Rewrite and translate this title “A Symphony of Light and Sound”: Inside Swarovski’s New Exhibition to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

Back in 1995, the Austrian crystal company Swarovski decided to celebrate its centenary by inviting an artist to collaborate and devise an homage to their trademark product. The first was the multimedia artist André Heller, who created a giant head, crusted with crystal, seemingly pushing it way out of the Tyrolean hillside Swarovski calls home. It was an audacious proposition, and one that has continued ever since, with Swarovski commissioning different artists and cultural figures across the years to create spaces they call ‘Chambers of Wonder’, all contained in a ‘Kristallwelten’, or crystal world.

Idiosyncratic, it has become a huge tourist pull – approximately 600,000 visitors pass under the jowls of the crystal giant each year to discover the works inside. And the artists include figures of the stature of Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell: the former creating a kaleidoscopic mirrored room with a ceaselessly reflected crystal chandelier; the latter one of his Shallow Space Constructions of pure light (the only room, incidentally, not to feature physical crystal).

This year, as they approach 130, Swarovski collaborated with the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose work is posited at an intersection of architecture and performance art. He has opted to create not one Chamber of Wonder, but two – ‘Pulse Voronoi’ and ‘Kristallstimmen’. Each relies on both individual interaction and cumulative effect – a reflection, Lozano-Hemmer says, of the labour behind the crystal. “To make visible, to make tangible … the thousands of people whose expertise and loyalty and talent is what forms the crystals. I wanted to pay homage to those voices,” he stated.

That is literally the case in the first work, ‘Kristallstimmen’ – which he describes as “a symphony of light and sound”. A sonic portrait of Swarovski, 3,000 suspended speakers encased in crystal play the voices of 3,000 employees from around the world. As a visitor progresses through the space, the installation also lights up, ebbing and flowing with the passage of the body, as if the crystal and voice are a pixel, part of a larger whole.

“To make visible, to make tangible … the thousands of people whose expertise and loyalty and talent is what forms the crystals. I wanted to pay homage to those voices” – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The same idea is expressed through ‘Pulse Voronoi’ – a cube of crystal blasted apart into 7,000 different fragments, suspended like a magical snowfall in the largest chamber within Kristallwelten. Each crystal is lit to flicker and flutter, to beat – a reflection of Lozano-Hemmer’s fascination with heartbeats, which he calls “our most intimate biometric”. He first became fascinated with the rhythm of the heart when listening to an ultrasound of his unborn twin children; he asked for two ultrasound machines, to hear each beat individually.

“They were making this syncopated music – minimalist music,” he recalls. His 2006 work Pulse Room explored this idea, with 100-300 bulbs matching the heartbeats of attendees. His Swarovski work pushes that notion to the zenith – 7,000 heartbeats are thumping simultaneously in the room, each detected by sensors that read the pulse when a hand is placed beneath them. “Each individual little crystal has a pulsation, a flicker,” he says. “This is the heartbeat of someone who participated in the past. When you walk in, you’re surrounded by the heartbeats of 7,000 past participants. When you add your heartbeat, it becomes part of the choir.” For Lozano-Hemmer, the work isn’t just a pretty mass of flashing crystals, but a memento mori – “reminding us that we are on earth for a fragile moment”. As new pulses are added – archived, stored – older ones vanish, in a constant renewal.

Old and new. It connects, obviously, with a grand art tradition; 17th-century ‘Vanitas’ paintings and memento mori as symbolic reminders of the inevitability of death and the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures, albeit in our less secular time. But it also connects with pop culture, with an urge to interact and affect our surroundings rather than act as a passive observer. To record and make a mark, too – archiving your heartbeat sounds like a thrill. Although, at Kristallwelten, there’ll be 599,999 others queuing to do the same.

Find out more about Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installations at Kristallwelten here.

Back in 1995, the Austrian crystal company Swarovski decided to celebrate its centenary by inviting an artist to collaborate and devise an homage to their trademark product. The first was the multimedia artist André Heller, who created a giant head, crusted with crystal, seemingly pushing it way out of the Tyrolean hillside Swarovski calls home. It was an audacious proposition, and one that has continued ever since, with Swarovski commissioning different artists and cultural figures across the years to create spaces they call ‘Chambers of Wonder’, all contained in a ‘Kristallwelten’, or crystal world.

Idiosyncratic, it has become a huge tourist pull – approximately 600,000 visitors pass under the jowls of the crystal giant each year to discover the works inside. And the artists include figures of the stature of Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell: the former creating a kaleidoscopic mirrored room with a ceaselessly reflected crystal chandelier; the latter one of his Shallow Space Constructions of pure light (the only room, incidentally, not to feature physical crystal).

This year, as they approach 130, Swarovski collaborated with the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose work is posited at an intersection of architecture and performance art. He has opted to create not one Chamber of Wonder, but two – ‘Pulse Voronoi’ and ‘Kristallstimmen’. Each relies on both individual interaction and cumulative effect – a reflection, Lozano-Hemmer says, of the labour behind the crystal. “To make visible, to make tangible … the thousands of people whose expertise and loyalty and talent is what forms the crystals. I wanted to pay homage to those voices,” he stated.

That is literally the case in the first work, ‘Kristallstimmen’ – which he describes as “a symphony of light and sound”. A sonic portrait of Swarovski, 3,000 suspended speakers encased in crystal play the voices of 3,000 employees from around the world. As a visitor progresses through the space, the installation also lights up, ebbing and flowing with the passage of the body, as if the crystal and voice are a pixel, part of a larger whole.

“To make visible, to make tangible … the thousands of people whose expertise and loyalty and talent is what forms the crystals. I wanted to pay homage to those voices” – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The same idea is expressed through ‘Pulse Voronoi’ – a cube of crystal blasted apart into 7,000 different fragments, suspended like a magical snowfall in the largest chamber within Kristallwelten. Each crystal is lit to flicker and flutter, to beat – a reflection of Lozano-Hemmer’s fascination with heartbeats, which he calls “our most intimate biometric”. He first became fascinated with the rhythm of the heart when listening to an ultrasound of his unborn twin children; he asked for two ultrasound machines, to hear each beat individually.

“They were making this syncopated music – minimalist music,” he recalls. His 2006 work Pulse Room explored this idea, with 100-300 bulbs matching the heartbeats of attendees. His Swarovski work pushes that notion to the zenith – 7,000 heartbeats are thumping simultaneously in the room, each detected by sensors that read the pulse when a hand is placed beneath them. “Each individual little crystal has a pulsation, a flicker,” he says. “This is the heartbeat of someone who participated in the past. When you walk in, you’re surrounded by the heartbeats of 7,000 past participants. When you add your heartbeat, it becomes part of the choir.” For Lozano-Hemmer, the work isn’t just a pretty mass of flashing crystals, but a memento mori – “reminding us that we are on earth for a fragile moment”. As new pulses are added – archived, stored – older ones vanish, in a constant renewal.

Old and new. It connects, obviously, with a grand art tradition; 17th-century ‘Vanitas’ paintings and memento mori as symbolic reminders of the inevitability of death and the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures, albeit in our less secular time. But it also connects with pop culture, with an urge to interact and affect our surroundings rather than act as a passive observer. To record and make a mark, too – archiving your heartbeat sounds like a thrill. Although, at Kristallwelten, there’ll be 599,999 others queuing to do the same.

Find out more about Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installations at Kristallwelten here.