For the High Line, Vega Macotela creates “One second”, a giant lens that encapsulates a second of silence from the south of the border. Working with a group of hackers, Vega Macotela embeds an mp3 file from an audio recording of one second of silence taken from a video done by a migrant from the top of the train "La Bestia" into the physical structure of a lens, thus distorting the image seen through it.
“In digital steganography, small amounts of data are usually encoded into larger digital files since the data to be hidden has to be smaller than the host. However, audio files like .wav or .mp3 use a significant amount of storage space, so the length of the audio I could encode in a 3d object had to be short. I believed this limitation could be poetic. We can imagine one minute of silence, but how about imagining one second of silence?
There is no "silence". There are silences, and not all are equal. It took me a few days to seek and find a second of silence that could conceptually fit the sculpture for the Highline. I found it in a video taken by a migrant going from the South border of Mexico to the North border, where Tijuana collides with California. He was traveling on the top of a train named "La Bestia", that migrants from Central America use to go all the way through Mexico to the United States. I downloaded the video, transformed it into a .mp3 file, extracted one second of silence from it, stored it as a .mp3 file again, and then encoded it into the 3D model of a lens, breaking its geometry.
The gesture was slightly similar to the one Duchamp did in "Air de Paris" (1919). However, instead of encapsulating air, I encapsulated one second of silence from the rails of the south to be taken to the rails of the Highline in the United States.”
“In digital steganography, small amounts of data are usually encoded into larger digital files since the data to be hidden has to be smaller than the host. However, audio files like .wav or .mp3 use a significant amount of storage space, so the length of the audio I could encode in a 3d object had to be short. I believed this limitation could be poetic. We can imagine one minute of silence, but how about imagining one second of silence?
There is no "silence". There are silences, and not all are equal. It took me a few days to seek and find a second of silence that could conceptually fit the sculpture for the Highline. I found it in a video taken by a migrant going from the South border of Mexico to the North border, where Tijuana collides with California. He was traveling on the top of a train named "La Bestia", that migrants from Central America use to go all the way through Mexico to the United States. I downloaded the video, transformed it into a .mp3 file, extracted one second of silence from it, stored it as a .mp3 file again, and then encoded it into the 3D model of a lens, breaking its geometry.
The gesture was slightly similar to the one Duchamp did in "Air de Paris" (1919). However, instead of encapsulating air, I encapsulated one second of silence from the rails of the south to be taken to the rails of the Highline in the United States.”