PAL is about connections, their origins, roots, the consequences of how we deal with them, and their inescapable imperfections. Is there beauty in the imperfections? Like in relationships, where there is a constant tension between that ideal –clean, pure and pristine– vision of our starting point, in the cocreation between humans and machines the same thing happens. Where do emotions emerge from when we code art? What’s the role of mechanisms, screens and other instruments we use to visualize the work? PAL is a collaboration between Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez and Iskra Velitchkova where both are exploring, for the first time together, all these questions by a very simple premise: a circle in the middle, that represents the ideal union, approached by each in a unique and vulnerable way, with two generative systems that play with the notion of circle and try to approach the central, perfect union in different manners.

PAL is a curation of 100 individual artworks based on a unique generative system. Once selected, the artists recorded them onto a VHS tape. During a 4 days live performance at Kate Vass Gallery during Art Singapore 2023, the artists played the tape continuously at the booth. Every time it reached the end, they rewound it to random positions then passed a small neodymium magnet around the tape. The magnet damages the recording, adding real-life interference to it, not digitally produced. The magnet can end up fully erasing the tape if it is applied long enough. As they applied the magnet in random positions on the tape, the distortions induced by it are randomly dispersed along the 3 copies of each of the 100 outputs. Moreover, the continuous playing and rewinding of the tape on an old video player add more degradation to the tape.

The end result is a VHS tape that contains the degraded 100 pieces. The project has two different end products. On one side, a collector may purchase the physical VHS tape which comes with a full digitisation of it as an accompanying NFT. On the other side, each of the 100 pieces that are included in the VHS tape are digitized independently and minted as individual NFTs. These are 30 second long videos that come straight from the tape used in the live performance.