El tiempo es la distancia más larga entre dos puntos.
Tennessee Williams, El zoo de cristal

Hace mucho tiempo, antes del Gran Reloj, el tiempo era medido por cambios en los cuerpos celestes (…). El tiempo también se medía por latidos cardíacos, por los ritmos de sueño, la duración de la soledad. Entonces, en un pequeño pueblo de Italia, se construyó el primer reloj mecánico. La gente estaba hechizada. Luego quedaron horrorizados. Aquí había una invención humana que cuantificaba el paso del tiempo, que daba reglas y compases al deseo, que medía exactamente los momentos de una vida. Era mágico, era insoportable, estaba fuera de la ley natural. Sin embargo, el reloj no podía ser ignorado. Tendría que ser idolatrado.
Alan Lightman, Los sueños de Einstein

A arte é irmã da ciencia
Gilberto Gil, Quanta

“Porque el tiempo, considera el tiempo”, juega Julio Cortázar en alguno de sus Pameos y Meopas. El tiempo es de esos juegos que nos dan tortícolis de tanto mirar hacia arriba imaginando la antigua muerte de esas estrellas que nos siguen observando; es el mareo del ojo del infinito; es la flecha por la que patinamos hacia delante. Pero es también experimentos de papel, de cerebro y de agujas, es la cara de la velocidad y es, por qué no, el alma de la obra de Nicolás Bacal.
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Experimento número 1. Cierre los ojos, respire hondo y estime mentalmente 30 segundos. No vale tratar de contar con algún truco mnemotécnico. Cuando termine, compruebe su tiempo subjetivo contra el de algún reloj fiable. Ahora repita la experiencia, pero antes corra a toda velocidad unos 100 metros. Con la lengua afuera y la respiración a borbotones, estime nuevamente esos 30 segundos. ¿Alguna diferencia notable?
Es que hay otros tiempos y están en éste: todos los tiempos todos de nuestro cerebro. Sin esa posibilidad de contar mentalmente segundos o minutos, olvídense de aprender, de contar un chiste, de cantar, de entender el mundo. Más aún: se trata de un tiempo bastante falible, y completamente diferente si uno está en la sala de espera del dentista, con la chica/chico que le gusta, saltando en bungee jumping o bajo el efecto de drogas, fiebres o alcoholes varios. El tiempo del lado de adentro, que le dicen, y que engaña como cualquier otro.
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Experimento número 2. Mírese frente al espejo y mueva los ojos, lentamente, de un lado a otro. Obviamente, se tarda un ratito en hacerlo, pero… ¿se percibe ese tiempo? ¿O más bien parece un cambio instantáneo, como si no hubiera pasado el tiempo entre esos dos instantes?
Aunque el tiempo puede ser, también, espacio. Es común medir la distancia en escalas temporales: vivo a 5 minutos del trabajo; caminen unos 20 minutos y se encontrarán con el lugar buscado; la vuelta al mundo en 80 días. La vida como una colección de segundos (unos 2.500 millones, segundo más, segundo menos). Dicen los Vedas que Vishnu, el dios protector del mundo, es un gran dormilón y le gusta reposar sobre Sesha, la serpiente de las mil cabezas, mientras su dulce esposa Laksmi lo acaricia y lo arrulla. Mientras Vishnu está despierto, guiña los ojos unas 1000 veces; cada vez que abre sus ojos aparece un universo que dura unos 12000 años divinos y que desaparece cuando los cierra nuevamente. Cosas de dioses, porque esos años divinos duran como 360 años humanos. En el medio, nosotros, nuestras obsesiones, los límites de nuestros sueños, los relojes de Nicolás.
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Experimento número 3. Tome una regla por el extremo inferior, entre el pulgar y el índice. Abra los dedos, déjela caer y, lo más rápido posible, cierre los dedos nuevamente. Anote la distancia recorrida por la regla. Estará midiendo el tiempo de reacción… en centímetros.
Sin embargo, uno de los tiempos más fascinantes es el que, cual ourobouros que se muerde la cola, se vuelve sobre sí mismo, se vuelve circular y periódico. Somos, también, ciclos dentro de ciclos, engranajes y rulemanes que giran e inventan días, mareas, estaciones. Andamos por la vida como expertos en planetas que giran sobre su eje, y –como el agua de mar– llevamos dentro esa revolución celeste. Somos, entonces, relojes con patas, que se juegan la vida, el estado de ánimo, las hormonas o la vigilia en estas caprichosas recurrencias llamadas ritmos, los ciclos biológicos.
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Experimento número 4. Intervenga un taladro de manera que gire a las revoluciones deseadas, por ejemplo, una por minuto o, incluso, una por hora o por día. Apoye el taladro sobre una pared. Espere. Vuelva a esperar.
