NYAB Event - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer "Pulse Park"

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At Mad. Sq. Art
Media: Sculpture

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The Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art program presents Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Park, an interactive light installation that will be viewable from dusk until 10:00 p.m. nightly in Madison Square Park, located between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and 23rd and 26th Streets in Manhattan. Visitors’ heart rates will be monitored by two heart rate sensor sculptures, and will activate two hundred theatrical spotlights, creating a pulsating matrix of light across the central Oval Lawn of the historic park.

Pulse Park marks the U.S. public art debut of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In Pulse Park, evening visitors to Madison Square Park will have their systolic and diastolic heart rates measured by one of two sensor sculptures installed at the North and South ends of the Oval Lawn. These biometric rhythms are translated and projected as pulses of narrow-beam light that will move sequentially down rows of spotlights placed along the perimeter of the lawn as each consecutive participant makes contact with the sensors. The result is a poetic expression of our vital signs, transforming the public space into a fleeting architecture of light and movement.

Pulse Park is inspired by Roberto Gavaldón’s film “Macario” (Mexico, 1960) in which the protagonist has a hunger-induced hallucination wherein individuals are represented by lit candles, as well as by the minimalist musical compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, Glenn Branca and Steve Riech. Pulse Park is the culmination of a series that Lozano-Hemmer debuted at the 2007 Venice Biennale with Pulse Room.

Since his emergence in the 1990s, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has mixed the seemingly disparate fields of architecture, digital media, robotics, medical science, and performance art into spectacular public artworks; enormous temporary landscapes of light and rhythm that double as platforms for public participation.

Born in 1967 in Mexico City and educated at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of the world’s preeminent practitioners of interactive public art. Since 1995, his series of “relational architecture” interventions have created platforms for participation that seek to interrupt the increasingly alienating and homogenized character of the global city.

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