Border Crosser: Hybridity, Cultural Diffusion, and the Porous Boundaries in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Artworks

Pedro H. Kramer Canhim, Ilum Escola de Ciência, Brazil

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks insist that technology is never neutral. Dense materials (wires, screens, spotlights, hardware) compose political visualities that unsettle the supposed fixity of national borders.¹ At the same time, they push against the borders of art itself; the limits that set apart the artwork and the observer are uncertain. Being a border-crosser artist and self-described as “post-Mexican,” Lozano-Hemmer plays with the boundary of the concept of border to undermine the idea that country limits restrain the cultural diffusion and crossing communications.² 

In the large-scale public art installation Border Tuner (2019) (Figure 1), Lozano-Hemmer scales and highlights the relationships created across the U.S.-Mexico border by projecting massive beams of light from two cities, at the moment when the Trump administration turned this border into a theater of political spectacle.³ More than a critique, this work made it possible to hear and see relationships shaped by a specifically Latin-American perception of frontiers and culture. Situated between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, this artwork embodies light as a channel of communication and bonding. Searchlights in both cities are aimed at each other, and by controlling the direction of the light, those channels are formed when two light beams encounter. In an article in Art21, Lozano-Hemmer prints the opinion of the population of both cities, writing, “People there are sick of the wall. They want to talk about the way in which two societies interpenetrate.”⁴ 

Figure 1. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo, 2019. Light installation, Bowie High School, Ciudad Juárez, México / El Paso, Texas, United States. Photographs by Monica Lozano.

Alterity and Latin-American Studies: Nosotros y Vosotros

To understand how borders are understood by Latin-Americans and represented in Lozano’s artwork, it is necessary to consider how the global North and the colonizers have cast the Latinos as the Others. In this essay, alterity serves as a productive framework to examine these asymmetrical relations from a Latin-American standpoint⁵—one that sees the region not as a passive recipient but as an active, porous field of cultural and technological exchange. In Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s poem collection, entitled Tech-illa Sunrise (2004), this alterity is illustrated: “Nosotros, los otros… We are all ethno-cyborgs, chiborgs, cyBorges, ciboricuas y demás. If you want to know the future of technology take a good look at us.”⁶

Nosotros is not just a word that could be translated to “us.” For Jorge Volpi, Mexican writer and essayist, we Latinos, far from the colonizer, understand ourselves as part of a nosotros, common but not equal, a vast imaginary that embraces our heterogeneity. Although in front of the colonizer we are part of a homogenizing vosotros, there is no divergence between Mexicans, Brazilians, Colombians and others.⁷ Being a nosotros or vosotros signify us Latinos as otros, or Others. To define oneself as Other, by recognizing that we do not belong to the hegemonic order, can be decisive for understanding how, for instance, the geopolitical border becomes a device for controlling subjectivities and cognition—and yet surmountable. Returning to Border Tuner, we can understand that this installation does not break the so-called unexchangeable wall, but highlights how Latinos’ imaginary is always in exchange and communication built by stitches, patches and hybridity, even across the wall.

The otherness is evoked when dealing with technology, when it is understood as imported magic. The idea that technology is linear reinforces the view that reduces a region to peripheral status by assuming that innovation flows only from North to South, erasing local processes of reinvention, adaptation, and use.⁸ Latinos are seen as peripheral, and Latin America is seen as borderlands, which brings back the notion of Latin-Americans as the Others. The border acts as a device that produces specific subjectivities, crystallizing behaviors and designating who is the migrant, the refugee, the alter/other while simultaneously creating its counterpart: the protected population, the protected ego/self. In other words, this device, appointed as a protection technology, is used as an imaginary political weapon.⁹

While borders operate as political imaginaries that crystallize fixed subjectivities, Latin-American thinkers have long emphasized that such divisions are never absolute. Mexican-Argentinian anthropologist Néstor Garcia Canclini argues that Latin-American culture is manufactured by hybridity where traditions, modernities, and global flows intersect rather than remain apart.¹⁰ Canclini appropriates the notion of global flows of culture in the globalization era to demonstrate counterflows from South to North.¹¹ Latin-American imaginaries insist on crossings, overlaps, and hybrid belonging; this reveals the permeability and the pores that borders have in Latinos’ subjectivity. It is in this horizon of hybridity and coexistence that Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks can be read as devices that expose the violence of borders while staging unexpected forms of relation across them. Using searchlights to represent the communication reveals how Lozano-Hemmer and his team are aligned with Latin-American sociotechnical re-appropriation of technology as a form of resistance and reinvention.¹²

