Episode 015: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Show Notes

This week on the show we visit with the one and only Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose software-based artwork spans from massive outdoor interactive public art, to more domestic-scale works that can be found in galleries and art fairs all over the world. Rafael has been making both intellectually and technically challenging work for decades, and in this chat we’ll hear about his roots as young artist working in experimental performing arts, learning from his mentor Dick Higgins, building a robust studio that employs over fifteen engineers, artists, coders, and we’ll hear about some hard-earned lessons in selling and caring for time-based media art.

Links from the conversation with Rafael:
> https://www.lozano-hemmer.com
> Current SFMOMA exhibition: https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/rafael-lozano-hemmer-unstable-presence
> A Crack in the Hourglass: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/rafael_lozano_hemmer 

Join the conversation:
https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence
https://www.instagram.com/artobsolescence/

Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries. This is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. 

Today on the show, we'll be visiting with the one and only artist Raphael Lozano-Hemmer. Now, if you are tapped into time-based media art, you of course know Rafael's work from his massive outdoor public art installations to booths at virtually every international art fair. On that last point you might think of Raphael is some sort of darling of the art market who seems to really have the commercial side of things all figured out, but this wasn't always the case. 

[00:00:44] Rafael: I just went on and on about how the market, was evil and how collectors were in fact, you know, vultures

[00:00:52] Ben: I was keen to sit down with Rafael on the show as through the chances we've had to cross paths over the years. I know that he has a very unique approach to conservation of his work and has had some great collaborations with conservators. But as we'll hear this also, wasn't always the case. 

[00:01:09] Rafael: Well, I thought of the museum as this cruel place, you know, like I wanted artworks to not be suspended like vampires.

[00:01:17] Ben: You know, in a way art conservators are sort of like vampires in the sense that we have to be invited in. In this chat, we also delve into Rafael's roots in performance art, experimental sound, and I honestly was sort of surprised at how punk rock his early years were including setting himself on fire on stage. LOL. 

Before we get started though, just a quick reminder that if you're looking for some worthwhile end of your giving, I could really use your help to make this podcast sustainable and to fulfill my mission of generously supporting the artists that come on the show. 

If you are in a position to give, you can make your tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for The Arts, by going to artandobsolescence.com/donate. Thanks for any help, you can provide friends that is deeply appreciated and a huge thanks again to all of you that have already supported the show. Shout out to Kate, Dragan and Tali for your donations last week. It means a whole lot. And now folks, without further delay, let's dive into my chat with Raphael Lozano-Hemmer. 

[00:02:16] Rafael: So I was brought up by club owning parents. My parents were owners of nightclubs in Mexico City. They had a salsa club called Los Infiernos, a discotheque called Mamá Carlota a drag queen performance place called Santos Dumont. And forever I remember being surrounded by choreographers and dancers, musicians, artists of all kinds.

And so I guess that's, you know, part of what led me to be an artist. After I grew up and I decided to go into chemistry in university. I was kind of reacting against this idea of nightlife and so on. It's like, how could I be something else? When I was 13, my dad gave me a book called the Bible of the bar and it's on how to make good cocktails and he basically wanted me to be a bar man. I kinda told him, you know, chemistry is kind of like cocktail making. The truth is after studying science, all my friends at university were choreographers writers, musicians. 

Basically it was my dorm, I happened to meet a guy called Steve Gibson. Who's a composer. I think he's in England now Andreas Kitzmann, who was a writer and then Kim Sawchuk, who was, a theorist, Kelly Hargroves a choreographer. The thing that actually brought us together was radio because they had a radio program in CFUV and then we moved to Montreal and we started one in CKUT, and that program was called the postmodern commotion and postmodern promotion. Pomo Como for short was kind of a performative radio sound experience show that lasted for about three years and it was very heavy on the theory. So at the time we were reading a lot of leotard and Eagle turn and the Deleuze and stuff like that.

 We did a lot of sort of experimental sound art. And then we do interviews interviewed a lot of really great people. We interviewed Liota, we interviewed Octavio Pass, it was an arts program so we would interview artists and musicians and so on. But the thing I remember is Christof Migone. Chris Migone is a really important sound artists and sound theorists out of Canada. He used to be at CKUT and he. Influenced us a lot. So we re did a lot of recordings of very strange kind of, uh, opaque music and opaque kind of poetry. Um, Kim saw Chuck who's a theorist would, um, you know, just keep us very, um, active and thinking about, you know, how, how to make theory, um, into more of a radically empirical thing.

