Exhibition: One to Zero

Exhibition Dates:
April 22 - May 3rd, 2024

Curated by:
Viktor Timofeev and Ryan Kuo

Presented by:
Feral File

*PURCHASE CANCELLED (2024) by Dirk Paesmans: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

A cutting-edge digital art exhibition titled “One to Zero” is set to launch at Feral File, featuring a diverse group of artists whose works explore the complexities and contradictions inherent in the digital art scene. The exhibition, curated by Viktor Timofeev and Ryan Kuo, will be open to the public from April 22, 2024, with sales starting on April 25 and concluding on May 3, 2024.

“Feral File presents One to Zero, a response to NFT bull market aesthetics and sensibilities.”

— One to Zero Press Release

*Perfume Area: The Alphabet (2024) by Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

One to Zero presents a reverse narrative to the typical tech-startup ideology of “zero to one,” which emphasizes rapid financial growth from nothing. Instead, the exhibition encourages a more contemplative approach to the digital art market, which often pressures artists to monetize their creativity quickly. The show invites us to slow down and critically assess the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.

“Making and sharing digital artwork today is contradictory. 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.”

— One to Zero Press Release

*In Tongues (2024) by Damon Zucconi: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

The exhibition showcases the works of seven digital artists: Laura Brown, Mira Dayal, Dirk Paesmans, Adriana Ramić, Laurel Schwulst, Sydney Shen, and Damon Zucconi. Each artist brings their unique perspective to the digital medium, pondering on the boundaries between artistic expression and technological platforms.

Mira Dayal's piece "reCAPTCHA.otf" (2024) creatively repurposes Google's reCAPTCHA as a dynamic typeface that alters text inputs on screen, examining the interaction between human input and machine interpretation. Viktor Timofeev's "Human Abecedary: Interletters" (2024) dismantles the alphabet into a series of unstable, clockwork components, creating a perpetually foreign writing system.

*reCAPTCHA.otf" (2024) by Mira Dayal: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

Damon Zucconi's "In Tongues" (2024) transforms Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" into an endless stream of jumbled letters, evoking the image of a large language model digesting and regurgitating literary content. Laura Brown's "Mon Alphabet en Signes" (2024) employs AI to describe static wooden alphabet blocks, reflecting on the struggles of digital systems to derive meaning from static images.

“The artists in One to Zero share aesthetic sensibilities, conceptual interests, social histories, and ways of working. They rearrange letters and images, design circular logics and feedback loops, and render experiences in software processes and poetic forms.”

— One to Zero Press Release

*Memory Intensified by Hand of Manual World (2021/2024) by Adriana Ramić: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

Adriana Ramić's updated "Memory Intensified by Hand of Manual World" (2021/2024) contrasts human and machine interpretations of combined images, while Ryan Kuo's "Downtime" (2024) simulates a business application's repeated crashes and recoveries, highlighting the vulnerabilities of logical systems. Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen's "Perfume Area: The Alphabet" (2024) offers a sensory experience through time-sensitive perfume reviews, challenging linear narrative forms.

Dirk Paesmans’s "PURCHASE CANCELLED" (2024) is a series of animated GIFs that critique the transactional nature of blockchain interfaces used in digital art markets – the series deconstructs Feral File’s blockchain-based interface, which prevents anyone from entering until they meet the demand: “Where's your wallet?”

*Mon Alphabet en Signes (2024) by Laura Brown: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

One to Zero not only showcases digital artworks but also reflects on the broader implications of digital platforms and market dynamics on artistic practice. The curators, both of whom discovered each other's work online, share a fascination with games, complex systems, and the intricacies of bureaucracy, making this collaborative exhibition an exciting exploration of the digital art landscape.

Featured Artists

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.

Dirk Paesmans (b.1965 Brussels, Belgium) is based in the Netherlands.

Recent exhibitions include N0dine Brussels(2023) and Croxhapox Gent.

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 Berlin Program for Artists.

Laurel Schwulst and Sydney Shen

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.

Sydney Shen, born in 1989 in Woodbridge, now lives and works in New York. She completed her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 2011. Shen uses sculptures and installations to create an atmosphere of wretched apprehension, examining the limitation of mentality through the extremity of the physical body. Exploring through various sources from historical and contemporary art history, including but not limited to medieval excruciation, supernatural horror fiction, and Internet subcultures, Shen frankensteins organic and fabricated materials such as Chinese and Western medical apparatus and instruments, graphic designed ornaments, and biological specimens. With the enticing but horrifying duality in her work, Shen manages to drag the audiences into the bizarre yet motley world she creates, directs and performs in.

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.

About Curators

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.

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).

*Human Abecedary: Interletters (2024) by Viktor Timofeev: Feral File Launches Pioneering Digital Art Exhibition, One to Zero*

About Feral File

Feral File commissions curated exhibitions of digital artwork and partners with artists and institutions to explore new ways of exhibiting and collecting. Evolving from the art gallery and digital publishing models, Feral File borrows the best traits of each to inform a new kind of art space. Feral File works in tandem with a community of technologists, new media artists, collectors, and curators to redefine and frame a sustainable model for the future of digital experimentation.

See One to Zero thorugh May 3rd and let us know your thoughts!