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Pulse Room<\/em>, 2006, installation view, Arte Abierto, Mexico, 2020.
\u00a9 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer \/ SOCAN (2021)
Photo : Mariana Ya\u00f1ez, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Gestures #2\u2013#4<\/em>, 2018, installation view, Root Division, San Francisco, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
If we refer to Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s The Emancipated Spectator<\/em>, in which Ranci\u00e8re reflects on another way of thinking the public before\/within a performance work, it is above all interactivity (defined as any type of \u201crelationship of exchange, dissemination, or communication\u201d in the social sphere, and not strictly limited to the digital field2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - As Catherine Gu\u00e9neau notes in her article \u201cL\u2019interactivit\u00e9 : Une d\u00e9finition introuvable,\u201d Communication et langages<\/em>, no. 145 (3rd quarter, 2005): 117\u200a\u2014\u200a29 (our translation).<\/span>) that he foregrounds, as a privileged form of this exchange. In this book, he underlines the difference between community<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cBy that I mean the community as a way of occupying a place and a time\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - \u200aJacques Ranci\u00e8re, The Emancipated Spectator<\/em>, translated by Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 6.<\/span>\u2014\u200aand the collective<\/em>, which at first refers to a gathering of all the spectators and performers, who, brought together in the same place, form a \u201ccommunity.\u201d However, he largely reconsiders this version by maintaining that it is especially through the intellectual power of the individual faced with an exchange, an interactivity (artistic or not), that communal force is created, and not through a mere collective gathering. In Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s view, community value is situated by no means in the collectivity (bound by similar interactivity), or in a predefined space, but in the intellectual work undertaken by each individual and gathered around a single reflective action. The power<\/em> that he speaks of issues from each spectator\u2019s perceptual interpretation, as well as from their capacity to intellectualize this individual relationship within a community.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 16.<\/span> According to Ranci\u00e8re, the act of breaking with the collective, from the point of view of spatiality (the same place), is then essential for reflecting on communal capacity as a collection of diverse experiences within a space freed of forced situations and far from a unified experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interestingly, an artist such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who places special importance on an art said to be interactive, refutes this idea of the collective<\/em>, as, in his view, the term instinctively refers to a universalization of thought. Preferring the word \u201cconnective,\u201d Lozano-Hemmer conceptualizes these interactive spaces as \u201cassemblages of disparate realities having neither prior intention nor homogenizing effect.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Jos\u00e9 Luis Barrios and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, \u201cSubsculptures\u201d: Un dialogue entre Jos\u00e9 Luis Barrios et Rafael Lozano-Hemmer<\/em>, exhibition catalogue (Geneva: Art B\u00e4rtschi & Cie, 2005), 14 (our translation).\u200a<\/span> This very Bakhtinian approach makes it possible to think of the work as a place in which individual thought, far from being universalized, preserves its individualization while still being part of a group. Here, his Pulse Room<\/em> (2006)\u200a\u2014\u200aan exhibition space lit exclusively by three hundred incandescent lightbulbs, each flickering individually at various speeds\u200a\u2014\u200ais a particularly relevant example. The lightbulbs, hung at a height of three metres and adorning the space in rectilinear fashion, like myriad points of light, are all connected to a sensor placed at the edge of the installation. When touched by a member of the public, the sensor translates that person\u2019s heartbeat directly into a single bulb. When the sensor is released, all the lights briefly go out. That precise moment, like a latent image, then allows the new pulse to be incorporated into the whole system. Then all the lightbulbs gradually light up again, the last pulse moving up to the first position in the queue. It seems obvious that the mechanism in Pulse Room<\/em> maintains a kind of local \u201ccommunity\u201d by generating an internal network that participants are invited to join. Is it, then, the collective or the individual experience connected with others that becomes a real form of exchange? On this point, it is the suppression of the collective<\/em> that allows Ranci\u00e8re to reconsider the individual\u2019s \u201cemancipation\u201d not as the establishment of a transcendent, all-powerful self, but as a way of discovering, of creating (even together): \u201cEvery spectator is already an actor in her story.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ranci\u00e8re, The Emancipated Spectator,<\/em> 17.<\/span> It is thus the force of the individual, gathered with others, that makes for a powerful community, and not the group as such, as (id)entity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n As the founder and curator of the Code\/Art Research Program,7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Code\/Art Research Program, accessible online.<\/span> I wish to reprise this community-centred practice. As early as 2017, the idea that gave birth to this project was the establishment of an art-research community that aimed to challenge the individualistic perspective of the artist as lone genius creating in their studio. However, it was never a matter of creating one or several concrete<\/em> works together, but of reflecting on issues related to pre-creative research. For if the final product is a privileged state in the creation of a \u201cmasterpiece,\u201d as Woolf reminds us, she also invites us to consider that it is above all the research, the wealth of shared background, the fertile ground of pre-work reflection, and the interconnection of ideas that lie at the foundation of any product or end condition. The project, whose objective has always been to give a real place to art research, continues to strive to go beyond purely aesthetic and\/or concrete aspects of art. An online platform was established in 2019 for bringing artist-researchers together, so that research might become a unifying source of connection, experimentation, and emulation around a common subject: society and its digitization. Finally, this sharing of reflections makes it possible to renegotiate place<\/em>, so dear to reflections on the collective<\/em>, in order to create a geographically limitless space. The Internet then becomes a choice response for conceptualizing pluralistic environments, so-termed by Frank Popper in his 1975 book Art\u200a\u2014\u200aAction and Participation<\/em>; spaces that enable\u200a\u2014\u200aand have always enabled\u200a\u2014\u200anon-hierarchical expression or manifestation.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Frank Popper, Art\u200a\u2014\u200aAction and Participation <\/em>(New York: New York University Press, 1975).<\/span> It is a non-hierarchization that is social and societal, but also spatial, for, if Ranci\u00e8re interrogates spatial stability as essence of collective power, he opens onto a liberation from the fixed structures in which this notion is imprisoned. This liberation is embodied here in a decentralized space in which both the community and its occupied space become digital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Creation always issues from a common source or field of reflection, but does this diversity really have a chance of surviving in a collective space in which identification with a group, a shared thought, prevails? Can we think communal heterogeneity, rather than collective homogeneity?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n To see in it not a single finalized work or a collective thought, but works, involvements, communal acts nourishing a common goal? To think creation and not identification? And why not broach these conditions of creative diversity as a force for the creation of a new form of reflection, far from any identification with some matrix of an all-powerful collectivity, but, above all, to maintain a singularity of thought within a common space (digital or not)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_DO_FE\u0301LIX_LOZANO-HEMMER_05_RGB-C-scaled.jpg\")
Pulse Room<\/em>, 2006, installation view, Manchester Art Gallery, 2010.
\u00a9 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer \/
SOCAN (2021)
Photo : Peter Mallet, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n