You know, something that could be, uh, prominent in radio. Um, people like, um, Brian Masumi, Arthur Croker. There's a lot of theorists at the time of post-modernity in Montreal. Again, this is late eighties. Uh, That we were, we were interested by. So, but, but the honest truth is that that was more the theory part.

Radio is very interesting because as a time-based medium it's actually quite similar to media art in the sense that, you know, the content is changing over time. You're responsible for keeping this, uh, you know, relationship with the listener alive at any given time. And, um, and that's where it came from it came from university and university radio. I don't know it worked out, but basically we decided to take the radio show into performances. That's basically what we did.

Since I didn't really have a particular talent, I could not sing, I could not play music. I couldn't do any of that. I was kind of the director of this performing arts organization and we did that for about three or four years and because I knew how to program, I programmed some of the staging, some of the set design for this performing group. 

I was working in a physical chemistry lab and we were doing very, very early simulation computer graphical simulation of how these molecules would interact. Chemistry, you know, made me aware and not allergic of computers. 

One of our members, Will Bauer developed a 3d tracking system based on ultrasonic time of flight and basically this allowed the computers to know where performers were on stage. I was lucky to work with that system early on, and to use it, for example, to create a piece which is now called Surface Tension, which is basically three or 400 photographs of the human eye, and they're triggered according to the position of the dancers on the stage. So picture a big rear projected human eye following every move from the dancer. What happened with those performances is that at the end of them, we would invite the general public to go and try the sensor and see that the, eye really did follow you because most people, thought, oh, this is just rehearsed. The dancer is just moving to a film of this eye, when the public went onstage and they saw that the, I really did follow your every move it kind of became very um, successful. You know, there was a sense of interaction that with more performing arts, seeing things in a proscenium, you couldn't get. That became my very first artwork as a visual artist, I realized that the public could be the actors and that it didn't need to be inside of a narrative, but it could be in a museum where people would create their own narratives with a piece.

And then, you know, with my friends I started just dabbling with Macro Mind Director at the time. So I knew Lingo and that's what I actually programmed the first piece with. The truth is as a programmer, I was not very good.

I mean, I did program that piece, but eventually you realize that it's kind of programming. So a bit like philosophy, you know, if you really want to make a contribution, you need to stay current. You need to apply yourself. And I started meeting people who were great programmers and I could talk their language and I could collaborate with them. And that was good. There's this moment in maturity where you decide, Nope, I'm not going to become a philosopher. Nope. I'm not going to become a successful DJ. Nope. Not going to become a in-depth programmer and that happened to me around when I was 23 years old and I started meeting incredible, programmers.

The first time that I was really a visual artist is I got invited by this crazy curator Lorne Falk to go to the Banff center for the arts to do a residency in visual art. He had been interviewed by Pomo Como and he'd seen some of our performances, which in retrospect were terrible. Right? Like in one of the performances, I set myself on fire doing some Daoist ritual of reading a text. And then I ended up with second degree burns in the hospital. I mean, you know, the kind of thing where, you know, you're young and you've got to get naked on stage. So you go ahead and you do that.

But he just, I don't know, he just thought that this material came from somewhere that he wanted to explore. At the time that I was doing chemistry, I was doing a minor in art history. And he's the one that I really liked as a teacher, exploding my mind with critical theory and with just a sense , of theory and art criticism is not boring. It's not parasitic, it's also creative, it's also explosive. And so he invited me to BAMF based just on that relationship and I just thank him so much for that opportunity. That's the one that really changed my life because I was basically doing everything. I was just ADHDing myself through my life until this curator said, no, come and do it we will give you the infrastructure to actually become a visual artist. He took wilds risks, right? I had no portfolio. There was really no reason why I should be in Banff, working with all these different established really established artists. 

I was so lucky because in the residency that I went, I met Dick Higgins and he is of course one of the influential and important members of Fluxus. Dick and I established a really good relationship and he performed for some of my pieces and I performed for some of his, we set up a beautiful friendship really, and he taught me so much. So when you talk about how formative, you know, certain influences are, I mean, Dick Higgins was that mentor that, you know, I wish all artists at that age can get, you know. I learned so much and we had great time that lasted for about six months.

After Pomo Como, we got actually a grant, from the Canada council. The only time that I've received money from the government was that initial grant. So the Canada council is a really fabulous institution that helps artists such as myself, which I had no portfolio or no history, you know, to actually create a work. Just that grant helped me become an artist because it meant that I could dedicate myself to being an artist. It was only like $500 a month or something, but I didn't care. It was all I needed. It was enough to just live, and we stretched that money as much as we could and we toured and did a bunch of stuff. 