The searchlight, commonly used in and associated with prisons, borders, and other political apparatuses to control our bodies, does not reveal a runaway or a border crosser in Border Tuner; it highlights communications that already occur across borders. The re-use of imported technology in design and art in Latin America is not explained only as resistance. Computational and technological Latin-American artworks like Lozano-Hemmer’s “should be understood as re-existences; in other words, as the creation of new syntheses between cultural and technological processes in the Latin-American context.”¹³ In this sense, the re-appropriation and subversive use of technology acts not just politically, but also creates new aesthetics and tangible experiences, breaking the pre-established notion of technological purpose and visuality. In an interview, Lozano-Hemmer reveals how the experience with the disco lights in Mexico City created a new light grammar: “I’ve come from a different tradition of light. For me, the light of the discotec is the light of disorientation. It is the light that allows you to hide.”¹⁴ The “light” presented in Border Tuner is a great example of re-appropriation of technology, usually used to suppress the voice of Latin Americans to amplify it. 

Another example of technological re-appropriation is Remote Pulse (Figure 2). Remote Pulse, installed alongside Border Tuner, adds a new conversation channel by establishing a cross-border relation between two bodies using only the pulse of a heart. If the border, as argued before, acts as a political imaginary that sets apart communities and reinforces dichotomies (e.g. Native/Alien, Ego/Other) Remote Pulse acts as a relational device that defies pre-established notions of U.S. neighbors. The artist describes this interplay as “two identical pulse-sensing stations that are interconnected over the internet. When a person places their hands on one station automatically the person on the other station feels their pulse, as the plates vibrate in sync with the heartbeat of the remote person, and vice versa.”¹⁵ This artwork creates a tangible relation, creating communication using only tactile experience, a sense not yet burdened with the prejudices and predetermined meanings shaped by border politics that already permeate our visual culture. Although not clearly related to oppression, pulse-sensing machines turn our bodies into data, and therefore can be used to classify and cluster beings—inscribing within them what Giselle Beiguelman, a Brazilian artist and researcher, calls the “datasphere.”¹⁶ Yet, in Remote Pulse, this data is not employed for measurement or classification, but rather to render perceptible the simultaneity of two distant bodies. The work recontextualizes a technology, converting it into an interface for mutual presence and shared sensorial experience.

Ethno-cyborgs: hybridity as a way to interact with tangible media

In “Iguanas y Dinosaurios,” an essay by the Mexican essayist Juan Villoro, the colonizer gaze plays an important role in order of alterity.¹⁷ More than being cast as Others, Latinos are exoticized to satisfy this gaze, like lizards disguised as dinosaurs to fulfill a manufactured fiction that crystallizes the Latin-American experience and identity.¹⁸ This disguise takes action by performing archetypes and stereotypes that resembles the preestablished fictional notion of a Latin-American. So when Gómez-Peña and Lozano-Hemmer reclaim themselves as ethno-cyborgs, they are echoing the idea of hybridism between Latin-American cultures while situating themselves in a hybrid of fiction and reality that refuses to fit in dichotomic terms.¹⁹ Donna Haraway describes the cyborgs as this hybrid configuration of self that proposes new and partial identities.²⁰ If the exotic seeks to crystallize the Latin-American experience, the cyborg can be used as a political and technical response to allocate nuanced new identities. Being an ethno-cyborg means inhabiting a subjectivity in which borders no longer segregate ideas or delimit cultural circulation. This notion takes shape in a context where hybridity is not an exception but the very foundation of cultural formation in Latin America. In this sense, hybridity could be read as a reconfiguration of the relationship established between an interactive artwork and the observer. Beiguelman defines the prognosis of the image by saying that “the image will be touchable, porous and produced by a subject who gazes while simultaneously seeing themselves within it.”²¹ 

