Artist Response No 10

Vectorial Elevation (1999)

Mexican-born artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created a unique spectacle by placing eighteen robotic searchlights around Mexico City's Zócalo, the world's third-largest urban square. In his project called Vectorial Elevation (http://www.alzado.net/), first presented in Mexico City to celebrate the new millennium, participants used a Web-based interface to control the searchlights, choreographing patterns on the night sky and the urban landscape.
According to the artis himself, this type of performance is called "Relational Architecture," which he defines as "the technological actualization of buildings with alien memory." The interesting aspect about his work is that laypeople and passersby can construct new meanings for edifices with internet software and robotic lights. In other words, even a layman has the chance to produce such an outstanding spectacle. According to Lozano-Hemmer, "light projections...can achieve the desired monumental scale, can be changed in real time, and their immateriality makes their deployment more logistically feasible."

Lozano-Hemmer furthermore explains that when a participant's design for Vectorial Elevation reached the head of the Web queue, it was beamed into the sky, visible to crowds on the ground in Mexico City and, via Web cameras, to a large online audience. More than 800,000 people from 89 countries visited the Web site in a two-week period. The light show they produced was visible within a 20-kilometer radius.

As it is described by the author, the project's aesthetic effect remind us of those of the Tribute in Light (2002), a temporary public art memorial to the victims of 9/11, by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, who utilized vertical beams supplied by 44 searchlights placed at Ground Zero in New York to project vertical beams into the night sky above the World Trade Center's destroyed Twin Towers.
However, Lozano-Hemmer describes his project as an "anti-monument" that serves primarily as a platform for public self-expression. Although Lozano-Hemmer uses technologies that suggest "panoptic regimes of control", Vectorial Elevation is primarily meant to be a celebration of the potential these technologies have to produce a new kind of participatory spectacle.