What happened is Pomo Como broke up at a time when I decided to move back to Europe. So the situation is I'm a Mexican, but I left Mexico at 13, moved to Spain because my mom married a Spanish guy and then came to Canada at 17 to study in university. But then around 1992, I decided to move back to Europe. And in Europe I got a teaching position in Madrid and Pomo Como kind of broke apart. And so what I did is I started supporting myself, doing, web design back in, I think it was 96. I was the first web page made in Spain or something. I can't remember. And, things like Cyberconf, I organized the fifth international Congress on cyberspace, with everybody, with Geert Lovink, with Manuel DeLanda, all my idols where we brought them together, for a conference. I was curator for the art and artificial life series. So basically I started curating projects at the same time as I was doing them. However, I never curated my own work into my shows. I have to say, I don't really like it when people do that. But I, supported myself doing, you know, these other jobs, like web design and organizing conferences and exhibitions, until my work started getting noticed.

My milieu at that time was Ars Electronica. I did my first performance at Ars Electronica in 91. And I loved Ars Electronica I loved V2 in Rotterdam, I loved Transmediale in Berlin. I loved ZKM. I loved what was happening in Europe with media art at that time, I thought it was really significant and mature and robust.

So I tried my best to be in that milieu, for a while and what happened is I landed the opportunity to start doing very large scale architectural work. Projections onto facades. So in 97, at Ars Electronica, I transformed the Habsburg Castle that they have there, into the Habsburg Castle of Mexico.

 Basically we use this sensor that I was describing before the 3d ultrasonic range tracker, so that whenever a visitor would point with their hand at the building, a massive robot light would put a hand projected wherever you actually pointed at in the facade.

And as you moved your arm this hand would open up the facade of the Austrian building and reveal the interiors of the Mexican building of the Hapsburg. That project was called Displaced Emperors. And I coined the term relational architecture to describe those early sort of experiences with buildings to simulating a history other than their own. And for the next say, I would say eight years, I did that over and over again. So I did another project at the Media Architecture Biennial in Graz in 97. I did Body Movies as a big shadow play with, V2 in Holland. And so there was these large scale public art pieces. Which made me kind of think of an economic model that was based on just performance. Right? So I would show up, say a light festival or a media art festival. I'd do a big projection or a sound experience, and then I'd get paid, whatever honorarium for that project being there. Throughout this period, I spoke very much against the necrophiliac and vampiric world of art collecting.

I talked at length against this kind of vampiric preservation attempt that was all based on speculation and ostentation and possessive individualism and I just went on and on about how the market, was evil and how collectors were in fact, you know, vultures, at the work of artists who basically they wanted to just eat alive.

I did that until about 2003 and what happened in 2003 is I had already started working with bitforms in New York. So Golan Levin, a dear friend artist, theorist thinker, amazing guy. He was already at bitforms in New York and he brought me in or he, he told Steve Sachs about me. And so I started working with Steve and, um, I thought Steve was crazy, he was weird, he was expansive, he was taking risks.

He was so enthusiastic about what we were doing that I was just like, okay, well, here's some prints, you know, instead of initially selling works that were more complicated. The first six I showed where the Thousand Platitudes performance, which is basically this performance I did at Ars Electronica, where we projected 30 meter high images on buildings in a gorilla kind of, you know, truck with a diesel generator. The project was called HUMO Huge and Mobile. I basically invited, I think about 10 other artists and that was with Brian Masumi. He was my collaborator in this project, but my own project out of that was to create this alphabet of projections on to, you know, prisons and castles and, public housing and so on and so forth and we would photograph the results of these interventions before the police would arrive. And then we make collages out of this kind of urban Photoshop and he started selling them. And I was just so impressed because I just always thought of the performance of being in the street, doing these projections as the subject of my contribution. 

The idea that the collages sold, that was completely new and that was all Steve Sacks. One of my big influences in media art of course, is Antoni Muntadas. For me, he was an artist that was so critical of the art world itself. You know, a lot of what he was doing was really questioning well, where does this money come from? You know, that tradition of Hans Haacke and artists who were coming from a very deconstructive kind of practice, you know, questioning art itself. So I loved him, but then he was also a pioneer in media arts. So he was open. He was doing the File Room. I think that was 95. And one of the things that I saw Antoni do is he would make these edditions you know, these prints, and then these prints were available. So you didn't need to acquire one of his big board rooms or anything like that. You could acquire also print. So I started getting relaxed with the idea that there was a place for these kinds of works to exist in collections and in galleries.

