Vectorial Elevation
by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
http://www.alzado.net

Amidst the array of activities commonly associated with the Internet–
email, MP3 downloading, online shopping, streaming broadcasts, dotcom
advertising, and so on–it can be easy to forget that, beneath all the
hardware and cables, is a technology that is fundamentally built on
light. As a 'thing,' light can be a frustrating medium to work with or
to talk about. It hovers somewhere between immanence and immateriality,
a super-saturated mode of representation that is also pure vaporware. As
a medium–that is, as something that both asserts and effaces its
presence–light takes on many of the contradictions inherent in
information technologies like the Internet.

For a number of years, the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
(http://www.lozano-hemmer.com) has been exploring the ways in which
information technologies are networked into architectural, cultural, and
political relationships. Vectorial Elevation is the title of a project
by Lozano-Hemmer which was commissioned by the Mexican Council for
Culture and the Arts to celebrate the year 2000 in Mexico. It involved a
series of military search lights positioned around Mexico City's
Constitution Plaza (the Z