Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an electronic artist originally from Mexico who creates interactive installations that involve robotics and usually combine performance art with social issues. ‘1,000 Platitudes’ is a project he describes as an “intervention” in which he projected words and expressions commonly used to describe modern, globalized cities on the sides of buildings, churches, and castles, among other things. I thought this project was especially interesting because it combines different disciplines like electronics, art, and typography in the outdoors, which then reaches a large group of people and can bring a certain issue to their attention. Another project of his which I thought to be interesting was ‘X is not the new Y’, which is an arduino-controlled piece that combines hundreds of thousands words and terms and presents them as random inequalities. I think it’s interesting that the and result of the art is defined by the code and there’s no telling what you might end up with. 

1,000 Platitudes

X is not the new Y Raqs Media Collective is a group of three artists from New Dehli, India who work in many different mediums. One of their projects that I found very impressive was ‘The House of Everything and Nothing’. For this project Raqs sought out a software programmer to find a way to make tangible (in code) the electronic conversations and traffic that took place between the three artists’ computers. The pattern this data produced was then etched into the exterior walls of the group’s studio and filled with LED wires. The end result was a combination of art that was generated by the occupants of the building and displayed in a visually pleasing way to those viewing from the outside.

The House of Everything and Nothing