Steve definitely was very important because he understood what we were trying to do and he sold and exhibited the eye, the Surface Tension piece that I was describing from the very beginning, he sold, 33 Questions, which was a very early piece that I did for the Havana Biennial.

And then OMR, another gallery these were even more established than Steve and I was their only electronic artist and they started taking me to Art Basel and to Armory and Frieze and so on. And they were the ones who first introduced me to certain collectors who would have never touched electronic art before.

I was still doing mostly performance and public art. The work that I was continuing to do, had to do with scale and absence and presence, but I did recognize that some of these pieces could produce derivatives such as this photography that we're talking about and the other pieces could actually live in a gallery space.

The most clear example of that is 33 Questions because that's a project which was produced I think in 2000. For the Havana biennial. Think of 21 small liquid crystal displays, which are like detonators and they're asking 55 billion unique and grammatically correct questions at a rate of 33 per minute. Right? So it's kind of like a poetry piece if you will. And it asks stupid things, things like will you bleed in an orderly fashion, things like that. And once it poses a question and never repeats it. So the idea is just creating this device that will never repeat the same question, that's what this project was. And we put in Havana but then Steve and OMR and another gallery that I joined called Art Barchie in Geneva they started sell this work to actual collectors who would put it up on the wall to the point where OMR exhibited, I believe at Art Basel and Glenn Lowry saw it and then later Barbara London saw it and they acquired it for MoMA. That was the very first time that I felt, okay. There is, there is significance. In Barbara's praise or to her credit, you know, she took a lot of risks like that and I, wasn't seeing a lot of other curators and important museums taking those leaps. So I'm forever indebted to her that, that she chose to acquire this work. And they exhibited, I think that year after, I think in 2005. So that really helped because the moment that MoMA acquired all of a sudden, all these other museums felt like that legitimated the media art practice that somehow, even though I was fully aware that media art had existed for the past, 30 years before that or more the idea that myself and my peers will now have the possibility of having our work collected by institutions was a big relief. It was wonderful. Instead of hating on preservation. I changed my tune, if you will. And now it was talking about perpetration of the cultural act. So the idea that the artwork could remain alive. Right. So do you remember that whole thing of Douglas Crimp saying that the museum was. a mausoleum and that artworks would go to die. That's kind of the eighties talk. Well, I thought of the museum as this cruel place that in fact did the opposite that suspended the artworks in suspended animation with quotations referencing and conservation so that they could never lead a dignified life and an honorable death. You know, like I wanted artworks to not be suspended like vampires. So I changed my tune and now it was all about, perpetrating as opposed to preserving. Perpetrating the cultural act. So if you understand media art, or many of different kinds of art as the art of instructions, you have some schematic, some code, some instructions on how to create this work, this situation, and that then the curators and conservators of the future may be able to restage such condition. It became incredibly interesting to me. Now the collection, wasn't a place for things to die and for objects to be revered, but it was a place where dynamics and emergence and relationships could actually be articulated into the future even after my death. 

[00:23:12] Ben: Yeah, I mean, of course, because you, as an artist, working with technology knew, these screens are going to break some day, like the computer that powers them is going to break some day. They're going to have to replace this stuff. So they are going to have to sort of perpetuate the concepts, the idea. Do you think that the museums back then knew that, do you think they grasped that yet? 

[00:23:35] Rafael: They right away asked me, well, how will this artwork function in 40 years time? And I'm like, I don't know. Uh, And what happened is at the time at MoMA we did an exercise, which was a really cruel exercise conservation exercise for 33 Questions and that's MoMA killed me and my lead engineer. And we gave them the source code, which is all written in Pascal, in Delfi, and it was working on windows 95. So the question was, do we, as Museum of Modern Art need to acquire a stockpile of windows 95 PC so that in the future, we can replay this. And I said, no, here's the source code. Here's the schematics here's everything. And what they did is they killed us. And then they gave it to some NYU engineering student who completely rewrote all the code from Pascal to C++, and from windows 95 to Linux. And if you were to see the two copies of 33 questions running in windows 95 versus Linux. They're identical. And from my perspective, that proved the possibility of migrating the work. So long as of course you have the source code and you have the instructions that you didn't need to stockpile gear.