¿Ritmo dijimos? ¿Eso que –dicen– es la base de la música? ¿Eso que está en el origen de la obra de Nicolás, la música del espacio y del tiempo? Sí, eso. Pero también la magia que convierte una melodía cualquiera en triste o alegre (hagan la prueba –y es sólo una melodía, por más que nuestro cerebro se empeñe en otorgarle un valor emocional). Sobre todo, la posibilidad de seguir una canción real o pensada con la cabeza (o simplemente con los dedos) y ser, en general, bastante precisos: eso es parte de lo que nos define como humanos.
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Experimento número 5. Imagine la canción Stayin’ alive, de los Bee Gees (y no diga que no la conoce, no se lo creeremos). Una vez imaginada y cantada mentalmente hasta el hartazgo, revise el baúl del desván y ponga el vinilo correspondiente. Sorpréndase con la extrema exactitud de nuestra reconstrucción mental.
Pero, además, ¿qué pasa cuando el mundo nos sorprende y se sincroniza con nosotros? Como Nicolás, podemos jugar a sincronizar nuestros actos con un segundero, o con el limpiaparabrisas, o con el tic-tic de la luz de giro. O interrumpir el mundo cada cinco minutos para hipnotizarnos con una luz estroboscópica al ritmo de nuestro corazón o, lo que es casi lo mismo, de un lejano púlsar conocido poéticamente como PSR B1718-19. Otra vez mirar para arriba, orientados por encima del dolor de cuello y estrujados por la deriva de nuestros pasos.
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Experimento número 6. Pegue imanes a unos CDs viejos que encuentre en su casa. Aquellos con fotos de la fiesta de egresados o con la música de Titanes en el Ring son especialmente adecuados. Arroje los CDs a una piscina de la especie Pelopincho sp. Déjelos flotar y déjese llevar por las brújulas cual oráculo de Delfos.
Jugar al tiempo es un juego al que todo filósofo que se precie debe subirse a lo largo de su filosófica carrera. Porque el Tiempo, en definitiva, es una de Las Grandes Preguntas Para Ponerse A Filosofar, y para muchos es La Más Grande de esas preguntas. Claro, cada maestrito con su tiempito, y habrá muchas más respuestas que preguntas en esta búsqueda: el concepto mismo del tiempo ha experimentado numerosos cambios históricos y religiosos; incluso se puede pensar en una geografía del tiempo, en la que cada cultura usa sus horas y días como más le place (como muestra basta un ahorita mexicano, más todavía un ahoritita). Ni que hablar de la medición del tiempo, desde la estaca con la que los Boy Scouts trazan relojes de sol hasta los ultraprecisos relojes atómicos, pasando por maravillas como el reloj de la catedral de Estrasburgo o de la plaza de Praga… Así como por las obsesiones de un tal Nicolás Bacal. Observando la obra de Nicolás uno se imagina a los señores filósofos sentados en la academia, o en un banco de plaza, seguidos a todos lados por decenas de discípulos, rascándose la cabeza hasta que de repente (Eureka) dicen alguna frase célebre que los hace pasar a la posteridad. Pero no: seguramente andaban tratando de ganarse el pan (o el gyros, o la focaccia) dando clases a niños ricos con tristeza, y “desburrando” a gobernantes demasiado ocupados en guerras y orgías. Lo que es seguro es que, como Nicolás, integraban el mundo sin detenerse a desglosar porciones de ciencias, de artes, de emociones o de razones. En definitiva, se trata de considerar al arte como una de las bellas ciencias.
Perros y gatos, Boca y River, hemisferio derecho y hemisferio izquierdo… arte y ciencia. Al menos así las aprendemos y construimos, como polos opuestos de la creatividad humana. Sin embargo, tienen más en común que lo que puede nuestra filosofía –son dos maneras complementarias de mirar, entender y fascinarse por el mundo. Es que más que un sustantivo la ciencia debiera ser un verbo que conjuga las acciones de observar, de experimentar, de hacer preguntas, de maravillarse, de querer conocer más y más –o sea, una parte indisoluble de la cultura. Sí, sí: de la cultura, tanto como la literatura, el teatro, el fútbol, las instalaciones artísticas o la belleza. En la ciencia y el arte encontraremos la misma transpiración, las mismas obsesiones e imaginaciones, las mismas miradas perdidas de quienes saben que pueden y deben cambiar el mundo.
De la unión entre la pólvora y el libro puede nacer la rosa más pura, dice González Tuñón. Y de la unión entre la ciencia y el arte nace Nicolás Bacal. El arte es, en el fondo, ciencia aplicada.

