FIFI projects

All The Horses Share The Same Color
LT / 19.421456
LG / -99.077939
Interview by Mario Garcia Torres

MGT: Where are you now Pablo?

PD: Putting the final touches to a piece of the exhibition. I came to a friend’s house in Avandaro to finish it.

MGT: I’m here in the studio. Would you like to tell me something about the piece
you are finishing?

PD: It’s a video called “Living in time, believing in the timeless”. It’s a two-screen sculpture. One has a count-up timer with the time the sun has been active, and the other one, a count-down of the time it has left to live, based on scientific speculation. In a certain way, this is the “anchor” piece of the whole exhibition. It’s a way to put human life in context and establish its limits.

MGT: Strangely enough, this is something I’ve been also thinking about. Not specifically, but I think we have a new urgency to relativize our existence; to perceive our presence in the history of the solar system, which is, in these terms, minute, with a wider perspective. I think we have flashes of this conscience when we live catastrophes or great natural disasters and, for a moment, we wonder if this is the beginning of the end of our civilization.

PD: Yes. What strikes me is the amount of subjective questions or thoughts that come from objective investigation (science). I’m interested in the insight derived from scientific data, such as these, that can be observed in the abstract, because their magnitude is very different from our conventional way to approach subjects such as location, time and identity. There is no objective investigation (science) that can answer the infinite subjective questions resulting from contemplation and introspection.

MGT: There is an interesting text on the first and most radical non-objectual conceptual art pieces that proposes that these works, for as cold as they may seem, appeal to our emotions, precisely by putting into perspective the subjectivity of our understanding of abstract concepts, such as the infinity.

The pieces that illustrate this most clearly are the telepathic works of Robert Barry, who stated that ideas transmitted this way would infinitely navigate the universe, and that anyone, anyway, could catch them.

PD: I like Barry’s idea. It deletes the intermediary language between the artist and its public. I sometimes think that in art, as in any other language or means of communication, the initial intention or idea remains unknown (even for the artist), and the succession of interpretations or modifications made of it ends up by defining it. I don’t know if there is a language as solid as to keep an idea intact when shared from one person to another. In fact, I think it’s actually not that important.

One of the key points of the investigation I made for these pieces is a statement by Allan Guth – a renowned cosmologist in the last years – who said that “Anything that can happen will happen and it will happen an infinite number of times”. Guth is talking about the theory of the eternal inflation, which proposes a possible explanation on how our universe was created and works. For it to be valid, he states that there is an infinity of universes with infinite possibilities (multiverses)

It strikes me that, by having infinite possibilities, this becomes an irrefutable theory that cannot be proved. I think this thought is closer to the artistic point of view. This statement by Allan Guth is the inspiration of one of the pieces of the exhibition. A sculpture with metal strips. Part of the idea is to sum the same number over and over. In theory, it is a sculpture that tends to infinity.

MGT: Would you describe this piece?

PD: In the center of a wall we place two linked steel bars. Two more bars are placed . of an inch apart from those in the center. The next bars are separated by . of an inch, and so on. Always adding . of an inch to the previous distance. The space between the bars gradually increases as the bars go farther away from the center. This could go on and on. The consecutive sum of the same number is a divergent series. It does not converge at any point, so you can keep adding the same number infinitely.

MGT: I’m still trying to negotiate this autonomy in my own work. How necessary is it for me, as individual? I do think there are infinite ways to interpret a work, but I also think it is important for our thought to be directed at least to one destination because this makes us human. We can share subjectivity and specific thoughts. On the other hand, I agree that ideas in a piece of art are not effective, as dictation from the artist (as it is the work itself) but in their distribution and possible reintegration outside the museum environment What do you think?

PD: I try to detach myself from the objects I produce. I mean, I try not to leave any physical traces of me in the pieces I show. It’s even better if someone else produces them. Personally, I do this to try thinking in my work as someone else’s’ so I can participate in the possible discussion and redefinition of the pieces from a less personal perspective.

