Manchester Trip

On this trip i was looking for artists that would assist me with my current project so mainly artists with interactive work or ones that look at the body conveying a message. In The Manchester Art Gallery there were quite a few that were interactive although a some of them seemed like they were for children. I saw the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who gets the audience to participate and create their own image by putting their finger into a  hole that has a digital microscope inside and creates an image of your fingerprint repeated on a large screen. It syncronizes with your pulse and repeats images of other peoples fingerprints.

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=73&tab=resource

'Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. He studied chemistry, before moving into the realm of visual art and now lives and works in Montreal.
Lozano-Hemmer creates artworks that depend on your participation to exist. This exhibition records your pulse, fingerprints, voice and image, and these recordings form the actual content of the works. The content is entirely "crowdsourced", to use internet terminology. In this sense the works are playful, open and inclusive.
However, there is also a more ominous or predatory nature at play. The works use biometric and surveillance technology employed by governments and corporations to profile, control and predict our behaviours in the name of efficiency or safety. These tools have built-in prejudices, as when they are used for ethnic profiling.
In an age of reality TV, mobile computing, virtual economies, Google street view and credit databases, Lozano-Hemmer sees technology as an inevitable part of our culture. His approach is to "misuse" the technology to create experiences of connection and complicity by using ambiguity, irony, repetition, performance and self-representation.
In creating poetic, critical forms of interaction, the works encourage the public to be an integral part of the art and reflect on our inescapable, playful and ominous, technological experience.

“In Recorders artworks hear, see or feel the public; they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. These works emphasize that absence and presence are not opposites, and that several realities co-exist at any given time."

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Pulse Index, 2010

Digital microscope, pulsimeter, plasma display, computer, custom-made software.
Insert your finger into the sensor and wait for it to detect your heart rate,
this may take up to ten seconds. When it is done, the system will display your fingerprint, pulsating to the rhythm of your heart beat, together with the recordings from the 508 previous participants. As more people try the piece your own recording travels upwards until it disappears altogether.'