2011. The zero zero decade

2008

Ground zero, carbon zero, and Coke Zero -- what's the connection? The year 2000 was once symbolic of the future -- the world of tomorrow filled with utopian possibilities for art, science, and technology. Entering the millennium, something is awry in the spirit of tomorrow for there exists a strange pattern of zeros in culture and technology, all related to the space-time coordinates of the future. There is ground zero, carbon zero, Coke Zero, and many others. What do these zeros suggest? Void or emptiness, end or beginning, the past or the future for utopia? It is ground zero for theory. Drawing from art, media, science, and philosophy, Barry Vacker uses zero as countdown and blastoff for theorizing the existential conditions of postmillennial culture. And here is the key question -- are any models for a future utopia possible after the three zeros of 2000? As part of my experimental book series, Zero Conditions is available in high quality paperback and Kindle via Amazon.

2018

Futures, 2000

It is generally recognized that ‘zero’ as we understand the concept today originated in two geographically separated cultures: the Maya and Indian. However, if zero merely signified a magnitude or a direction separator, the Egyptian zero, nfr,dating back at least four thousand years, amply served thesepurposes. If zero was merely a place-holder symbol, then such azero was present in the Babylonian positional number system before the first recorded occurrence of the Indian zero. If zerowas represented by just an empty space within a well-defined positional number system, such a zero was present in Chinesemathematics a few centuries before the beginning of theCommon Era. The dissemination westwards of the Indian zero as an integral part of the Indian numerals is one of the mostremarkable episodes in the history of mathematics and the story is well-known.

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s - 60s Text by Valerie Hillings, Daniel Birnbaum, Edouard Derom, Johan Pas, Dirk Pörschmann, Margriet Schavemaker. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014. 244 pages. From October 10, 2014 to January 7 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented the exhibition ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s - 60s. It was the first large scale historical survey in the United States of the work of the German Group Zero, whose core members included Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, along with thirty-seven other artists that the exhibition curator, Valerie Hillings, calls the “ZERO network."

2013

This fifth decade is the first of this new century, and simultaneously of a new Millennium according to the calendar in practice for most of us. The turn of Millennium is always a very specific time for people: it could be understood as a key point, a point of irreversibility between past and future, but also it is mainly understood as a “new era” giving the opportunity to create new situations and for the members of IASS new Shell and Spatial Structures. It will be the appropriate time for developments that did not occur before. Men are always in between the past, their roots, and the future, their projects. These aspects are reflected in the titles of our symposia and specifically in the titles of the last symposium of the second Millennium [1], and the first symposium of the present one [2]. Looking to this fifth decade is difficult since this is precisely the present time, this is not exactly a work of history, it is not yet a work of project, but all the published documents tha...

2020

We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today. This special issue thus demonstrates how architects, designers and artists have reacted to the new socio-politically relevant concepts of postmodernism with a new kind of flatness, diversity and ambiguity in contrast to the identitarian concepts of modernism. What is striking is that the new designs were hardly understood and the reactions to them were characterized by a certain blurriness and uncertainty, which ultimately culminated in the winged term “anything goes.” Yet even today, adherence to this negatively evaluated dictum actually hides the critical aspects of postmodern philosophy and the arts’ reactions to it, which recognized the limitation of individuality through socio-political paternalism and found an answer first in the rejection, then in the diversification of the individual. It was not until the 1990s that the critical and ethically relevant aspects that challenged active engagement with social constraints began to gain importance in the arts. Against the background of the ambivalent history of postmodernism in the visual arts, the uncertainty in dealing with their designs was already evident in the very prominent exhibition on contemporary architecture at the MoMA in New York in 1988, which was organized by Philip Johnson. It could not really explain what was actually meant by “Deconstructivist Architecture,” as Simone Kraft makes clear. It is Arianna Fantuzzi who shows the neuralgic point of the transition from modernism to postmodernism by comparing self-portraits of artists from the 1990s. With the variety of possible roles that each person can adopt, the designs of postmodernism are thus characterized by the withdrawal of a unique identity. This phenomenon can also be described as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen does in his historical overview, stating that after an affirmative opportunistic attitude toward sign systems in the 1980s, the arts only took on critical traits in the 1990s. In other words, as soon as the challenge was taken up to find its own, more critical path against paternalistic social standards, the situation changed. In line with this critical approach, Anna Kristensson argues that designers have a duty to choose an open and fair course toward the users, not to manipulate them in the interest of sales, and customers must face the reality of aesthetics and not be misled by supposedly clear advertising. It is Iris Laner, in her examination of postmodern theory and the work of Jeff Wall, who shows how alternative perspectives on our world are tested – permeable to the viewer, not only through the aesthetic, but also through epistemological and ethical gravity. Finally, I expressed myself in a similar way. The possibility of deconstructing our conventional understanding of reality, as postmodern theory made clear and as the artist Karin Kneffel shows, opens the possibility of freeing us from social pre-determinations. The magazine’s editor-in-chief also wrote an essay on the changing world of the arts and Jeff Koons. To conclude, this special issue on postmodernism clearly shows that in the long run, postmodernism Illustrates a completely new view of the world and our being in it. We can no longer hide behind predetermined standardizations. Thus, with the term “anything goes,” postmodernism opens a path of liberation from supposedly individual, but socially normed standards. In a new way, we are all called upon to consider not only our own share in shaping reality, but also that of the stakeholders, and to assume responsibility. Martina Sauer Senior Editor

the article presents a deep understanding of the importance of the number zero to the business world

Glosema. Revista Asturiana de Llingüística, 2019

Reseña de:T. Givón (2017): The Story of Zero, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins [414 pp.]. ISBN: 978-90-272-1239-9.