CH —Let’s talk about bricolage, the materials that you use and the end result of how you make the works. Your tools are more like those used for school than the ones used by a professional artist or found in an artist’s studio.
NB —Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I made a record in my room with lile, my first band, and I think that is somewhat connected to the idea of bricologe. Something about the possibility of my room.
I started playing piano when I was six and I had a lot of different teachers when I was a child. As a teenager I studied with Mono Fontana who taught me, among many other things, to listen. Actually, I always thought that I would be a musician; I even got a university degree in musical composition. Later, when I wanted to start making objects, I found that I didn’t master any specific visual discipline. But that didn’t concern me too much, and I didn’t set out to learn any particular technique. I chose to make the most of that deficit, to turn it into a style. For me, that is connected with shortening the distance between the object and the person who looks at it.
CH —The object reaches out to the viewer.
NB —That’s right. In a certain way, the objects become manuals for their own making. There is no mystery about how these objects are made; a viewer, whether handy or not, can recreate them. Some of them are extremely simple, others somewhat more clever, but none has any sort of hidden effect. There is a sort of absolute diegesis which, I think, shortens distances and hence gives the work a certain intimacy, an emotional quality that I find important.
CH —I can’t help but associate that with the word “vos”1 that often appears in your work and is, in my view, the key to pop music: the singer sings to something in particular, but at a certain moment and in a certain way he summons the listener to generate a connection that is very…
NB —Raw, right?
CH —Very raw and very much alive, very sincere, like an act of confidence, gaining confidence.
NB —I remember one of my first visual experiments. I wanted to put a speaker on a shower pipe so that you could hear the shower. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to stick them together, how to connect them. I didn’t know how to solder or anything like that, so I went to the hardware store and bought Poxilina putty. That’s how I started to connect with the visual and plastic nature of certain materials. A domestic hardware store with materials entirely accessible to the general public.
CH —Your work also has something of a school science project: making something scientific with safe materials that are apt for the general public, materials that are widely available and inexpensive.
NB —When I look through the book, I see that everywhere.
CH —Sure… you know what each thing is; they are all familiar objects.
NB —I have also tried using other supports like video, drawing and photography. Actually, how I came to photography is a special case.
CH —You’re talking about the series…
NB —La gravedad de mi órbita alrededor tuyo [The Gravity of My Orbit Around You] and another piece as well, the one with the lunar calendar. When I started taking an interest in astronomy, I found myself drawn to taking photos as a sort of tribute to the technology that has allowed us to see the universe beyond our eyes’ ability to focus.
In the photos in La gravedad de mi órbita alrededor tuyo, you can see the lamps that are generating the light bouncing in that white sphere, which is what gives rise to the effect. On the floor of the rooms are the tools that I used to make the installation and the pliers that hold the tape measures.
CH —The exploding sun in those photographs is an outburst in your work. For someone who doesn’t know how you make these images, it generates a certain sense of mystery. Then you see the flashes and you start to sense that there is some sort of white sphere or something off of which the glimmering light bounces, overexposing those areas of the image. There is some pursuit of effect here, but it is so much at the forefront, and in the context of such an everyday scene, that it also seems like a reflection on that pursuit of effect: the point at which something magical takes place and you don’t know how the artist did it or where he got the idea…
NB —I think that, of all the images I have made thus far, those are the ones that most doggedly pursue effect. It’s like with magic: when they tell you how the trick works, the magic no longer exists. It vanishes instantly. The aim of this work was basically for the sense of mystery to persist regardless of the explanation.
CH —And it does. Even without the mystery, the magic continues to work. I think that, in your work, the whole problem of effect is handled with great sensitivity. There is at least some small effect in all your work, actually, but with a little analysis its mechanism is revealed. It never leaves you with a sense of bafflement about its making and there is no attempt at virtuosity. The work, like the word “vos,” reaches out to you, as if to say “you too can do this, you are also part of this process, I am not trying to dazzle you with this work.” That, in my view, is very interesting and effective.
I also think there is something interesting about the pop song, the love song, the one that you can listen to forty times in a row and still like. In a way, Conceptualism has turned into a sort of pop song of the visual arts, a sub-genre that is much more legible than ever expected.
NB —They are like choruses, don’t you think?
CH —Yes. It brings to mind the Commercial Album by the Residents, where each of the tracks—none of which lasts longer than a minute—consists of the chorus and the bridge with no repetition. This allowed them to cram their own “top 40” into the 40 minutes of an LP. I find it very interesting the way you, in your work, radicalize Conceptualism’s evident ability to be a song.
NB —Something strange happened to me when I went from playing music to making art, actually when I started to spend more time talking to visual artists. I noticed, in talking to them, a sort of yearning for the experimental nature of music, for the slow tempos and how they make it possible to perceive the musical object. And I feel just the opposite: I am drawn to the immediateness of the visual arts, its potential to immerse you in very dense knowledge in half a second.
CH —I once heard you say that you try to make your works operate the same way live and in photographs. That is also bound to privileging the idea over the object. Art viewers can enjoy seeing an object whose beauty has nothing to do with the sense of sight. It could be said that your work is not very sight-oriented. I would dispute that, but it could be argued.
NB —I think that the bricolage strategy that I mentioned before has become fundamental and structural to the images I build, as if that style were part of the idea, or the idea put in practice.

