22 April 2024
Event
One to Zero Exhibition Notes
The exhibition title One to Zero reverses the tech-startup concept of "zero to one," in which the entrepreneur charts a path from being financially empty-handed to monetizing the future. We all saw that big-boy bubble burst somewhere between a plague and an invasion, its soiled product narrowly missing the bin. Such a downturn is felt as a deflation in the air, the word smelling like austerity, spare means, a foul order breaking down. Rather than trying to reassemble the broken money machine, this show proposes slowing down—if not outright stopping—at the brink of a theoretical high.
To take a deflationary approach is to manifest the contradiction of making and sharing digital artwork today. One must have technical literacy and artistic sensitivity to the technology—all while attending to a growing pressure to find the money hidden inside the medium. At times the artist’s effort may consist entirely of fighting to fit the format of their chosen platform. How does the market look today? Do the individual goods add up to a meaningful whole?
The artists in One to Zero share aesthetic sensibilities, conceptual interests, social histories, and ways of working. In this exhibition, their artworks are incremented and iterated 26 times. Like an alphabet, each series is a larger system from which the parts are indivisible.
Mira Dayal's reCAPTCHA.otf (2024) remakes Google's public Turing test as a computer typeface that scrambles a human’s text input as it is written onto the screen. In a similar spirit, Viktor Timofeev's Human Abecedary: Inter-Letters (2024) breaks down the alphabet into moving parts on a clock face, generating an unstable, permanently foreign writing system.
Damon Zucconi's In Tongues (2024) renders the contents of Proust's Swann's Way as an endless babbling stream of letters, suggesting a large language model regurgitating the content it was fed. For Mon Alphabet en Signes (2024), Laura Brown prompted an AI to narrate unmoving wooden alphabet blocks, leaving the algorithm to write detailed descriptions that audibly strain to make meaning.
Likewise, a human viewer of Adriana Ramić's software application, Memory Intensified by Hand of Manual World (2021/2024), will interpret its composite images of animal-object hybrids differently than the image-recognition systems they were originally meant to train. Ryan Kuo's Downtime (2024) is an audiovisual program that mimics a business application crashing and recovering repeatedly, like an ocean wave, as the primacy of its logical system is threatened by the "workers" that stray.
Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen bypass quantitative systems entirely with Perfume Area: The Alphabet (2024), a series of perfume reviews whose compositions shift according to the time of day. As a fragrance does not progress linearly, neither does its description, which wafts in and out of perception as though carried on a breeze.
Finally, in PURCHASE CANCELLED (2024), a series of quivering and convulsing GIFs that recall his chaotic approach to JODI’s early-2000s desktop performances, Dirk Paesmans captures error loops in Feral File's blockchain-based interface, preventing all from transacting until they meet the demand: Where's your wallet?
Each work in One to Zero employs a mechanism—crossing symbolic, computational, and natural systems—whose jumbled output one can read, even as its viability to the money machine is unclear. Together, the works spell out an unspoken rule: that digital artforms today can and must answer to multiple callers, using means that can scarcely address their full meaning.
Artist
Laura BrownLocationBrussels / New York
Laura Brown (b. 1990, New York) is an artist and designer working between Brussels and New York. Her practice spans traditional and digital media, and she frequently engages with technological tools and standards to probe the particular visual-informational regimes they entail.
Artist
Mira DayalLocationNew York
Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, editor, and educator based in New York. Her studio work involves subtle, laborious applications of materials; critical reflections on changing technologies; and formal explorations of the limits and systems of language. Her work has been shown at Barnard College, Parent Company, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Hesse Flatow, Gymnasium, Lubov, NURTUREart, NARS Foundation, and Abrons Art Center in New York, among others.
Dayal is currently on faculty at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts, and has previously taught at Hunter College and the International Center of Photography. She recently edited, with Josephine Heston, Track changes: a handbook for art criticism, published by Paper Monument with significant support from Critical Minded. She also publishes the interdisciplinary collaborative artist publication prompt: with Nicole Kaack, and is the founder of the Journal of Art Criticism. She was previously Ideas Editor at Art in America, and an associate editor and regular contributor at Artforum.
Ryan Kuo (b. 1982, Elkins, WV) is an artist and writer based in New York City. His work uses digital systems and sequences to invoke a person or people arguing. The intention is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. His projects have been commissioned and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), M+ (Hong Kong), Queens Museum (NYC), bitforms gallery (NYC), and TRANSFER (LA), and has been published in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Rhizome. He was a 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellow and a resident at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City), Pioneer Works (NYC), and the Queens Museum Studio Program (NYC). He has been developing an artist's book about aspirational workflows, File: A User’s Manual, modeled after software guides for power users. He is not a programmer.
