Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez & Iskra Velitchkova

ABOUT

PAL is about connections, their origins, roots, the consequences of how we deal with them and their inescapable imperfections.

We all need love. To be loved but also to love; it’s what builds a home and sets the stage for our own tolerance with what’s to come. However, love comes at a high price. It inhabits imperfection, implies danger and requires vulnerability. That makes love very much similar to life itself. If not the same. It requires surrendering our beliefs of the ideal and embracing the real, with all that this brings along. Love is maturation, as life is.

If there is one big thing in our time, it will probably be that constant challenge of ourselves. Our identities as humans, our own freedom, and our potential replacement by the machines. We particularly believe there won’t be such a replacement. And it’s for one simple reason: what machines are here to offer is a grade of perfection which may look appealing, but if that means that love will be taken from us, with its imperfections, we are not going to agree. Machines have many different reasons to stay with us. They are here to process, understand and guide us, but always with only one clear mission: bring us tools to get to know each other better; to get to know ourselves better.

PAL is a reflection about those potentially missing imperfections. That utopian dystopia when love becomes perfect and joy is not anymore an option since suffering has been removed. It is a battle cry to take back our frictions, as the only tool we have in the end to value what a relationship must bring. It’s about the pursuit of truth.

PERFORMANCE

PAL is a circle in the middle, and two forces converging into it. Different intensities and different approaches, which combined fight to get into the center. It begins from perfection. From the idealization of the journey, the pureness and freshness of the preliminary intentions. Basic and clean shapes. Each of us has started up our own way to reach the circle based on our own entity and character, and by including randomness and chance to the system, the journey evolves along each iteration. The result is a collection of possible and impossible ways; all of them neat, clean, sheer. Unreal.

PAL creates, as a generative system, an infinite set of pristine outputs, an assortment of thoughts and situations that live in the ideal setting of our mind. From these we take n curated outputs, natively digital, which are handed back to the physical work by putting them into a VHS tape. That tape is displayed on an analogue TV and the imperfection comes into play both by the analogue medium and by the use of a magnet.

In the course of the exhibition at — the tape will be displayed in loop during ___ days and the magnet will be bit by bit undermining the quality of the video. At the end of the performance, the work will potentially have been appropriately infiltrated by reality and its deformations and unexpected breaches and tears.

The last step will be to put the work back into its initial digital space. Because, same as what machines do, love does. That wish and hope for perfection expands ourselves in the initial point. And that’s beautiful, and that’s powerful. However, it’s our choice to deal with what’s to come, or keep seeking for perfection – whatever that means.

During the exhibition there will be a digital display showing an endless live succession of outputs from the generative system. These outputs, as they are not transferred to the VHS tape, are gone forever in the moment the system creates a new one. Much like our ideals, which, when untested with reality, won’t take any life of their own and will become ghosts in our minds.