Sandbox
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - Mexico
2010
Relational Architecture 17
Sandbox is a large-scale interactive installation created originally for Glow Santa Monica. The piece consists of two small sandboxes where one can see tiny projections of people who are at the beach. As participants reach out to touch these small ghosts, a camera detects their hands and relays them live to two of the world's brightest projectors, which hang from a boom lift and which project the hands over 8,000 square feet of beach. In this way people share three scales: the tiny sandbox images, the real human scale and the monstrous scale of special effects.
The project uses ominous infrared surveillance equipment not unlike what might be found at the US-Mexico border to track illegal immigrants, or at a shopping mall to track teenagers. These images are amplified by digital cinema projectors which create an animated topology over the beach, making tangible the power asymmetry inherent in technologies of amplification.
Technique: Infrared surveillance cameras, infrared illuminators, computers, DV cameras, 4 projectors, milagritos and plastic rakes Dimensions: Projection onto 740 square meters (8,000 square feet) of sand, each sandbox 69 X 92 centimeters.
BIO
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.
Electronic artist, develops large-scale interactive installations in public space, usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces. Using robotics, projections, sound, internet and cell-phone links, sensors and other devices, his installations aim to provide "temporary antimonuments for alien agency". His work has been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the United Nations' World Summit of Cities in Lyon (France, 2003), the opening of the Yamaguchi Centre for Art and Media in Japan (2003) and the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004).
SOURCE + IMAGES
http://lozano-hemmer.com/sandbox.php
