At the time, I was living in Miami, Florida, and I was driving down an alley, and I saw a globe smashed in a container— I stopped the car, I took a picture. I thought, “what a great image.” Then I realized I should bring the globe to the studio. I brought it without knowing why, but just as a sort of a thinking buddy, really, and that led me to think through my own methodology, which is always to deconstruct the object that I am interested in. This is just always how I work.

I am always very attracted to garbage. I am always looking for interesting treasures. Most of my work is produced with discarded material.

I thought, “okay, I'm just going to have to take this globe apart in pieces.” Naturally, I took it off the axis. Then the two poles, plaques that sit on top, fell off. Then I realized that the equator is a tape. I removed the tape. Then I was left with all the ink in the globe, and so that took some thought — how can I then keep on stripping the parts? The ink and the cardboard, how can they be a part? That led to sanding the surface, almost to mimic an erosion process that also happens to what this object is representing: the planet.

Q: The current version of Ballroom started with 100 globes. What was the process like for making all of them?

What the studio looked like in Ballroom times was incredible. We had over a hundred boxes with globes inside that we received from a company that had a lot of outdated globes. Every time we finished sanding one, we would let it loose on the ground, and so there were also a growing number of balls on the floor of the studio until we realized that we should start putting them away!

There were also wooden spools for collecting all the equator tapes, which I still have.Then there were jars of colored dust. Every single grain of dust that we could collect from those globes was put in these jars. We would try to sand each globe by color so that we could then end up with big jars of dust that will be used later for other works. We also recognized we had to use masks with the amount of dust that was in the air, and we started creating different techniques to protect our fingernails. Because of so much sanding we all realized that we were shaving our nails in different shapes.

There is no right way of sanding a globe. Each collaborator found their own technique and their own way of holding the globe so that it wouldn't roll. I think this is also part of that collaboration, like putting a set of rules in place and then allowing freedom for everyone to adopt a technique with it.

As an artist, I've never really worked alone, and I am not interested in working alone at all. If I had gone into this project trying to sand 100 globes, by now I wouldn't have an arm left. That meant that it needed to be a collective process.

By creating that work in collaboration with other hands over such a long period of time of silence and of repetition, the conversation that was happening while making that work was a geography lesson for every single one of us. That perhaps was one of my first works in which collaboration took place in the making. I am more interested in designing the process of production. If the process is consciously designed, the outcome, whatever it is, will be okay. It's not about the outcome. It's about designing the process.

Q: What else have you deconstructed as part of your art?

A: I first exhibited at PEM in 2018 as part of an exhibition called PlayTime. I presented an ongoing body of work called ARC, Animal Rag Company — or Animal Rag Collection, or Animal Rag Collective. Animal Rag is really where it's at. I found out that I still had my own teddy bear, called Pepe. It barely has any fur left and it doesn't have eyes and there's no mouth or nose on it, but it is so meaningful. It's worth hundreds of books of photographs, really, and I am not going to throw it away. I'm also not going to give it to my child because it's nasty. It's like this middle place of an object is so valuable, but at the same time, it's garbage. It's, like, treasure garbage.

That led me to deconstruct the object, but I wasn't going to deconstruct my own teddy bear. I deconstructed the first random one that I found in a thrift store, and then I purchased a few more to deconstruct to see if they were all the same. As I was deconstructing them, I was placing them on the floor, and I realized that they just fit together perfectly as puzzle pieces. The work just made itself in front of my eyes. I started placing all the parts together, composing rugs out of animals that are as alive as we make them.

That quickly became a collection that I have been producing over the years. I receive so many donations of stuffed animals, of parents that are cleaning their closets or that the kids are growing up and so they bring me the teddy bears — these unused objects that are quite meaningful.

Q: Ballroom is a little unusual because it allows visitors to touch the artwork. Why did you choose to make this work interactive?

A: People can touch the balls, but they can also kick them and push them around. That's part of it. It is a way of inviting people to move in space differently.

In a museum, we're not used to touching the artwork. The artwork is typically presented as this prestigious object far away from the viewer. This is something that I have always been trying to push the boundaries of in my own work: How can the spectator genuinely be a part of the work?