CH —The beauty of your works lies, in my view, in the leap that you make viewers take. A leap from the ordinariness and familiarity of the objects they are looking at to the vast and spiritual nature of the process that you are describing or setting off before their eyes.
NB —I remember the text that you wrote for my show 31536000 órbitas por año (December 2010). At that time we were both reading popular science—specifically, Brian Greene’s book The Fabric of the Cosmos— and you wrote a lot about the experimental nature of my work, about how, though geared to a precise visual poetic end, they were experiments in the “scientific” sense. They made use of a scientific method that was altered for the sake of a visual outcome. I found that very interesting. My work does partake of experimental method, and the type of objects that I use puts that method on a familiar scale. Like seeing what happens to time when one is in a free fall, but from a subjective perspective and measuring time on an alarm clock, as opposed to a group of countries that is building an international station in outer space.
CH —That’s what I was thinking about when, in that text, I spoke of the role of intuition as the origin of research. One does experiments until discovering the object that was concealed in the idea. There is a certain “something”— magic, art, whatever—and one works to make the object produce that something. What I mean is that a spark has to fly off the assemblage of putty, pieces of wood and tapes. Your works evidence that process of experimentation.

* * *
CH —You have not made much music in the last four or five years, working almost exclusively on making objects. Your most recent exhibition, PSR B1718-19, included two new songs, though. In what way do you think your music changed after that break?
NB —I’m not sure it really changed much. There may be new ideas, sound ideas that are the product of visual thinking. I mostly talk about melisma, which is the main characteristic of the new songs.
CH —Melisma? What’s that?
NB —It’s when, in a long melody, one syllable of a word is stretched out. Classical music and madrigals use melisma a lot. It is typically used at the end of masses when there is a long melody during the letter a of the word…
CH —Amen.
NB —Or… (humming the beginning of Thomas Tallis’s “spem in aliu”). Flamenco is also highly melismatic.
CH —I see.
NB —In my most recent songs, the level of melisma is ridiculous, with two phrases of lyrics taking up five whole minutes of music. The words, then, are so stretched out that you can hardly understand them. I think that transformations like that probably come from visual thinking.
CH —Handling something like dough.
NB —That’s right, and within a song. At the same time, I think that the use of melisma as a resource acts like a strategy of shyness: hiding poetry in music.
CH —Because the lyrics become unintelligible.
NB —They are very hard to make out. The other problem was how to show music in an exhibition.
CH —The use of the strobe light.
NB —That’s right. I composed songs whose tempos were in synch with a light that flashed once every second (like the pulsar PSR B1718-192). So those songs ensue to the rhythm of the second, the rhythm of the representation of the passing of time.
CH —Are all the songs in the same meter?
NB —No. They have different rhythms that generate poly-rhythms with the same tempo; that is, they are in synch but they are not all in [= 60, which is the speed of the second hand, but in [= 90 and in 6/8 time. Those are all rhythmic combinations that fall on the second grid.
CH —I would sometimes say to myself when I listened to records, “They recorded that in ’78. Why don’t they do it again? It would definitely turn out much better.” Later, I realized that it almost never works out like that. In terms of drawing and painting, the finished work is rarely better than the sketch which, in its humble way, already holds everything that the finished work aspires to express. You manage to avoid that problem in your work. By staging an experiment that almost anyone could replicate and obtain the same result, you get around the problem of execution. For those of us who have this problem, the moment that “the thing” occurs to us is the best time to make it because that’s the only time we have direct contact with the idea.
NB —Conceptualism is, in the end, the elimination of execution. The same thing might be said of the record: it is the elimination of performance or, at least, it changes the idea of playing music. When I graduated from high school I tried to become a pianist. One of my teachers had me spend months just hitting the wooden keyboard cover, not the keys, to teach me about the way your hands fall. That’s when I understood that to be a pianist was, above all else, to be a gymnast.

