One to Zero

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.