In a discussion, a friend, who is also an artist, said something that stuck: «I’m sure that I’m saying something, I’m just not so sure what that is». It may sound like a joke, but I identify with that because we, as visual artists, have to make up our own language and our own world which may or may not be effective when communicating ideas.
I’m interested in the mental space created when we think of the work. In the pieces of the exhibition, I give the “ingredients” to create this mental space in the observer.

I didn’t know Robert Barry’s telepathic work that you mentioned before. He even made an exhibition and completely closed the gallery when it was displayed, right? Shit! It’s a great way to erase space and the objects of an exhibition!

He got rid of the space and of the object leaving only the public invited to the sidewalk. Hahaha!. Wow!

MGT: Barry’s idea is incredible. The least possible to present an idea… What other pieces are you presenting?

PD: Outside the gallery I will show a piece in audio consisting in two speakers. One syntonized with a station of Monterrey (the closest to the gallery) and the other one to a farther radio station in Perth, Australia.

MGT: How did you conceive this piece?

PD: I like the outer space of the gallery and I had the intention to show a piece that elevates the sensation of being outdoors. I had been investigating for a while now about antipode coordinates, that are the coordinates of opposed sides of the world. A recurring subject in my work is the notion of location, expressed through maps, buildings, coordinates, directions, streets, etc… It’s a relative concept
In this installation, I want to give the feeling of space, magnitude and constant change in the world, and break the idea that in the “white cube” everything is decontextualized. By using that city’s radio station, we are including it in the exhibition.

MGT: Radio stations and taxi drivers are probably the two greatest sources of information to understand a city. Through them, we understand the interests of a city, what it needs to discuss, and the needs and anxieties of its community. I like listening foreign radio, whenever I have the time. Sometimes even in a language I don’t understand. I imagine that Perth’s station is spoken in a moderately foreign English. What is the role of these stations in your piece?

PD: I’m excited about not having control of the contents in each station. I agree with you. The radio is a great way to get to know a city, but we usually listen to that of our own city, while we drive or do something. And I think that the idea of listening to the farthest radio station from where we are standing is very interesting as a practice of location. For example, not long ago, I heard that two radio stations played the same Justin Bieber song with a delay of one and a half minute. It was bizarre, but it was a great moment!

MGT: Without looking at the piece, I think that it could be easier to relate to this piece than to that of monitors of which we talked about at the beginning. It would seem that the first one brings us face to face with numbers that are hard to conceive, but this radio piece deals with two extremes, that, although they are far apart, they are still in this earth, so to speak.

PD: Yes. It is clearly easier to relate to the scale of this piece than to that of the other one, that speaks of millions of years.

MGT: What is the time difference between Monterrey and Perth?

PD: Perth is 13 hours ahead…

MGT: Pablo, I understand you studied cinematography. Do you find any relation between it and this piece? Do you think there is some of it in your piece?

PD: Yes, there is a subject I feel cinema has not been able to successfully achieve: speaking in the present. Maybe in experimental or art films in pieces like, yours, in which you speak to Dr. Atl in subtitles. I remember having thought of that when I saw it in the Jumex Museum a few months ago. Using subtitles is like using voice over, but in a personal way because spectators read subtitles with their own voices at that precise moment. They read it in present. I think that in a film, you can only find the present in voice over. With this piece, you are in the present the whole time. There is no future while the speak and there is only past when they play a song that was obviously recorded in the past. I have that feeling every time more often when I face recorded/filmed information: I think that its creator is probably dead now, or recorded it long ago and is now a different person. This piece remains in the present, and I think this is very special. Regardless of our thirteen-hour distance from Perth, the contents are in the present. Time is only a number to maintain the order that is obviously linked to the Earth’s rotation (night – day); what is happening there, is happening now, but in another place.

MGT: This makes me think of the piece Information Office of David Lamelas. Do you know it? It’s excellent. He wanted the piece to consist in real time information of Vietnam by receiving telex about it. I find interesting that the first time he presented it was in the Venice Biennale in the 60’s. Unlike yours, I think, when it was presented in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the recreated the exact moment and the piece as it was in its time; the news that arrived were those of its first presentation. Do you want your piece to be always in the present? What would change if it was presented in a different time and place?