Artist
Dirk PaesmansDirk Paesmans (b.1965 Brussels, Belgium) based in the Netherlands Recent exhibitions N0dine Brussels(2023) and Croxhapox Gent Currently working on solo projects after his %20WWWwork with JODI(.org) wq8i676i8o7b29 1380N\o//\weee3weee wqb %$sHiteqqr avae qwe ilable
Adriana Ramić (b.1989, Chicago) explores the tenuous pathos and interiorities among earthly and machinic beings. Multidisciplinary and conceptual, her work spans installation, video, text, sculpture, drawing, and software, and often draws upon studies in computation and behavior. Through enigmatic vignettes of perception, she investigates the sensitivities of existence and comprehension in both personal and abstracted forms. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2023); inge, New York (2022); Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Stroom den Haag, The Hague (2019); Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2018); Kimberly-Klark, New York (2017); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2016); LUMA/Westbau, Zürich (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), among others. She is currently a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists.
Sydney Shen (b. 1989) is a visual artist living and working in New York. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2011. She exhibits her artwork at galleries, institutions, and fairs worldwide. Currently Shen is working on a large-scale, interactive public sculpture for Riverside Park, New York, through the Works In Public Program at the Art Students League in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. She received the 2019–2020 Jerome Foundation Queens Museum Emerging Artist Fellowship, and was a 2019–2020 resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program. Select solo exhibitions and projects include First Chair, Gallery Vacancy at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023; Cupio Dissolvi, Gallery Vacancy at Liste Art Fair Basel, 2021; Strange But True, Queens Museum, New York, 2021; Misery Whip, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2021; Every Good Boy Does Fine, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, 2019; and Onion Master, New Museum, New York, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include G Museum, Nanjing, 2023; Simone Subal Gallery, New York, 2022; Lubov, New York, 2022; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2022; 47 Canal, New York, 2022; and Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen, 2021. Shen’s works are in the collections of Asymmetry Art Foundation, London; G Museum, Nanjing; Longlati Foundation, Hong Kong; Macalline Art Center, Beijing; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and Sigg Collection, Basel.
Laurel Schwulst (b. 1988) is an artist, designer, writer, educator, and technologist. She is interested in ambient forms of design and literature, public works, and the poetic potential of the web. She is recognized for her experiential projects-as-worlds, her expanded writing practice, her creative direction leadership, her websites, her innovative learning materials and educational environments, and her ongoing collaborations. Her writing (published in venues including The New York Times, The Creative Independent, and Art in America) has taken the form of essays, perfume reviews, and interviews with other artists. For over a decade, she has taught classes and workshops (at universities including Yale and Princeton) and has presented internationally at cultural, academic, and internet-native institutions (at venues including BBC Radio 4, RISD, University of Seoul, Google, and Wikipedia). Schwulst serves as director of the gift shop at Are.na, a platform for networked curation and teaches design at Princeton. She lives in New York.
Artist
Viktor TimofeevLocationNew York
Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984, Riga, Latvia) is an artist based in New York. Timofeev’s multidisciplinary practice is informed by personal experiences, speculative imaginings, and everything in between. Working across generative software, video, painting, installation, and sound, Timofeev often combines these mediums to create semi-fictional environments. He received his MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and his BFA at Hunter College in New York. He curates monthly events that include screenings, performances, and sensory-deprivation listening sessions at No Moon, an event space in Brooklyn that he co-founded in 2018. Timofeev also hosts a show on Montez Press Radio focusing on artists who occasionally work with music and sound. He has released several LPs, cassettes, digital albums, and CDs on labels such Futura Resistenza, Alicja, and lobitlandscapes.
Recent exhibitions include Pedagogical Games 1 at 427 Gallery in Riga (2024), 2023 at Paris Internationale with kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga (2023), Tallinn Photomonth in Tallinn (2023), Digital Intimacy at the National Gallery Prague in Prague (2021), the 14th Baltic Triennial at Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (2021), Unexpected Encounters at the Latvian National Museum of Art (2019), and Somewhere in Between at Bozar in Brussels (2018).
Damon Zucconi was born in Bethpage, New York in 1985. He received a BFA in sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 2007. Zucconi employs custom software to create works which are typically accessible online. Vision, literacy, and pattern recognition are common areas of investigation in his work. Recent solo exhibition include Self-Titled at Veda, Florence (2023), When You’re Here, You’re Familiar at JTT, New York (2023), Lithromantic at VEDA, Florence (2020), and Imagine a World Without You at JTT, New York (2019). Additionally, Zucconi has participated in recent group exhibitions such as Hoi Köln - Part 2: In the Belly of the Machine, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2023), The Cargo Cult and other certainties, Galleria ZERO, Milan (2023), and Behind the Screens at CODA, Apeldoorn (2023). Zucconi lives and works in Beacon, New York.
One to Zero smart contract:ethereum
