Cone Problem Found centers around a series of 9 large Xerox photostat-based prints of photographs taken in Berlin and in New York. It also includes information retrieved from two articles, one from the Brazilian newspaper Jornal do Brasil and another from the Daily News. The first led me to P.T. Barnum and his Circus (through the book P. T. Barnum: America's Greatest Showman), and a photograph that became central to my work during this period, a figure I named ‘the Coneboy.’ As for the second, while riding the subway in New York, I caught a glimpse of the headline “Cone Problem Found” and misread it for “Clone Problem Found”—subject matter related to my main project at the time, Cyberclone 2000. The interrelation, phonetics, and significance between cone and clone thread the piece together. Cone Problem Found combines the 1996 dream “the building and the boy”—the Coneboy and New York’s ziggurat-topped Bankers Trust Building (1912)—with images of the Berlin series A Árvore and New York’s cityscape: an empty—yet tangible—sidewalk, cone related imagery skyscrapers, and water-towers.

“Like a storyboard, CPF is formed of facts and perception, where the connection of imaginative imagery, intuition, and communication compose a ‘triple-engaged reality.’”  (S.F. 1997)

Generally, the composing parts include A Árvore (The Tree), the newspaper headline ‘Cone Problem Found’, elements of the 1996 dream, and conic features of the New York cityscape. A Árvore is composed of photographs of a tree in different seasons in Berlin. After being extensively photographed, the specific tree was unexpectedly and unexplainably removed, leaving the old place unaltered yet empty. Information, a primary domain of the piece, is acquired through both dream and reality: newspaper articles, ‘the building and the boy,’ cone and cone, cone and clone, building and none—here absence could relate to semblance (tree/boy/no/tree/the building/cone/and so on). These events are interconnected: the coneboy is the central, otherworldly element that bridges these realities,  by being connected to a second boy’s image—held by the Giant Woman (P.T.Barnum’s/JB newspaper image’s detail), to the altered headline ‘C(l)one Problem Found,’ (information/realm of communication/immateriality/absence), to The Tree (intuition/fate) and to ‘cone/clone’ (imaginative/associative imagery).