> Technical Itch
This week, I walked excitedly into Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive exhibition, “Recorders”, at Manchester City Gallery.
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=73
The gallery was quite quiet, so I got to have a good go at everything. The exhibition’s outstanding work, “Pulse Room”, involved holding two metal handles which stored the pattern of your heartbeat and allowed it (along with other visitors’) to be replicated in the glowing and fading of 100 large light bulbs hanging in a grid from the ceiling. When it came to my turn, it actually felt like I was, to put it incredibly cheesily, “at one with the machine”. It was beautiful. The Collaborator in me loved it.
Feeling like a little kid desperate to go on the slide again a split second after reaching its end, I walked around the exhibition a second time and I noticed that some people were choosing not to interact with the works. I also looked with regret at the one work which was dark and bedecked with an “out of order” sign. I wondered how the artist would feel about these occurrences. Work which has to plug in and interact electronically, digitally or mechanically is, on the whole, the kind of work I avoid making myself – if it breaks down or people don’t play, that’s the audience gone. What’s an artwork without an audience? It’s not an artwork – it says nothing to no-one.
I don’t mean this niggle to reflect badly on Lozano-Hemmer’s pieces, which I very much enjoyed, but the show’s assumption that we are entirely beholden to technology seemed wrong to me, as proved by the visitors who “saw” the show but did not or could not “experience” it.
