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The recurrent use of shadows as platforms of visibility,
interaction and co-penetration in Lozano-Hemmer’s installations
(in his series of Shadow Boxes, in Airbone, Bifurcation,
in Flight, People on People, Sustained Coincidence, Under
Scan, Frequency and Volume, Body Movies, Re: Positioning
Fear, Two Origins, etc.) is particularly eloquent in this context.
11 Shadows are, as Peter Pan knows only too well, the
most mischievous and slippery part of the body, with a certain
tendency to escape. There are two dangers in the triangle
body-technology-programmer: the first is losing control of
our digital shadow and handing it over entirely to the system;
the second concerns the impossibility of discerning between
an inside and an outside; who is really trapped as datum/
specter: the digital double or the living body?
Changes in technology, consumption, work and mobility
have transformed our experience of time and space, rendering
it increasingly unstable and blurred. Memory takes on a
decisive role in this context. The obsession with the creation
and consumption of devices with ever-larger storage capacities
is symptomatic of the paradox in which we live: the
almost instantaneous obsolescence of these technologies, to
which we entrust all our memories and information, places
us under a continuous threat of amnesia. 12 In our obsession
with being seen and registered in this digital world, do we not
run the risk of suffering the same fate as Cortázar in his story,
“Axolotl”? I would like to propose that the lucidity of Lozano-Hemmer’s
work regarding these dangers shifts his work
from a ludic register to an active critical register, that, while
it plunges us into a minefield of technological seductions, into
a second degree reflection, it becomes a training ground for
our awareness of the included third in the game. Ultimately,
the aesthetic experiences proposed by Lozano-Hemmer open
up the possibility of positioning ourselves opposite this undercover
agent, adjusting the balance of power and control in the
triangle and, at the very least, taking an active role in the oscillation
between being a body or a datum, being a subject
or an object, observing or being observed, being Cortázar or
being Axolotl.
11— Ibid.
12— Andreas Huyssen. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 14-28.
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ALEJANDRA LABASTIDA
Antimodular Research, Estudio de Lozano-Hemmer, vista general—Lozano-Hemmer's Studio, general view 183