Page 136 - Cyberculture and New Media

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materiality that conditions it. It is not expressible as
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reflection, but as composition.

In a recent paper on interaction as relation, Nicole Ridgway,
following Deleuze, argues that this meeting of materiality and concept in
interactive art happens as a modality of performance rather than preformism:
“not the realization of a preformed order, it is rather constant emergences; a
dynamic and processual becoming; the interval of relation: unique,
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improvisational, reciprocal, participative, and affective.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Canadian Mexican artist who develops
‘Relational Architectures’: large-scale, public, interactive installations that
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attempt to “transform urban spaces and create connective environments.”
Body Movies (Lozano-Hemmer, 2000) casts an archive of thousands of
images taken on the streets of cities all over the world, onto large buildings,
using robotically controlled projectors located around a square. Huge
floodlights wash out these photographs so they can only be seen when
passers-by block out the whiteness with their shadows and reveal the
projections underneath. Said shadows range in size from 2 to 22 meters,
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depending on a visitor’s distance from the light. When pedestrians have
aligned their shadows with all the persona-images in the portrait, a new
photograph is triggered, and the inter-play begins again. (See Figure 1)
In addition to Lozano-Hemmer’s deployment of the haptic, his
works effectively accomplishes Deleuze’s time-image: severing the
connections between situations and actions so that we experience “direct
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images of time.” What Deleuze finds in the time-image is a shift from “the
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Kantian subject to the decentred subject of postmodernity.” The time-image
severs time from movement and space from location; it enables a viewer to
draw out that part of an event that cannot be reduced to the limited image we
see on screen. Lozano-Hemmer’s work gives “discourse to the body … the
body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself … it is on the
contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the
unthought … it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed
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from thought.”