* * *
CH —You had spoken to me of the loop in Stockhausen’s sense of the word.
NB —Stockhausen said that rather than the organization of sounds in time and space, music could be seen as the art of bending the perception of time. He proposed the idea that varied acoustic structures accelerate our perception of time, and static sound structures delay it. But what most interests me about his formulation is its understanding of repetition. Analyzing a sound object in music is like analyzing a liquid that, because of the workings of time, inevitably slides through your fingers. A sound occurs and vanishes instantly. So to explore it requires repetition.
CH —You have to be able to keep the immediate past very much alive in your mind, right?
NB —Right, but if you can’t, you repeat it. So repetition becomes a sort of freezer. I find that interesting in relation to entropy. I mean the arrow of time. There is something about that that I automatically associate with infatuation and the sort of suspension of time that we experience when we fall in love. When we enter into that state, time stops: you don’t know how much time has gone by, you don’t eat, you don’t sleep. I am particularly interested in the idea of repetition as a tool to suspend time in this romantic sense. Like in Groundhog Day3.
CH —Thinking about the relationship between entropy and love, falling in love makes you feel like an energy source that came into being out of nowhere were suddenly turned on by nothing more than the physical closeness of two people.
NB —Relationships also tend toward entropy (laughter).
CH —Like a sun that as soon as it lights up starts to head towards its end as black hole.
I recently saw a Japanese cartoon, really just the first episode. The premise was that the main characters would struggle to stave off death due to a drop in the temperature of the universe. Humanity had by its very nature the ability to put off entropy, or even bring it to a halt. I think that that is the advantage of engaging in some sort of spiritual practice: the belief that there is something one can do to annihilate the inevitability of death in the broadest sense.
NB —The parallel between inevitable death and entropy is on target. Those two ideas are clearly bound, even though we sometimes fail to see the connection.
CH —We don’t always make the connection because entropy is a very new concept in terms of the history of the human mind.
NB —Time only moves forward because things tend to disorder.

CH —And, to speak in terms of art as we ought to, what do you consider your sphere of expertise? I would say it is a hybrid sphere. You were trained in music, but you quickly started to conceive of music in relation to space and objects. That led to working with time.
NB —I went from working with time through sound to working with time through objects. One of the things that happened in that passage was that I started to study the uses of distance.
CH —Are you talking about the works with the tape measures?
NB —Yes, for example. And that meant a return to science, to how science uses hybrid units of time and distance to measure things.
CH —Like the light year, but once again we are using the terminology of science.
NB —In my view, art and science use the same mechanism to produce knowledge. Scientists write papers aimed at their own community, they test out the ideas in those papers, they assess them, they weed them out or use them to build new theories. That’s a whole inward-looking and closed mechanism. Once in a while, some component of that mechanism, some piece of knowledge breaks through to humanity at large, and so we get the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, things that turn the world upside down. But all of those discoveries are the fruit of a very long and complex discussion. And, in my view, the way art behaves is somewhat similar. Our shows, and books like this one, have a limited reach. But I trust that I form part of a self-regulating mechanism of exercises in thought. Your show might suddenly cause me to make a new work, or I see a show that makes it clear to me that a certain formal resource does not work. The mechanism for growth is, then, akin. And every so often some part of all that breaks loose, something that might be of value for the world at large.

CH —Shall we listen to the songs? 4
NB —Sure.

