Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Look Alive

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Look Alive presents a selection of installations by the internationally acclaimed Mexican-Canadian artist, whose work over the past three decades has explored the intersections of contemporary art, architecture, performance, and technology. Featuring the premiere of Pulse Map, the newest work in the artist's celebrated Pulse series, the exhibition invites visitors into responsive environments that evolve through light, movement, sound, and participation.

Pulse Map is a site-specific installation created for Georgetown's Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, comprising nearly 3,000 polycarbonate lightbulbs arranged in a labyrinthine field that visitors are invited to traverse. Each bulb emits a warm filament glow, glimmering in sync with the recorded and looping heartbeat of a past participant, creating a choral display of biometrics and symbolism. Three suspended camera sensors allow visitors to record their own heartbeat and contribute it to the work. As new heartbeats are recorded, they gradually replace the oldest ones, transforming the installation into a living archive of anonymous participants. In this continuous cycle of recording, replacement, and remembrance, Pulse Map operates as an evolving reflection on the transient nature of presence and the traces we leave behind.

The exhibition title, Look Alive, draws on a familiar expression that calls us to attention, awareness, and engagement. In Lozano-Hemmer's work, the phrase takes on additional meaning. To look is not only to observe, but also to become visible. To be alive is not simply to exist, but to be present. Throughout the exhibition, presence becomes the medium through which the works come to life, connecting individual experience to larger patterns of participation and shared experience.

Additionally, the exhibition draws inspiration from literature and film, specifically Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel (1940) and Zbigniew Rybczyński's film Tango (1981). In both works, people occupy shared environments across overlapping layers of time and experience. Recorded projections appear alive in Morel, while in Tango, individuals repeatedly move through the same room, unaware of one another. 

Across Look Alive, individual actions become collective experiences. A heartbeat joins countless others. A movement activates a machine's gaze. Faces return the visitor's look. Each interaction leaves a trace. The works in the exhibition are never entirely fixed. Instead, they continually evolve, making every visit unique. Those who came before are connected with those yet to come.

The works presented in Georgetown’s Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Gallery explore another dimension of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Look Alive: the act of looking. Rather than treating vision as one-sided, Lozano-Hemmer transforms looking into an exchange between the viewer and the artwork, blurring the boundaries between observer and observed. While AI photoplethysmography cameras in Pulse Map detect participants’ heartbeats, the works presented here use cameras to detect the presence and location of visitors. In doing so, they make the mechanisms of machine vision tangible, drawing attention to the ways technology observes, tracks, and responds to our presence.

Created in 1992, Surface Tension is Lozano-Hemmer's earliest interactive work, exploring technologies of observation and tracking that, decades later, have become increasingly embedded in everyday life. A large human eye follows visitors with remarkable precision, creating the unsettling sensation that the artwork is looking back.

In Reporters With Borders, hundreds of television news anchors from the United States and Mexico appear in a constantly changing mosaic of moving portraits. Drawn from a database of more than 1,600 video clips, the work reorganizes itself every five minutes according to categories including gender, race, and nationality, while the silhouette of the visitor activates voices within the installation. In January 2027, Reporters With Borders will be replaced by Eye Contact, in which visitors encounter the recorded gaze of strangers. Rather than simply presenting portraits, the work invites moments of empathy, curiosity, humor, and reflection, reminding us that every act of looking is also an opportunity to be seen.

This exhibition is supported by Maria and Alberto de la Cruz, Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative.

Cameras are used throughout Look Alive to facilitate visitor interaction with the artworks. Depending on the installation, these systems detect heartbeats, location, or silhouettes. No personally identifiable information is collected. Any imagery or data temporarily captured by these systems is used solely for the operation of the installations and is continuously overwritten as new visitors participate. No imagery or data is permanently stored or shared.