"The Aleph?" I repeated. Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending" ... "I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass" ... "Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive..."

-- (from The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges)

In late 2009, through the Fountainhead Residency Program in South Florida, I acquired a plot of remote undeveloped land deep in the Florida wilderness. Over the following months, I installed a sculpture made specifically for that land. The only visual documentation of that object exists as a video that is similarly placed at an undisclosed location on the internet. Both the real object and its virtual counterpart visible only by chance encounter.

Gean Moreno: Let's start with a description of the project.

John Espinosa: Remote Viewing is a sculptural object made of undisclosed materials and dimensions that I primarily made here in my studio in LA and then completed and installed it at an undisclosed remote location in the Florida wilderness.

GM: Disclosure, then, seems its theme.

JE: Disclosure was not necessarily the impetus for the project but it is a layer present in the work. But primarily, the lack of available descriptive information was a means to maximize the potential visualizations of the object.

GM: But I think that disclosure is more than a layer; it's fundamental, constitutive. It is by carefully staging the operations of disclosure, by controlling the lack of information, that you "maximize potential visualizations of the object." Not disclosing materials, forms and location are careful exercises in controlling disclosure, in testing what the deliberate withdrawal of data can produce.

JE: It’s important for me that the project be as porous as possible, and anointing disclosure as the work’s central theme concretizes it. You are absolutely correct that the managed dispersal of data was an essential methodology and is what holds the project together. But it is not the whole, only a dominant characteristic that functions like a hard reflective outer shell that is difficult to penetrate. Which is why I wanted to de-emphasize it (even if for just a moment) to allow for the less spectacular, but no less important, attributes to seep into the conversation.

GM: Which attributes?

JE: The idea of a visually anarchic condition in which an object could exist with infinite potential visualizations; the general geographic location for the object and so forth.

But let's go with your instinct and explore disclosure. The words you chose frame the project in the context of manipulation and power dynamics. To me fundamental to creating is the configuring of data; whether it be tangible data (matter) or intangible information. It can be by accrual or negation or as in this project, both.

GM: I find the project to be very much about "manipulation" and "power dynamics," however I think you are using the terms in a negative sense. I'm not. I considered it a project that employs certain historically specific conditions (immaterial production, for instance) and attempts to harness certain flows (rumor, for instance). It exploits the current impetus for bottom-up, accumulative narrative building not only through a continuous introduction and configuration of data, but through a welcoming of emergent qualities that may appear along the way. In other words, what you manipulate is a series of conditions and in the process generate a space of narrative production, which remains active precisely because it is structured to accept and incorporate new data (i.e, new, imaginary versions of the sculpture). I think that the project is as much about establishing the ground that supports an "anarchic condition in which an object could exist with infinite potential visualizations" as it is about the visualizations themselves. And this ground, in this project, is produced by manipulating disclosure.

JE: Also, on the flipside of that condition created by the shaping of disclosure is the apparition of the actual physical object to whomever by remote chance encounters it. For that person the experience of the project is inverted, the data vacuum is reciprocated.

GM: But this figure is a double figure. Let's say the "real" person that finds the sculpture. And the person that we imagine finding the sculpture. This second one is a parallel or extension to the "object [that] could exist with infinite potential visualizations."

JE: yes, I love that. And for the finder the maker is an “imagined figure” but also exists as a “real figure.”

The object set in the Florida wilderness is a “real” object that for the non-finder is a placebo object that instigates potential realities, parallel to the actual “real” object. I think that is my favorite way to think about the project. For me Remote Viewing’s elastic properties allow for a possibility that the projects physics could be set in a quantum mechanics (multiverse) context. I know that is asking for a lot, but that is something that I love to imagine.

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