How do we mitigate the coexistence of these objects, plus the unexpected reaction of the viewers? This is exactly what I am most interested in. I think this is the art, really. The work is an excuse to bring these uncomfortable setups to unexpected places.

Q: What are your favorite objects from PEM's collection being exhibited with Ballroom?

A: There's a very special one, which is a large black globe that has a chalkboard surface. It's giant. This globe was never exhibited before, so to have my exhibition be the excuse to bring such a fantastic piece out of storage is exciting. The chalkboard was used for educational sessions, for students to draw distances or places. It's black and it's such an opposite to all the whiteness in Ballroom, but in essence, they both have this provocation of an invitation to be written on. That's part of the dialogue that I am interested in extending in conversation with the collection itself as well.

Q: Tell us more about The New Times Atlas of the World, Physical Earth, the video piece exhibited with Ballroom.

A: That was produced in collaboration with Błażej Kotowski. He's a programmer, and we have entered an incredible conversation and dialogue about the potentiality of artificial intelligence, imagining new cartographies. The proposal was to collaborate with this AI model to discover what its “imagination” could be.

When developing the work, I requested an AI model to simply stay within the given structure of the image without prompting it to produce a map.This was a very challenging task because typically the way we use artificial intelligence is by requesting what we want as an outcome. The general use is to request a map, and then the artificial model will come back with a map. If it's not the map that we want, we would tweak the definition and the request, the prompt, so that the map comes out exactly as we want it.

Instead of requesting an outcome, Błażej and I designed a process for the AI to think. We gave it parameters. We let it loose to make the connections that it might bring outside of our aesthetic choices. When it gives back an image, we implemented a second code called erosion: it erodes the image digitally. The AI brings a result, and that triggers the second code that erodes the result. What we do then is feed back these eroded results to the AI.

Then it brings another result, which triggers the erosion again, and it starts looping and feeding itself back this eroded image over and over. That's the reason why in the video you see how at first there might be a map that is somewhat recognizable, but then over time, it becomes more and more abstracted. You’re seeing this hallucination of the AI trying to make sense of a page that is white, that has a ghost of a map — but we're never telling it that it's a map. The program is discovering it by itself, and then slowly trying to bring it back. In that process of bringing back the map, it's also abstracting it over and over, because it's losing meaning as it's trying to make meaning, simply because there's nothing there.

Q: Do you think you'll be working with AI more in the future?

A: I think it's quite an interesting field to explore and one that needs imagination. For me, AI is less a tool from which we sort of extract content, but one that carries a potential of working together. I'm less interested in thinking about how the soul of the AI can resemble a human, but actually, how can we let the AI be a different entity, luckily not like a human? I don't know if we should be replicating humans, really. But if it is a separate entity with which we are going to be sharing this space, how can we work together?

How can we potentially make something that is useful for both entities and not one that destroys the other? My view on artificial intelligence, perhaps, is a bit more hopeful. AI is not where it is right now. It is where it will evolve. This is only a beginning. We start trying to work with it and coexist with it instead of fighting it, because it's already here. Let's start modeling possible futures.

Q: Can you tell us about the sound playing in the gallery?

A: The Atlas is composed with a sound that was also generated by an artificial intelligence model. We fed the model a large amount of environmental sounds like earthquakes, wind, sounds of water, including atmospheric frequencies that we are not able to listen to. The AI used those sounds to compose a sound piece in relation to the image. Any variation in the image will trigger a variation in the sound. Again, all we did was provide a framework for the AI, not knowing what the outcome would be.

When we first heard the sound, we were pretty surprised by how deep it sounded. It does capture an environmental atmosphere. It's not recognizable, but it does feel like natural sounds, or like Earth or something planetary. It sounds immense.

Q: What do you hope people will think or feel going into Ballroom?

A: I prefer not to impose what visitors need to be thinking of, or what this work is about, or how they need to feel. That is not what my work is about at all. I see myself more as revealing things as they are. Perhaps differently, organized differently, but I am not making anything new. I'm just showing you the globes before being printed. That's all. What I expect from the viewer is for them to complete the work, whatever that means for them.

The reactions that people have had to the work have been of a range of different emotions and philosophies. They go from terrifying, catastrophic reactions of climate change and “we’re doomed and it's over” to also hope, and the potential of imagining how it could be different.

Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom is on view through February 23, 2025.