From a distance, the dark shape at MASS MoCA’s front door looks like a large aquarium, awash with turbulent, oil-black waves. But as we approach the sculpture, the splashing free- form liquid snaps into a tightly structured, almost crystallized accumulation of hundreds of thousands of small black spheres, meticulously stacked and interlocking as if according to some hidden geometric code. The action is suspended freeze frame, and we soon see there is no glass container.
Across his practice, which is equal parts architectural design, visual research and philosophy, Federico Díaz often examines incongruous moments of change in time, motion, and velocity. His tools vary, but include sophisticated software for modeling particle physics, 3D stereographic polymerization lithography (which enables the “printing” of 3D objects, directly from streams of data), and state-of-the-art computer-controlled manufacturing equipment (but also, and tellingly, brush and ink, the tradition of which he studies seriously). Díaz does not work alone. While many artists rely on experts to help fabricate complicated work, Díaz sees himself as part of a research collaborative that includes engineers, computer programmers, genetic researchers, multimedia graphic artists, and others who visualize problems and projects posed by the artist. For example, one such challenge posed by Díaz in the early 1990s was “to create a synthetic organic shape, which at first sight resembles a living organism, but which is in fact created on the basis of an algorithm. My aim was to create an object that emerges directly from thought and feeling (and that) represents the merging of molecules but without the touch of any human hand.”
Creating new forms that arise directly from thought itself – in essence, short-circuiting the representational techniques (and constraints) inherent in painting – has been a central interest to Díaz since his youth. For Díaz, the need to create an immediate connection between a form’s conception and its realization is driven in part by a utopian desire to collapse time itself, to eliminate any gap between the formation of an image in the brain and its representation. “A command is given via an electrochemical reaction that governs the movement of the hand,” he once commented. “However, the movement is belated, far behind the idea received by the brain. The time segment, which the neuron must pass through in order to encompass the still unclassified information, moves within me from a point in the present (hand) into the past (brain).”
In this and other formulations, Díaz expresses an idea that art realized by handcraft (for example, oil paint on canvas, via brushwork) is doomed to be out of sync, and that to make an artwork that is connected with its moment of conception, the entire neuro-physical interaction between brain and hand must be dramatically foreshortened. The radicality of this notion is at times mystical, almost Zen-like – “I am interested in dematerialization leading to extinction, the art of becoming nothing at the point of the present” – and so it is not surprising that when Díaz sketches(→p.22–23), he uses brush and ink techniques associated with East Asia. To some extent, the quality of ink drawings are judged by the extent to which there appears to be no lag between conception and realization; the instantaneous fluid mark of the brush on paper carries within it the total collapse of thought, image, and memory into muscle, hand, and flowing ink.(→p.35) In the case of Geometric Death Frequency – 141, the artist began his process of collapsing time and space with a simple digital photograph of the museum’s entry courtyard, the exact location now occupied by the sculpture. But then he subjected the digital files that comprised the photograph to data analysis, encoding the data with a series of formulas that, once rendered in 3D by state-of-the-art computer-controlled manufacturing techniques, would finally become the sculptural form we see … but with no human touch involved, the translation from original image to final form taking place literally at the speed that electrons move through digital circuitry. Digital cameras focus light energy onto a photosensitive plate, which measures the intensity and wavelength properties of the individual light photons striking it, recording those readings into data files. Each discrete picture element, or “pixel,” is described by a distinct packet of digital data. When making a conventional 2D photograph, each of these packets of data determines the exact location, layer, and tone of a dot of ink on the page: thus an image moves through the channels of digital photography from photons of reflected light passing through the camera body, to information-rich pixels written to digital files, to dots of color precisely printed on a page.
Díaz draws an analogue between this process of transcribing photographic data and human perception, and indeed, between life and death itself. “As light hits the lens in our eyes, a picture is created of our 3-dimensional world,” he said in an interview.He continued, “A camera lens works much like the lens of our eyes. Passing through the lens, light then hits the curved surface of the eye behind the lens. The camera body works in a similar way as our brain. Those impulses of energy excite neuro-optic nerves that are part of our brain. When you look at a photograph, you are seeing information – light – as it flowed at a specific state and time. A fixed recording of light photons at a fixed point in time thus replaces the actual space in front of the lens. In this way time and light are stopped. This stoppage represents a kind of death.”(→p.12)
But in Geometric Death Frequency – 141, Díaz intervenes in this chain of connections that creates, stores, and recycles images. For this work, he treats each photographic pixel as if it were an actual physical object in space, granting the photograph a 3D, topographic presence. Then he asks, what if these pixels- turned-spheres, whose points of origin were light photons, were treated as if they were molecules of a liquid?
“Re-originating” the light-based pixels as individual molecules of viscous liquid, Díaz proceeds to rearticulate them, literally shaking them up.(→p.131) He does so in a particular way, generating his shaking force by means of a sophisticated computer modeling program that simulates the complex physical action of fluids in motion. To that simulation model Díaz adds other rules of behavior for the individual pixels-turned-molecular spheres: for example, pixel-spheres which represent lighter color wavelengths within the original photographic image were coded to rise higher when subjected to simulated energy, while darker colors were encoded to remain lower. Having encoded his algorithm (which included the definition of the confining virtual glass wall of the aquarium box) into the simulation model, Díaz then ran the computer simulation, frame by frame. Each frame is the next instant of time, the individual pixel-spheres reacting to the simulated shaking forces placed upon them by the fluid dynamics model, and all subject to the rules and constraints of the artist’s code. Pixels-turned-spheres collide, carom, coalesce, form droplets, well up against the virtual walls, and crash, frame by frame. Díaz observes the virtual waveform animation unfold on his computer monitor, millisecond by millisecond, frame by frame. The original photograph is suddenly three-dimensional, and almost immediately illegible. In this case, Díaz stopped the animation at frame 141, selecting the moment that the image stops, or “dies.” Frame 141 is then constructed by a computer- controlled robot which, sphere by sphere, reconstructs the results of Díaz’s simulation. Four hundred and twenty thousand black spheres of ABS plastic later, each glued one to the next, the sculpture is complete.
If the stoppage of time is, in Díaz’s formulation (and in the naming of this work), a kind of death signal, Díaz also seems to suggest that the instantaneous information flow which propels the sculpture forward, and which links it back to its source – the sharing of time-liberated data in all its totality – is something like the essence of art itself.
As an artist, Díaz is a shape-shifter, though his works are always deeply rooted in physical reality. There is something alchemical or magical about the series of transformations that gave rise to GDF141: the bricks, the clocktower, the window mullions, the glare of windowpanes that, taken together, form our entrance courtyard are reduced to streams of digital data, the photons of reflected light becoming small black spheres meticulously cut, stacked, and glued; the courtyard becomes sculpture but also still contains it … and all the while Federico remains behind the curtain. If data manipulation sounds dry, this work shows that data too can have metaphoric sweep, fluctuating between stasis and movement, permanence and change, fullness and emptiness.