Shadow Box

“1984×1984” is the tenth piece in Lozano-Hemmer’s Shadow Box series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. The piece shows a grid of thousands of random numbers extracted from addresses photographed by Google Street View. Scanned by Google from the front doors of buildings around the world, the numbers have an immense variety of fonts, colours, textures, and styles. As a viewer walks in front of the piece, his or her silhouette is represented within the display, and within its form, all numbers countdown to show the number 1984 repeated throughout. The piece was made as a homage to George Orwell’s eponymous dystopian novel, 30 years after his predicted date for the collapse of privacy.

“Make Out” is the eight piece in the Shadow Box series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. This piece shows thousands of internet videos of couples looking at each other: as soon as someone stands in front of the display his or her silhouette is shown and all the couples within it begin to kiss. The massive array of make-out sessions continues for as long as someone is in front of the work, –as he or she moves away all the kissing ends.

“Reporters With Borders” is a high resolution interactive display that simultaneously shows 864 video clips of news anchors taken from TV broadcasts in the United States and Mexico. As the viewer stands in front of the piece his or her silhouette is shown on the display and within it reporters begin to talk. Every 5 minutes the piece switches the video clips – from a database of 1600 – and classifies them along gender, race and country, so that for instance on the left there are only American reporters and on the right only Mexicans.

“Third Person” is the second piece of the ShadowBox series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. This piece shows the viewer’s shadow revealing hundreds of tiny words that are in fact all the verbs of the dictionary conjugated in the third person. The portrait of the viewer is drawn in real time by active words, which appear automatically to fill his or her silhouette. The collector may choose to display the words in English, Spanish or French, or a combination of the three languages.

“Eye Contact” is the first piece of the Shadow Box series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. This piece shows eight hundred simultaneous videos of people lying down, resting. As soon as a public member is detected, his or her presence triggers the miniature video portraits to wake up: hundreds of people simultaneously turn to look at the visitor directly, creating an uncanny experience that questions who is the observer and who is the observed.

More works

Shadow Object (2012-today)
Shadow Box (2006-today)
Subsculpture (2004-2014)
Relational Architecture (1997-present)