Through Lozano-Hemmer’s production, this image prognosis takes shape when the audience becomes an active co-producer of the image itself, as illustrated by Recurrent First Dream (2022) (Figure 3). In this installation, a slender screen displays Primeiro Sueño, a poem written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun and poet. As the viewer approaches, their presence generates a dynamic word-cloud reflection, resembling a flickering plasma that seems to delimit their body as a gaseous outline. The result is a collaborative authorship: Sor Juana’s original text, Lozano-Hemmer’s conceptual and spatial framing, Hugo Daoust’s software architecture, and the audience’s embodied interaction all converge, intertwining to produce the work in real time. When collaborating in this artwork, the viewer is inserted in cybernetic space, or “endophysical space.”²²

Computational artworks evoke a new sphere of communication and being. Peter Weibel attributes to computational arts the possibility of constructing endophysical spaces: “Virtual reality, interactive computer installations, endophysics, nanotechnology, etc., are technologies of the expanded present, ways of transcending the local horizon of events.”²³ In other words, the perception of space and time are changed, allowing the observer’s perspective on the border to shift: the threshold between where the artwork begins and where the observer ends becomes blurred, the boundaries fading as dialogue unfolds (whether human-machine or human-machine-human). In Weibel’s terms, the shift from opsigraphy (the writing of seeing) to opsiscopy (the seeing of seeing) marks the moment when the observer is no longer external to the image but becomes part of its very system.²⁴ Following this idea, Border Tuner transforms spectators into co-authors, making perception itself a shared field. In this interaction, the artwork reveals the permeability of art’s borders, its meaning emerging only through collective activation across physical and symbolic frontiers. Lozano-Hemmer re-affirms the public as authors by assuming that his artworks are incomplete without the public. 

Experiencing and being part of an artwork bears strong relation to the Latin-American experience. In this respect, the Latin-American lens ceases to be merely an identity theme and turns into a method for relating to technology, to understand and read new possible representations and interactivity. If we are ethno-cyborgs, as proposed by Gómez-Peña and Lozano-Hemmer, maybe their invitation to “take a good look at us” is an invitation to project new possible futures.²⁵ Within the Latin-American context, hybridity is not a deviation from purity but a method of coexistence, a porous condition through which relations between bodies, technology, and meanings are continually renegotiated. The ethno-cyborg thus becomes a figure of epistemic permeability, inhabiting borders without being defined by them. From this perspective, interactive and computational artworks become more than an interface for human–machine engagement, turning into a space where new configurations of self, community, and technology emerge. Lozano-Hemmer’s installations embody this logic of exchange and translation, not the dissolution of difference, but its transformation into dialogue. The border is not an end—rather, it is a membrane through which art, technology, and subjectivity circulate and reconfigure one another.

About the Author

Pedro Henrique Kramer Canhim is an undergraduate researcher at Ilum School of Science (CNPEM, Brazil) and a FAPESP fellow. His current research focuses on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks as a platform to discuss technological culture in Latin America, drawing from interactive media and Latin American studies. As an artist himself, Pedro explores cybernetic art as a means to visualize possible futures, particularly through the lens of the Global South.

