the zero

From Rhizome Artbase
2002
Description

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.

Rhizome staff
no data

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.

Christina Ray
24 April 2002
Legacy descriptive tags
Christina Ray, I. Rice Pereira, zero-space, glowlab.com, The Nature of Space
Attribution: Christina Ray
Participatory, Narrative, Documentary, Database, space, postmodern, memory, language, interact, email, archive, HTML, DHTML, Visual, Text
Attribution: Rhizome staff
Metadata
Variant History
static files
24 April 2002
cloning
Rhizome staff