PD: I want it in the present, by now. I had never thought of that possibility. Now, the choice of the two stations is based on location, not on content. It may be interesting to record what happens in the time it is exhibited and see if it is relevant to present it in the future as it was at that time…

MGT: I understand that there a couple of other pieces in the exhibition?

PD: Yes. There is a series of 4 paintings, each of which describes the physical process of being human; one describes the process of sight, the others describe neuron synapsis, tact and hearing. I wanted to make paintings as portraits of the observer.

The last piece is a painting based on a 1977 document called «The Wow signal». A very famous document of a signal received in Ohio State, where the scientist in turn was very excited and wrote “wow!” over the printed data of the telescope thinking that, at last, an alien had contacted the Earth. There is still no explanation for that signal.

MGT: What is the wow signal painting? How are the data that point to a possible contact identified?

PD: This painting has two types of data: one part is the zone in the space to which the telescope pointed and the other part are numbers that represent the intensity of the audio signal received by the telescope. There is where Ehman (the scientist) circled the data that made it special. Numbers go from 1 to 2 and, in this case, letters appeared (AEUQJ) used to represent signals with intensities from 10 to 36. This means this signal was thirty times more intense than what we normally hear from outer space.

There are two stories I like. In 2007 – 30th anniversary of the Wow Signal – the university of Ohio organized, with Twitter, an event to send the tweets of the whole day to that zone in space. The other one is that it inspired Carl Sagan in its novel “Contact” – which is excellent – and then Robert Zemeckis made a movie of that novel, which is also very good…

MGT: Five days after the exposition, 39 years would have passed after the supposed contact… I find these assumptions interesting. Sometimes these speculations give us more to think about than hard data. How verifiable are the theories described in other bidimensional pieces?

PD: Oh yes! It’s almost its 40th anniversary! I wasn’t aware. They have tried to explain this signal for many years without success. It is already some kind of accepted mystery among cosmologists. The other paintings describe processes of the human body that, more than theories, are physical descriptions of the body; there is nothing to prove there. I thought of those paintings with a series of talks and books from Allan Wallace, a Buddhist scientist that has criticized the scientific community for years for ignoring the study of human conscience or the human mind. These paintings describe certain processes that are identical for all of us, but we are evidently very different from each other. Science tends to generalize and find simple explanations to complex subjects. So much so, that scientists don’t have the slightest idea of what human conscience is, what is its cause or where it is located, etc.
The scientific method needs to observe and experiment certain things to be able to prove or reject something. When dealing with the mind, they don’t know where to
start, and they have ignored the knowledge of other millennial disciplines that do consider introspection as something important. What is more, introspection if the main axis of their practice. Science breaks naïve evidence of theories: when it states something, it is simply because it does not know how to refute.

MGT: I think those paintings do precisely that: bring scientific processes to the field of symbolism and incite different readings. Going back to what we talked about before, I would say that it somehow emulates the processes in which some of the conceptual artists were interested: seeing a piece as a means to spread information.

PD: Totally! The same information presented in another way would provoke a different reading. Something similar happens with other two paintings that I have made. The first you see in the exhibition. They have data taken from a map designed by Frank Drake in 1972 to localize the Earth from outer space. I think it’s cool that the object that the human being has sent the farthest is a map of our location in the universe.

MGT: Are these coordinates? Or what are these data?

PD: Frank Drake located 14 pulsars and gave, with respect to them, the location of our sun and of the Earth. These paintings have the celestial and galactic coordinates of each pulsar and the binary period of ho each of them “pulse”.

MGT: Are you still in Avandaro?

PD: No. I’m on my way to Monterrey…

MGT: Is there an easy way for you to send your coordinates?

PD: Latitude 19.421456, Longitude -99.077939

MGT: I propose that your coordinates right now be the title of this conversation.

PD: I agree!

MGT: Done! Good luck with the installation!