Notes

1.  I refer to the dense materiality in many of Lozano-Hemmer’s works, including those classified as “relational architecture” (e.g., Pulse Topology; Border Tuner). On “relational architecture,” see Maria Fernández, “Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano‐Hemmer’s Relational Architectures,” Architectural Design77, no. 4 (2007): 78–87, https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.490. ↩︎
2.  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Tech-Illa Sunrise: (.Txt Con Sangrita),” Aztlán 29, no. 1 (2004): 181–90, https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.2004.29.1.181. ↩︎
3.  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Border Tuner / Sintonizador Fronterizo,” accessed September 30, 2025, https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/border_tuner__sintonizador_fronterizo.php. ↩︎
4.  “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer In Borderlands,” Art21, October 2, 2020, accessed September 30, 2025, https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s10/rafael-lozano-hemmer-in-borderlands-segment/. ↩︎
5.  “Alterity” is understood as the process by which the self is defined through the construction of the Other; see François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). ↩︎
6.  Lozano-Hemmer and Gómez-Peña, “Tech-Illa Sunrise.” ↩︎
7.  Jorge Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar: Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI, Ensayo (México: Debate, 2009), 13. ↩︎
8.  Eden Medina et al., Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (The MIT press, 2014), 16–18. ↩︎
9.  “The current political imaginary of borders as devices to keep invaders out not only works to sort and contain people and things—it embeds other types of nefarious politics, enabling new forms of violence and ever-more exclusionary political formations.” Miriam Ticktin, “Borders: A Story of Political Imagination,” Borderlands Journal 21, no. 1 (2022): 151, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48767835. ↩︎
10.  Néstor García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estratégias para Entrar e Sair da Modernidade, with Ana Regina Lessa and Heloísa Pezza Cintrão, Ensaios Latino-americanos (Edusp, 2021). ↩︎
11.  Néstor García Canclini, “La Épica de La Globalización y El Melodrama de La Interculturalidad,” in Nuevas Perspectivas Desde/Sobre América Latina: El Desafío de Los Estudios Culturales (Editorial Cuarto Propio / Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000). ↩︎
12.  Rubén Figaredo Fernández, “El Arte Hacker. El Activismo En La Era Digital,” Ábaco, no. 68/69 (2011): 94–96, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43794301; Gabriel Pereira et al., “We’ve Always Been Antagonistic: Algorithmic Resistances and Dissidences beyond the Global North,” Media International Australia 183, no. 1 (2022): 127–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X221074792. ↩︎
13.  David M. Sperling et al., “Fabricating (Other) Computations: Digital Fabrication and Technological Appropriation in Latin America,” Dearq, no. 27 (July 2020): 86, https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq27.2020.06. ↩︎
14.  How Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Mesmerizing Works Are Bridging Divides, directed by Q with Tom Power, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvWYVqD_A9s. ↩︎
15.  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Remote Pulse,” accessed October 17, 2024, https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/remote_pulse.php. ↩︎
16.  Giselle Beiguelman uses the term datasphere (originally Dadosfera) to describe the contemporary environment in which life is continuously translated into digital information. It designates a decentralized regime of surveillance, where sensors, algorithms, and corporate interfaces distribute control across a diffuse network, distinct from the classical panoptic model. Within this sphere, every gesture, movement, or heartbeat becomes a circulating data trace, shaping new aesthetics and image politics. Giselle Beiguelman, Políticas Da Imagem: Vigilância e Resistência Na Dadosfera, Primeira edição, Coleção Exit (Ubu, 2021). ↩︎
17.  The term “colonizer gaze” refers to Juan Villoro’s notion of “mirada ajena or mirada europea,” which can be translated as ‘foreign gaze’ or ‘European gaze,’ describing how Latin Americans disguise as exotics through the eyes of the colonizer: Juan Villoro, “Iguanas y dinosaurios. América Latina como utopía del atraso,” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, accessed October 2, 2025, https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/iguanas-y-dinosaurios-america-latina-como-utopia-del-atraso–0/html/fdc324bc-098b-427e-a99d-88ce6bf68556_2.html. ↩︎
18.  See the analogy used by Villoro to construct the idea that Latin America is perceived as a theme park: a utopia of economic and technological lag/backwardness: Juan Villoro, “Iguanas y dinosaurios. América Latina como utopía del atraso,” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, accessed October 2, 2025, https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/iguanas-y-dinosaurios-america-latina-como-utopia-del-atraso–0/html/fdc324bc-098b-427e-a99d-88ce6bf68556_2.html. ↩︎
19.  Lozano-Hemmer and Gómez-Peña, “Tech-Illa Sunrise.” ↩︎
20.  Donna Haraway, Manifiesto Cíborg, 1st ed (Kaótica Libros, 2020). ↩︎
21.  Translated by the author, from Beiguelman, Políticas Da Imagem, 34–35. ↩︎
22.  Peter Weibel, “El mundo como interfaz,” Elementos: Ciencia y Cultura, February 2001, Vol. 7, N. 40 Edition. ↩︎
23.  Translated by the author, from Weibel, “El mundo como interfaz.” ↩︎
24.  Peter Weibel, “The Intelligent Image: Neurocinema or Quantum Cinema?,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, Electronic Culture–History, Theory, Practice (MIT Press, 2003). ↩︎
25. Lozano-Hemmer and Gómez-Peña, “Tech-Illa Sunrise.” ↩︎

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Fernández, Maria. “Illuminating Embodiment: Rafael Lozano‐Hemmer’s Relational Architectures.” Architectural Design77, no. 4 (2007): 78–87. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.490.

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