Document:Q5201

In the mid-1950's, American artist I. Rice Pereira wrote a short book entitled 'The Nature of Space.' In it she explained the apprehension of space as an attribute of consciousness, and specified an irrational, or unknowable, spatial quantity which she called 'the zero.'

This project is about collecting known spaces and, through re-arrangement, generating unknown or 'zero' spaces, impossible to describe logically.

In December of 2001, I sent an email to friends requesting that they send me descriptions of places, either from books or from their own memories. I collected about 150 sentences, divided them into fragments and entered them into a database with identification numbers for each fragment. A randomly selected group of these numbers has been inserted into each photograph. Clicking on numbers in different areas of the image (after closing this text window) causes a sort of poem to emerge. Each image has many possible combinations, all of which in some way describe a location.

I like to think that throughout history memories and stories of places have been accumulating in space like a dust cloud of numerical data or an invisible hieroglyphics. The stories are always there to be decoded and re-generated, but they still remain as elusive as the zero.