(A song heard in the background intermingles with CH’s voice.)
CH —Some say that there should not be any music at art exhibitions. Art is dubious of any work that appeals to emotion, as if that zone were off limits, repressed. But for that very reason the emotional has become a part of our mind that should be released, a terrain where too much desire has built up. I think that, due to your musical training, you didn’t fully realize how bold it was to use music in an art show. But it worked perfectly with the strobe light: the visual was turned off and the auditory turned on. It showed great awareness of these issues.
NB —That banned emotionality makes me think about a critical issue: how to address love as theme. I may not be that well informed, but it seems to me that in contemporary art the theme of love has been relegated.
CH —Relationships are fair game, talking about the agony of love—the way Sophie Calle, for instance, does—is okay.
NB —Right. But in works by Sophie Calle or Félix González-Torres, say, love is addressed because the artist is self-referential. I am talking about love as theme. I think of music, literature or film where, in the end, all the stories are love stories. The relationship between the biography of the authors and their work matters very little.
CH —In the visual arts, it seems you have to demonstrate that you are not talking about love but the possibility of love or a facet of love. In a certain way, all of those artists are saying, “I’m talking about love, but this is not all love is. It’s a love that I can talk about.”

NB —The thing is, in my work I use the word “vos,” but that “vos” is not necessarily the person being addressed.
CH —Your use of “vos” is inflammatory. It is a constant provocation, a discovery. I think that there are still things for you to say and do with “vos.” To top it off, it has significant local connotations. I like the way it is irritating.
NB —What draws me to the word “vos” is its relationship to local pop music, to songs. It’s a strategy for speaking of love as theme, and of bringing it to bear and confronting you with it so that, among other things, the work becomes a gift.
CH —So you are saying that the word “vos” is what summons you and allows you to talk about a theme?
NB —I think of the Beatles’ songs that say “she” and nothing else. It no longer matters who “she” is. Love becomes impersonal and, thus, theme.
CH —I am very intrigued about where “vos” will go in your work in the future. The friction between the use of that word and your scientific and experimental side is also interesting. Love as experiment. There are many ellipsis that intrigue me, paths to follow, terrains to explore, and they all have an inner coherence that allows them to coexist even though they are yet to be fully worked out. Indeed, they may never be, but it’s very intriguing that all of these things are in the same universe.

NB —To unpack a little what you said: is what is inflammatory about the use of “vos” the fact that it is tacky? Why is “vos” inflammatory?
CH —Let’s try to define tackiness on the spot, let’s undertake that exercise. Does the tackiness set off by the word “vos” lie in assuming something good ingenuously? Is it connected to ingenuity?
NB —It has to do with adolescence, with not seeing the whole picture, with that type of ingenuity. The other definition of the tacky would be the overly obvious, the cliché. Here (referring to an online dictionary) it says that tackiness has to do with elegance: “the word tacky is used to describe disdainfully something that attempts to be elegant.”
CH —Hmmmm…
NB —“Tacky” may not be the word that we are looking for.
CH —Maybe not, but I agree that the pretension of elegance is connected to the tacky. A flower in a coat pocket that attempts to be elegant but the color is off or the blossom too big.
NB —When I said “tacky” what I meant was something else, maybe I was thinking about the quality of being saccharine or cloying. Something like talking about love and drawing hearts. I want you to fall in love with me so I write “vos” 86,400 times.
CH —There is something syrupy about your work. The second hand of the clock pointing to the word “vos” written at every minute is like saying “I think of you every minute of the day.”
NB —Tackiness as strategy.

