Filling Absence
Diego Rabasa

Did time create mankind or did mankind create time? That is a question that has made great minds, such as Henri Bergson, declare that this matter is too complex for science to resolve it.

Beyond the necessity, or the lack of, a consciousness that estimates and measures it, we still have the fine mess of time that is evoked in very different dimensions. Starting from the fundamental front of the gods Aion–eternal time–and Chronos–devourer of everything, and then delving into Borges and his isotropic time in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, the same author who presents us with a cyclic and eternal time in ‘El tiempo circular’ and who also rejected time in ‘A New Refutation of Time.’ And there is Saint Augustine, with time being an internal phenomenon; Kant with it being the phenomenological model that allows that deceitful and almost unstoppable duality–cause & effect–to develop, and Leibniz with time being an instrument that only exists relative to things (its changes and transformations).

Two of the biggest scientists of the 20th century also rose to the challenge: John Archibald Wheeler and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Ilya Prigogine. The first coined the idea of the ‘observer participancy description’ of the universe, which basically proposes that without a consciousness–specifically that of human beings–analyzing it, time would not have an objective. It seems that this idea of time, as an entity that occurs inside the mind, was behind Eliot’s verses in the first of the Four Quartets, when he says

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Prigogine’s take goes way back to Aristotle, who in Physics claimed that time is ‘the number of change with respect to before and after.’ How to indicate what is before and what is after? That was the question that made everyone rack their brains for centuries, until it was proven that the universe is moving and that it tends towards chaos (messing with the state of things), it changes its state, is moving, advancing–physics’ irreversible phenomena. Heraclitus walked this path, so did Wislawa Szymborska in her poem included in Senza Replica, an installation by Pablo Dávila:

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Novelist William Gaddis–a strong contender for the crown of American literature of the latter half of the 20th century–points to a moment during the transition from the 19th century into the 20th in which the modern world began to demonstrate that ‘society will not perish for confronting a stronger one, but by its own hands’ (Guillermo Núñez Jauregui, dixit): the invention of the player piano. By the end of the 19th century, several mechanical and pneumatic inventions lead to the machine assembled by the American inventor Edwin S. Votey. The device was able to reproduce music through a sophisticated grid and a set of pulleys, valves, and perforated rolls. The instrument quickly became popular and ‘selling player pianos to Americans in 1912 was not a difficult task. There was a place for everyone in this brave new world, where the player offered an answer to some of America’s most persistent wants: the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none’ (William Gaddis, ‘Stop Player. Joke No. 4’). Gaddis himself warned us in his novel Agape Agape about the dangers of turning comfort and entertainment into the epigones of technological developments: ‘back on the pantomimics and clones and mechanization of everything in sight, entertainment [leisure they call it] and the binary system and all-or-none computer where its technology came from in the first place.’

Senza Replica is in the vortex of these two deep inquisitions. Dávila’s installation activates a musical clock through an electronic system that sets in motion the keys from a piano to infinity through a sequence that develops every possible chords in the 88-key instrument to a rhythm of one chord per second. While this cyborgized piano contains all of the possibilities of the instrument, the absence of repetition brings back what the pianola ripped from art: To demonstrate the need to prioritize randomly, to filter the fall of it all, in order to achieve harmony, exploration, sense, and emotion.

Furthermore, while the changes in state from one chord to the other suggest that–as Prigogine underpins– the universe is advancing and Cronos devours us all, there are several times happening simultaneously and traversing the symptomatic traces of the echo of our steps through the world in the mind of the audience. Watching the piano in motion without human assistance lands the sense of absence, like when Dorothy Parker said ‘Seeing that the telephone was not ringing, I immediately knew it was you.’ Then if it does not need a pianist, it does not need a spectator. And absence is followed by recollection, recollection evokes absence and from absence comes an impulse to create.

Then, the piece becomes an invisible canvas that is splattered–as a Pollock would–with the projections and lamentations, with the forgotten memories and longings, with the fantasies and regrets of the spectator filling the room with their unique sense of absence, while time advances and leaves everything irremediable and comfortably behind.