It's funny cause right now, 33 Questions Per Minute is about to be exhibited again at SF MoMA, for my show and we've just rewritten it again for me if you're paying close attention to say the display format or the size and so on and so forth. I mean, it has to be articulated, in the document, right? So I give a document saying, this is what we're going for, but ultimately I'm not married to a particular liquid crystal display. Right. I explained how conservators and curators of the future, just use anything that looks like a detonator. You know what I mean? That's what we're going for, but really what matters is more the experience of this software generating this endless number of questions. 

 I keep saying, feel that I'm closer to an artist in the performing arts that I am in the visual arts. Because for example, if you think through the very production of the work, right, I'm more like a director. I bring the people who have different talents. He's a composer, she's a coder, this person is a photographer, and so I bring the elements, but then I make them into something that, I think is personal and it's got my idiosyncrasies and my biases and my nightmares imbued into it. The idea this sort of romantic notion of the artist in front of a canvas seeking inspiration, I don't even know what that is, right. For me, the artworks are alive. The artworks have sensors that sense the public and change according to what the public is doing. So for me, that's so much closer to performing arts and I've always thought that that's one of the mistakes is to think of media arts as part of the visual arts. I don't agree. I think that we're event driven and as such, the kind of curatorial framework needs to be very, very different. I think that we've come a long way. I think that most museums now have a performance art component, you know, people like Tino Sehgal has now pushed the boundaries of what it means to have an art object.

Well, this is a bunch of instructions, Sol Lewitt before that. Moholy-Nagy making a telephone painting. I mean, all of these things give us a rich sort of set of precedents that as media artists, we can turn around and say, well, think of this as a bunch of instructions, you know. Of course there's caveats to that, and there's exceptions to that. There are some materials that I'm completely married to and I would like the artwork to die if those materials cannot be found. 

For example, there is an artwork I made in 2004 called Synaptic Caguamas. It's basically a cantina table like you might find it a bar in Mexico that has a number of, I think it's 30 Caguamas beer bottles. Caguamas beer bottles are like the 40 ounce in the US is like a big sized brown bottle. And I made a cellular automaton, controlled the rotation of these 30 bottles on the table and simulate the most rudimentary neural connections in our brain, because I learned that a lot of the way that synapses fire in the brain actually conform to some rules of cellular automata. So I made basically like a really stupid brain with 30 beer bottles, and I would joke around. My dad had an alcohol problem and, uh, it was like a portrait of my dad, you know, and for me, this beer bottle, is it everything it's shape its color, the way it reflects light, everything about it is so important in this work. If ever these beer bottles would break or whatever, then I don't ever want to see a different type of beer bottle in it. They're very specific Indio brand 40 ounce bottles of beer. If you look at the list of materials of the installation I speak about this is, you know, there's motors underneath that are controlling everything. There's a computer that is running the installation. That computer used to be a Mac, a small little Mac laptop that was sort of, you know, shelved underneath the table. Now we can do that with a Raspberry PI. And in fact, I'm going to port the bees to a Raspberry PI because it's just a tiny little $15 computer. That has no moving parts. So that's a much better solution. So I don't mind which computer runs. It don't mind which motors move it. But what needs to move is the Caguamas because the symbolic appeal, the aesthetic appeal of it is fundamental to this artwork. So I let the curator or conservator of the future know you can change everything, just don't frickin touch my Caguamas 

[00:29:40] Ben: I guess it makes a lot of sense that the thing that you would be committed to permanently would be a physical object, not a technology per se.

So, let's dig into this conservation question a bit more, because I think of all the artists, I know you probably have the most formalized model for how you manage obsolescence and variability and conservation. So I'm curious if you could share this a bit with our listeners.

[00:30:09] Rafael: Yeah. So, I have an entire set of practices, we call them. I published a document called best practices for the conservation of media art from an artist perspective. That was God now, six years ago, but this document really contains our approach. One of the reasons why I wrote this is because I wrote it when already, I don't know, about 200 or 300 of my artworks were in different collections all over the world. And I was well aware that at any given time, these early, hard disk platters, moving parts are always the ones that are going to fail. So they were ticking time bombs and that at any given time, I'd get a horrible call from a collector who was unhappy that the work wasn't working properly and that they would lose their trust in media arts as a way to actually collect art. And I was mortified over these tech support calls. So I wrote this best practices because I think that instead of conservation being something that's awful, it could actually be something that allows you as an artist to take control over your legacy. And not only that, but also profit from it. So the way that I'm getting people's attention by people I mean, colleagues, attention on this best practices is by saying a number of maxims, right? Like the first one is, when you're selling an artwork, you need to already tell the collector how much they're going to have to invest. Very similar to say buying a fountain, everybody who buys a fountain knows that you need to chlorinate the water and change rusty valves and, change a light bulb from time to time.

