Luminato Loves Lub-Dubs
Pulse Front at Harbourfront
By Sara Jane Mackenzie
Posted June 18th, 2007
If you, like most Torontonians, find it somewhat difficult to stay in the loop when it comes to being hip to the arts scene, then you may have shared my sense of bewilderment at the strange blinking lights emanating from the Harbourfront Centre this past week. Several thoughts crossed my mind: Big concert? Movie premiere? Alien invasion? (Well… maybe not, but you gotta admit for a second you thought it too...right?)
Despite the dizzying array of events and openings vying for our attention within the Luminato festival, Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s latest installation, Pulse Front: Relational Architecture 12 certainly piqued our curiosity, if not our understanding; but then that’s what his work is all about, investigation. No, wait, make that participation.
Located behind the Power Plant gallery and the Harbourfront Centre, Pulse Front invites (or demands) the viewer to participate. In fact, the work does not exist outside of that participation. If there is no one willing to lend a hand (and subsequently their heartbeat), there is no work to view. Lucky for Lozano-Hemmer, that is not the case. Unsurprisingly, his piece was so popular that Telus, its major sponsor, agreed to fork out an additional $5,000 to Zerofootprint to offset the energy used and extend the piece until June 17th. He’s so winning the Luminato popularity contest.
So here’s the breakdown: 20 giant worlds-most-powerful spotlights, 200,000 watts of power, beams of concentrated light that are visible 15 km away. Pretty impressive, no?
But before we get too wrapped up in the technical artistry involved in bringing a harebrained scheme like this to life - and believe me, tiny computers, custom-made software, and heart-rate sensors all working in tandem equals a lot of technical know-how! – what is more staggering is that all of it is rendered useless without the active participation of the viewer. By touching one of the biometric sensors rigged to each sculpture, your unique heartbeat begins to course its way across the sky. The piece compels us to be more aware of our commonalities – that we are each, at the core, just a beating heart; but it also reminds us that we, like our individual rhythms, are all different. And not just in that “my mom says I’m special” kind of way. Even I am not too cynical to see that this is the best love letter that Toronto has ever received from its subjects.
It’s no wonder that technology and human physiology figure so prominently into his work. Based in Montreal, Lozano-Hemmer earned a degree in Physical chemistry at Concordia. In 2006 he staged a piece in Mexico City in which an entire room was lit by 100 incandescent light bulbs blinking to pre-recorded heartbeats. That was just a dress rehearsal for Toronto’s mammoth installation. In an age of passive spectatorship Lozano-Hemmer forces the viewer to engage with the work, to become a collaborator. Bringing out the exhibitionist in all of us, the extension of this piece definitely says something about our wish to communicate with others. Technology and art have been sharing a bed for some time now, and this piece reminds us that the two can easily coexist. That they must coexist. The binary of the precise and scientific versus the fluidity of the creative is slowly losing its polarity as we are shuttled into the post-post-postmodern era. In a city that’s not easily impressed, all it takes is a colossal show-and-tell of light and energy to rekindle our awe in nature and remind us that we do indeed have our own signature rhythm pumping through our veins and, for a few minutes, across the night sky.