CH —There is the risk that it seem like a formula for success or a way to make people love you or to get what you want, to seduce the viewer. I think it is connected to the evident seductiveness of Conceptualism. The somewhat ill-spirit idea that Conceptualism makes art collectors feel smart. It’s not that far off. The pleasure produced by Conceptualism is not, in a way, bound to vision but to the spark you feel when you suddenly get it. The gratifying wink of mutual understanding between the artist and the viewer. Does that happen less with painting? I mean, do you feel that wink when standing before a painting by Velázquez?
NB —The thing is, one of the works culminates with its reading and the other doesn’t. I have the feeling that the Velázquez painting is going to be the Velázquez painting come what may. Some conceptual works, on the other hand, operate on the basis of very immediate intellectual mechanisms and then that’s it. I see that in my work. I think it is very generational. The choice of materials, those television sets and VHS recorders, all those objects are deeply rooted in the sensibility of a specific generation.
CH —A sort of nostalgia.
NB —Pre-nostalgia, for me. A pre-occupation in the sense of a concern that comes before, a nostalgia that arrives too soon. VHS recorders are still used, albeit not to watch movies, but to store security archives. It’s a living technology in a state of decline. But it’s connected to the practice of detachment and the speed with which everything moves forward. I feel that using this material binds me to a whole generation across the world. And I know that—like the use of “vos”—it is a way that I have of approaching someone—a ton of people, actually—and saying something to them as if I were saying it to just one person. But I can also see the generational limit to that. The other day I showed my work to twenty-five fifteen-year-olds who knew what a VHS was, but I bet that if I were to do that in ten years they won’t know what it is. They will see it as a piece of plastic with a certain sheen, and that might mean that something will have stopped working.
CH —I think that that generational aspect is part and parcel of contemporary art. In my view, objects usually take on new and often unexpected meanings over time, and the same thing happens with good works of art. The “vos” acts like the generational references.
NB —It’s a question of shortening distances. I’m glad you mentioned Velázquez because my work goes against the smallness you might feel before one of his paintings. It’s just the opposite. I am well aware that that is a very Indie idea: the movie made with two bucks, the home-recorded album. It’s definitely from a certain time, but I still think it’s important. Like video games and the pixel are for you.
CH —That’s why I said that the question of generation is inevitable. Actually, I think it’s what’s really vital in the works: evidencing an era, a generation.

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1 Translator’s note: In the Rio de la Plata region, the word vos, as opposed to tu, is used for the second person singular in the informal voice.
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2 A pulsar is a small—just a few kilometers in diameter—and extremely dense star. Pulsars let off a beam of energy that goes through our position (Earth) every X seconds. They are like lighthouses in space. The light they give off is not the same as the light of live stars. Pulsars are remains of dead stars that continue to revolve. The rotation period of PSR B1718-19 is 1.0040 seconds.
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3 Groundhog Day (1993) was written by Danny Rubin and directed by Harold Ramis; it stars Bill Murray and Andie Macdowell.
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4 http://nicolasbacal.bandcamp.com/

Time doesn’t wait for anybody
Diego Golombek

Time is the longest distance between two places.
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies. (…) Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness. Then, in a small town in Italy, the first mechanical clock was built. People were spellbound. Late they were horrified. Here was a human invention that quantified the passage of time, that laid ruler and compass to the span of desire, that measured out exactly the moments of a life. It was magical, it was unbearable, it was outside natural law. Yet the clock could not be ignored. It would have to be worshipped.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