So for every one of my works, I give the gallerists, guidance on what is the meantime between failure. You're buying this work, which features a projector that, you know, has a light bulb that goes off every 2000 hours. It costs $500 to replace it. So therefore, and then you just do the math. It is my experience that when you are upfront with a collector about what the maintenance is going to cost, they don't feel betrayed. It's almost as a car dealership. You want the studio to take care of whatever improvement or whatever upkeep or maintenance needs to be done because you trust that they are the ones who know it and critically the studio can actually monetize that. In other words, we charge normal engineering fees to, you know, keep some of our artworks, uh, over time. And it is my experience that I don't know, 90% of the collectors that we have would prefer us to do the maintenance, then bring in somebody who is forensic, who is just starting to understand what that work actually does. Right. And so that was the first one it's like, let's actually see this as an income stream. So that now whenever I get the dreaded call that something's failed, we are like super happy, you know, because I can support a technician who can then solve the problem that the collector has. And this is critical because Ben, I have collectors, who've bought artworks of really well known artists, whose names we won't mention and it stopped working and that artist is nowhere to be found. The gallerist doesn't know they, they let go of their technicians and now this person will never, ever buy another media artwork because they see it as buying a problem. The second thing about it is to make sure that you have a warranty that is adequate for the artist's lifestyle. So whenever I give a talk about this, I love to ask fellow artists, how much warranty should you give on an artwork? And people say five years, somebody says 10 years, somebody says one year, and then I just drop the big zero, zero years. This was the right amount of warranty that any artist studios should be providing for their work zero. And then people freak out. What do you mean zero years? Normally I say zero years, but if you were giving a computer that has a one-year warranty, obviously you do pass that on to the collector.

But the key thing is by calling it zero years, the collector knows that when they're acquiring this work, they're acquiring a responsibility that I am not a corporation whose job it is to maintain this overtime, that the collection needs to know that they need to either hire conservation or follow some principles, to be able to maintain that piece over the world. So that In the future. If I die or I decide to leave and go to Jamaica or whatever that the artwork can be kept alive. So what I do do is when I sell a work and I give zero warranty, I give all source code. I give all schematics, I give spare pieces. I give a very, very robust manual. That explains not only how the different pieces come together, but different formats and ways to be able to do it. A bill of materials that tells the collector each one of the elements that makes the piece and crucially, it tells you like if you saw the bill of materials for Synaptic Caguamas it tells you. 30 Mexican Indio brand beer bottles. And then it tells you, is this item replaceable? The answer's no, whereas the computer, I don't care which computer runs it so long as it follows the behaviors that I have.

So this is this guidelines that will allow the collector in the future to make the decision, you know what we're going to take care of conservation of this, following the artists guidelines, or in many cases, we'll just hire the studio to take care of this work, over time again, being able to then therefore support the studio.

This is the two main things, right? We work with over the counter technology as much as we can. We used to develop our own sensors for example. Tracking systems that track people in 3d and whatever, and then the Kinect came out and you could buy it at Sears and I'm just like, okay, let's, let's use that. It's better than ours. You reduce the number of motors, you document the project. I mean, there's just so many things that one can do to help.

I think that talking about money is taboo amongst artists, and for good reason, to be honest, it's boring and corporate, and it's not the situation that I like to talk about income stream, because I want to just become so wealthy or whatever though that'd be nice, but it's more because I think about the sustainability of the studio. You know, money is just the vehicle through which you, sort of satisfy your addiction to continue to create. So money is a fundamental part of autonomy and independence, and being able to turn down shit shows or projects that you don't want to do, and then you can focus in on what you really want to do. So I think that this taboo amongst artists, it's not that it's a mistake, it's well-deserved, but I think that by talking about this by trying to share information about how to monetize and therefore survive. It's actually like a politically and interesting chore.

[00:37:15] Ben: What kind of people do collaborate with and work with? 

[00:37:18] Rafael: So I'm super lucky because I'm working with a team of 15 artists and scientists. So half of them are programmers or engineers or coders of some sort. And then the other half are architects or designers or composers. The team is of course, key to the development of these pieces, right? Like I said I'm not doing any coding myself. I see myself as the curator of a lot of the phenomena or mechanisms that come out of the experimentation that happens in the studio.

