"I need to feel the weight of a message," he says. "If you send me an email, I have to hold the paper. I have to feel if you typed it in anger or in haste. Digital life flattens texture. My job is to put the texture back."

He is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled "The Audience of Dust." For one year, he will not make any objects at all. Instead, he will visit a different museum each week and measure the thickness of dust on the frames of the most famous paintings in the collection. At the end of the year, he will publish a ledger: "Rembrandt: 0.04mm of neglect. Rothko: 0.12mm of awe. Monet: 0.00mm (cleaned by intern, August 14)."

And gravity, as Arce knows, always wins in the end.

In a sun-drenched but crumbling warehouse in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, there is no heat. Yet, the man standing in the center of the room, wearing a thick wool coat and fingerless gloves, is trying to melt ice.