Rafael Lozano-Hemmer : Obra Sonora

Down the street from their main gallery, Carroll/Fletcher’s project space features some of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s smaller-scaled works, which sketch out the complex relations between measurement, statistics, surveillance, participation and play at stake in his oeuvre. A digital display reads “1984,” spelled out in continually changing numbers culled from Google Street View (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2014). Each digit of the ominous date switches, sampling from a different address, according to a pre-set rhythm which visitors can alter by turning a dial. (Similarly, they can enter any four-digit code into a keypad and watch the display count up or down to 1984.) The piece isolates, and obsessively repeats, a mythological force threaded into numerical fabric: the persistence (we might say ubiquity) of Orwell’s novel as a touchstone in articulating the tonal fabric of the surveillance state, as felt by individual subjects. 

Surveillance, of course, has changed since Orwell envisioned it. As Manuel de Landa and Karl Palmås have noted, surveillance today might best be understood as panspectric, rather than panoptic.¹ 1 - See Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991) and Karl Palmås, “Predicting What You’ll Do Tomorrow: Panspectric Surveillance and the Contemporary Corporation,” Surveillance and Society 8, 3: 338-354. Big data, whether collected by governmental bodies like the National Security Agency or by any of a host of private analytics and information companies (such as Quantcast, Factual and Experian), relies on a much broader spectrum of information than the merely visual: records of correspondence and search history, algorithmically-deduced personal identities based solely on online activity,² 2 - See John Cheney-Lippold, “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,” Theory Culture Society 28, 6: 164-181. arsenals of past purchases, GPS coordinates gleaned from smartphones, and many other mechanisms for producing citizen – consumers as quantified selves.³ 3 - I am borrowing this term from the Quantified Self movement, which seeks to incorporate insights from data acquisition into daily life. For more, see www.quantifiedself.com.