So the team we're super proud because we basically have gender parity, including in management and in coding. We have also seven countries included in this 15. I'm super lucky and privileged because I live in Canada where this team is actually in part subsidized by the Canadian government, because we are set up not as an artist studio, as much as we are set up as an R&D operation. And in Canada, R&D means that you can get support from the government to stop the brain drain into the United States. So that means I've been able to bring people from Carnegie Mellon, and I've been able to bring people from the university of Michigan people who normally I would never be able to afford. Well, thanks to the support from the Canadian government. I've brought people who, I mean, obviously they don't care about money cause they can make so much more money at Google or whatever, but they are people I can pay well. So this idea of having a sustainable studio that has a stable group of people who grow over time, you know, it's a privilege I have.

So I would say 50% of the work that we do at the studio comes out of an idea or a commission, and then I kind of come up with a concept and then we develop the technology to make it happen. The other 50% is like, for example, somebody shows me the Navier Stokes algorithm, and I just loved Navier Stokes. It's such an incredible algorithm. This is the math that describes how fluids or gases spread in space. And so all of a sudden I get super excited about this math. And then one of my engineers managed to early on put this running on the GPU instead of the CPU. And so we could actually do it in real time. 

 The thing about it too, is that I'm ADHD. So what happens is that the thirst that I have to try different things, it's exciting, but it's also frustrating because many times they're developing something and I'm going like, yeah, no, not the right direction. So it's also frustrating to work with me because I'm constantly changing my mind. And then the moment that we get really good say at, I dunno, detecting heartbeats, we just move on to something completely different. So it's good for people who like variety. One of the reasons I've kept really, really good developers I think is because everything is open source. So we have a commitment at the studio to develop the artworks. And then at the end of that, put useful code into our GitHub and allow other artists or other developers to use our code. Just like we sometimes take open source and incorporate it into our work. The reason that's important is because so many of these guys or these women, could be coding a proprietary architecture say inside of Google or inside of a company, and then nobody can actually see the architecture of what they did, you know? And then if the company goes under, all of your intellectual property is gone and you can not disclose how you got to those methods. I think if you're proud of your code, you would like to work in a place where after this has created some effects or some artwork, you know, the code can still be useful and can be published publicly so that other people can see the majesty of what you've done or, or comment on their or improve it. So I love the idea of being very relaxed about no secrets. I mean, we're not in the business of writing algorithms. Now I know some artists are right. If your art matea is developing algorithms, then yeah. Keep those private, you know, keep those safe. But in my case, we just apply these techniques, these algorithms this code to create experiences.

As an example, in my show in 2015 in Mexico City, we had 43 artworks on view. You could either buy the catalog, which was, I don't know, whatever 25 bucks or you could buy a USB stick for I think it was $10, which included all the source code and schematics for every single artwork so that if you really liked the piece. You could just make it yourself. I love this position, Ben, because I think that in digital worlds, we know that there is a certain abundance, right? There is this capability for perfect digital reproduction. And so instead of fighting against it, we need to make our work more viral. My strategy for conservation is if younger generations start using my code then they will know it in the future and because they'll incorporate into their own work and then it'll be easier for somebody in 20 years, time to look back at the code and say, oh, you know, I, I can fix this.

So if you buy a print from us, you get the print and then you also get the USB stick with a TIF file and the printing instructions. Cause when the future of your kids scratches or UV light deteriorates the chromogenic print or whatever, you just go ahead and you print another.

And the reason why I do that is, well, first of all because, some people think, oh media art conservation is so hard and whatever; it's the opposite you can't kill the thing. You can have endless reproductions of the code that will generate this particular structure. They've always asked, well, if I'm spending so much money on this, what stops me from making as many copies as I want? My answer, of course, is if you want more copies of this, you should print as many as you want. It's not cheap to do a Lambda or a light jet print. It costs about 500 bucks. So go ahead. If you really like this piece, you want to put one in each one of your child's homes, you go ahead and do it, but here's the deal to protect the investment. When someone buys a work like that, we give them a certificate. This certificate is like the simple certificate of authenticity.

