Nominated for a curatorial prize that set only one inflexible condition, which was to use the new gallery space at GAMeC, it seemed appropriate to take this as the departure point for my proposal. Without visiting Bergamo, I formed a visual understanding of the city and the gallery from friends' memories, books and photographs. Together these observations created a very graphic and stratified impression of Bergamo. Taking the architectural plan of the gallery as my 'centre', I then imagined how it related to this context.
Using such a simple visual reading let gallery plan act as a central pivot for the rest of the proposal. The windows that look down into the gallery from a separate room on first floor level became my second point of perspective. Grouped together, the gallery and its variety of external viewpoints, could exist as a single particle within the main plans and sections of the GAMeC building. Spanning out further, this unique set of conditions was occuring at GAMeC, in a building located at the foot of the old city of Bergamo, a city which literally climbs in layers up a steep hill, incorporating the formal strata of a city wall and finally offering views of the surrounding landscape.
‘What happens if you imagine the extended dimensions of the given gallery, picture it as one particle of GAMeC and in turn the city of Bergamo that contains it?’
1 Experience the gallery from its ground floor
2 From a more distanced viewpoint through the four first-floor windows
3 Picture the experience within the building’s physical make-up
4 Extend the experience out into the surrounding city
Concentrating in this way on one specific space into which multiple viewpoints could expand a viewers' experience of the exhibition, prompted the use of Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten to act as a metaphor to probe the site and concept further. The exhibition’s title ‘Another Zero’, stems from the Eames’ idea of questioning what happens if you add another zero to the powers of ten equation, a mathematical progression, that for them became a frame through which to view life and its relationships.
Powers of Ten, a nine minute film made in 1977, visualised the relative size of elements through space and time exposing worlds within worlds.
‘What happens when you add another zero to the equation?’
10˚ A man sleeps on a picnic rug - one square metre of space
1025 The edge of the universe - camera zooms out ten times for every ten seconds
10-18 One atom in a hand - camera zooms back in ten times for every ten seconds
Another Zero
Haluk Akakçe, Tobias Bernstrüp, Tobias Collier,
Tom Friedman, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Keith Tyson
'a problem cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness as it was created'
Albert Einstein
The exhibition takes the idea of 'zero' as a constant, an absolute that everything stems out from. The selected artists propose different zero points through their work and then oscillate between a detailed and a more contextual - visual and mental -reading of the world around us. They examine geometrical systems and architectural structures to play with scale and perspective, questioning how everyday objects and mental calculations relate to each other in a wider context. In a similar way to Powers of Ten, the artists often focus on one event or element of everyday life, presenting or creating a scenario to describe its context. These new imagined environments and experimental applications suggest alternate or fantastical interpretations for natural and built evolutionary processes and allow the audience to re-imagine their own worldscape; the causes and consequences that link events, relationships and scientific problems.
Another Zero includes a specially commissioned wall painting by Haluk Akakçe and a new lecture work that considers and analyses the idea of ‘adding another zero to the equation’ by Keith Tyson. On two wall mounted screens the DVD works Interloper, 2003 by Saskia Olde Wolbers and Polygon Lover, 2000 by Tobias Bernstrup present another form of imagined environment where alter egos construct alternative existences. Hung at different heights from the ceiling like distant satellites to the other works are Tom Friedman’s Untitled, 1998 a sculpture of hard insulation, polystyrene balls and paint and by Tobias Collier the spherical Proto – Oscillator, 2002 constructed from fibreglass, polystyrene and glass.
The selection and installation creates a composition of layers and alternative angles of perspective within the gallery, which refer back to the original reading of the space: the way the plan was seen to relate to the building’s physical make-up and extending out its relevance to the surrounding city.
The design of the different publicities for this exhibition attempted to add extended layers of connected material to the concept, literally referencing their own position, be it in a magazine or on the streets of Bergamo, back to the gallery space and the exhibition’s location in time and space. This catalogue, is then perhaps the most distant viewpoint from which to look back at the exhibition and the gallery plan as a departure point for the proposal. It offers an expanded notion of Another Zero including images and text by Charles and Ray Eames and works by the selected that helped form the original proposal.
