Santiago Díaz Escamilla

Disección
Dissection

2017

Single - channel video (color, silent)

In a vector graphics editor, I worked with the image of a mountain that Athanasius Kircher included in a seventeenth-century book, breaking it down in different ways (see Criterios de selección [Selection Criteria], 2017). Before I began recording the screen, I took one of the resulting drawings and gathered all its pieces at a single point. One on top of another and painted the same color, they formed a single pile in which none of them could be made out anymore.

I hid the program’s tools, except for a small panel that I left on the right, while the pile remained on the white background of the interface. Each time I let go of a piece, its shape was reproduced in a box on that panel, where it stayed as I dragged the next one.

I began recording, and how to separate the pieces was decided as I went, without my knowing how long it would take. I only had to hover the cursor over the pile for a piece to be outlined in blue. I would move that outline to a clear spot and, when I let go, the piece would be there. The pile barely changed, and the rhythm of the operation was that of the hand, my hand, quick and steady, while it grew increasingly tired.

And so, piece by piece, the pile dwindled. The video runs thirty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, a little longer than it took to separate all the pieces. When the last one came out, I zoomed out. All of them were in view, spread across the white background at a distance from one another, and the box on the panel, empty.

See also: Criterios de selección and Planos