It has a signature and a numbering system, but it also, in our case, it has a blockchain address. It has a watermark, it has an engraving. It's actually an aluminum ingot that has been doubly anodized. It's like a very special little title of this work. And if you ever want to sell this work and you don't have this authenticity certificate, then the work is worthless, right? And so that's how we're taking control of the market. We're saying fine. The image wants to be free. Let's make it free. Anybody can have it, but it is the certificate of authenticity that somehow shows the relationship between the collector supporting the studio. And it is this title that contains or carries the value of the work. So when I give this certificate to people, I like offer it like a really special thing it's like I presented with two hands, you know, and I'm very serious and solemn as we give it. We never ship this thing because it's the title and that one is reproducible. You know, you have a certain responsibility to keep this going, but in the future, it's not happening now, but in my website you can get the manuals for each one of the pieces. It's all there. But in the future, I want to also put all the source code for the artworks there, you know, and whoever has invested in my studio, what they have is this title that sets them apart or that, sort of, rewards their investment with an accrual of profit over time. The self-certification is also a really good way to make sure that you've gotten paid, right, because that's the other problem with a lot of this very intangible digital stuff is that you could just, you know, you own a URL or you own a GIF like, what is that in terms of materiality? Well, in our case, the answer is this irreproducible other aluminum ingot. 

[00:45:22] Ben: What has been, over the whole span of your career, the most challenging conservation issue that you think you've had to deal with? 

[00:45:31] Rafael: Oh, I, I know exactly the one. It was awful. It's still awful. At the Venice Biennale in 2007 at the Mexican pavilion, I showed many works. One of them was a piece called Wave Function, which is 50 Eames plastic mold chairs that were on a serene and base that was motorized. And as you entered, there would be these 50 white chairs, basically. And as you entered, the computer would sense you, and it would create a massive wave. There was a linear actuator in each one of those chairs that would lift the chairs up really quite high, and then go down again. And so you'd have this wave expanding throughout the whole field of this kinetic sculpture. So that artwork went well and we sold it to a number of collectors, but one of the collectors who bought it, put it in a pretty public place in this kind of foundation that they have in Poland. We spent so much money on the linear actuators, because as you may know, a linear actuator, you can spend a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks. And we went right ahead and bought thousand dollar ones, because they were the best. What happened is when they put this work in their collection, there was one thing that was bothering the collectors. Over time, these linear actuators were producing noise. And then it turned out that the warranty that I had from the linear actuator company. Did not include noise because linear actuators are usually used in industrial settings where noise is not the biggest concern. And so they just basically refused to change that.

So at enormous cost, I had to completely re-fit the linear actuators with a composite instead of a metal nut. And even after all of that, the noise was still there. And in the end, you know, I had to have the piece returned to me. Normally the problems that you have in terms of conservation, in my opinion, have to do either with moving parts. So that's the number one thing that will go wrong. Kinetic sculptures. So always get good motors, get good drivers and get lots of spares. Or the other thing is a dependency software dependency. So you've made a particular digital environment based on assumptions of certain DLLs or libraries that somehow die over time. And so that's why more and more, we're hoping to only use material that is in the open source so that we can either modify it or included inside of all of our installs. 

I have to say, we've now redone the piece it's finally more silent. And back then I gave a warranty to the collector. Now you get what you buy and that's it. And then we will work with you to try and improve the problem over time. But I'd rather do that than, pretend that it's going to have like a perfect working order over my lifetime or something crazy.

[00:48:25] Ben: Yeah. It sounds like a hard, hard earned lesson. So what advice would you give to a young aspiring artist working with technology, you know, 21 year old Rafa?

[00:48:40] Rafael: There's many and then there's none because who am I? So I would say, make vectorial work. It means that when you have a concept and you can render in code with some sensors or whatever, it is always try to go for the domestic scale. Something that you can afford, something that can be a proof of concept or a prototype or an artist proof, and then ensure that that concept can then grow. So that, for example, if you're making a small animation, you can imagine, well, what would that be like at the size of a whole building or the size of a museum so that these works can actually scale up in ambition, and allow you to create more, independence, because the problem with a lot of media art is that you're going into extremely expensive, for example, arrays of things. So all you need to do is do a proof of concept of that in a smaller scale document that well, and then somehow convince gallerists or collectors to invest in the bigger version of that maquette version that you've just made. So that's a robust way to not need a huge studio. You work in maquette scale only to be able to deliver, once you've been paid, a version that is a little bit more sizeable. 

[00:50:03] Ben: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It's truly an honor to speak with you Rafa I really appreciate you taking the time. 

[00:50:08] Rafael: Thank you so much, the honor is mutual all right, ciao ciao.

And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you enjoyed today's show, I hope you'll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps with other people discovering the show, which in turn helps with my work to pay artists. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can find the show on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. 

And lastly, do you have a question for me or something you want to comment or respond to that you heard on the show? You can leave a voicemail by calling 1-833-ART-DATA. That's 1 8 3 3 2 7 8 3 2 8 2. Thanks again so much for listening friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.