A arte é irmã da ciencia
Gilberto Gil, Quanta

“Because time considers time,” jests Julio Cortázar in one of his Pameos y Meopas. Time is one of those games that gives us a stiff neck from looking up so much as we imagine the long past death of stars that keep watching us. It is the dizziness of the eye of infinity, the arrow on which we slide forward. But time is also experiments with paper, the brain and needles, it is the face of speed and—why not?—the soul of Nicolás Bacal’s art.
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Experiment number 1. Close your eyes, breathe deep and mentally estimate 30 seconds. It’s against the rules to use a mnemonic trick to try to count. Afterwards, compare your subjective time to the time of a reliable clock. Do it again, but this time after running 100 meters at top speed. With your tongue hanging out and panting, estimate those 30 seconds once again. Any significant difference?
You see, there are other times and they are in this time: all the many times of our brain. If you can’t count seconds and minutes mentally, forget about learning, telling a joke, singing, understanding the world. In fact, this sort of time is quite fallible; it is completely different if you are in your dentist’s waiting room, with the boy or girl that you like, bungee jumping, high on drugs or alcohol, or have a fever. The time inside, so to speak, deceives as much as any other.
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Experiment number 2. Look at yourself in the mirror and move your eyes slowly from side to side. Of course, this takes a little while. Can you perceive that bit of time? Or does it seem more like an instant change, as if no time at all had passed between those two instants?
But time can also be space. It’s common to measure distance in time: “I live five minutes from my job”; “Walk about twenty minutes and you will get there”; “Around the world in eighty days.” Life as a collection of seconds (some two and a half billion, more or less). The Vedas say that Vishnu, the god who protects the world, is a sleepyhead who likes to rest on Sesha, the thousand-headed serpent, while his sweet wife Laksmi caresses and lulls him to sleep. When Vishnu is awake, though, he winks his eyes a thousand times; each time he opens them, a universe that lasts some 12,000 divine years appears only to disappear when he closes them again. A question for the gods, since those divine years are around 360 human years. What lies in between them is us, our obsessions, the limits of our dreams, Nicolás’s clocks.
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Experiment number 3. Hold one end of a ruler between your thumb and your index finger. Release it, let it fall and clasp your fingers together again as fast as possible. Note how far the ruler has fallen. What you are measuring is your response time… in centimeters.
One of the most fascinating times is time that, like the ourobouros eating its own tail, circles back on itself and becomes periodic. We are also circles within circles, gears and bearings that rotate and invent days, tides, seasons. We go through life like experts in planets that turn on their axis and, like seawater, we carry their rotation within us. We are, then, clocks on legs whose life, mood, hormones and wakefulness are at stake in those arbitrary recurrences called rhythms, biological cycles.
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Experiment number 4. Set a drill bit’s rotation speed to the pace you want, for instance, one rotation per minute or even one per hour or per day. Place the drill against a wall. Wait. Wait some more.
Did we say rhythm? That which forms the basis of music, or so they say? That which lies at the origin of Nicolás’s art, the music of space and of time? Yes, that. But at its origin also lies the magic that makes a melody sad or happy (Try it. It is just a melody, no matter how our brain strives to give it an emotional charge). Mostly, the ability to fairly accurately follow a song, whether real or thought up in our heads (or on our fingers): that is part of what makes us human.
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Experiment number 5. Imagine the song Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees (don’t say you don’t know it, we won’t believe you). Once you have sung it to yourself ad nauseam, go through the trunk up in the attic and put on the album with the song. You will be surprised by the accuracy of your mental reconstruction.
But what happens when the world surprises us and it moves to our pace? Like Nicolás, we can play at aligning our acts to the seconds’ hand, or the windshield wipers, or the clicking of the turn signal. Or stop the world every five minutes to hypnotize ourselves with a strobe light that flashes to the beat of our heart or of a distant pulsar poetically known as PSR B1718-19, which amounts to almost the same thing. Look up again, regardless of the pain in the neck and the tight muscle from so many wandering footsteps.
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Experiment number 6. Stick magnets to some old CDs you have lying around the house; ones with photos of your high school graduation party or the music from the professional wrestling show Titanes en el Ring are particularly good for this. Toss the CDs in a kiddy pool. Let them float and let yourself be taken away by the bubbles like the oracle at Delphos.
Toying with time is something that any self-respecting philosopher should engage in occasionally. Because Time is, after all, one of the Great Questions to Philosophize About, indeed for many The Greatest of those questions. Of course, there is more than one way to count time and there must be many more answers than questions. The very concept of time has undergone numerous changes at the hand of history and religion; one could even imagine a geography of time, where each culture uses its hours and days as it pleases (take, for example, the Mexican ahorita, or even the ahoritita). Or consider the measure of time, from the stakes that the Boy Scouts use to draw sundials to extremely precise atomic clocks, by way of wonders like the clock on the Strasbourg Cathedral or the one in the Old Town Square in Prague… and the obsessions of a certain Nicolás Bacal. In looking at Nicolás’s work, one imagines old philosophers seated at the academy or on a park bench, along with dozens of disciples who follow them everywhere, scratching their heads until suddenly (“Eureka”) they say some celebrated phrase for which they live on in history. But it’s not like that at all. They were probably running around trying to earn their daily bread (or gyro or focaccia) by gloomily giving classes to rich kids, and “enlightening” rulers busy with wars and orgies. In any case, they, like Nicolás, most certainly took part in the world without taking time to separate science from the arts, emotion from reason. It is, in the end, a question of considering art one of the fine sciences.
Dogs and cats, Boca and River,1 right and left hemispheres… art and science. At least that’s how we learn and construct them, as opposite poles of human creativity. Yet, they have more in common than philosophy admits: they are two complementary ways of looking at, understanding and being fascinated by the world. Rather than a noun, science should be a verb that combines the acts of observing, experimenting, asking questions, being astonished, and wanting to know more and more—that is, an essential part of culture. That’s right, of culture, like literature, theater, soccer, art installations and beauty. In art and science we find the same perspiration, the same obsessions and imaginations, the same lost gazes of those who know they can and must change the world.
González Tuñón says that from the union of gunpowder and the book can come the purest rose. And from the union of science and art comes Nicolás Bacal. Art is, in the end, science applied.

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1 Translator’s note: This is a reference to the two main rival soccer teams in Argentina.