1/0 brings together Rita Osipova, Benjamin Schoones and Noa Zuidervaart at SLUG in Leipzig, a city Leibniz left at twenty and never stopped belonging to. In 1697 he sent the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel a drawing for a medallion: a table of numbers in two signs, captioned Imago Creationis, offering the arithmetic of zero and one as proof that everything could be produced from nothing. Binary was a devotional image before it was an engineering standard. Three centuries later the same two signs run underneath nearly everything, no longer an image of anything, only a condition for it: to be sorted, stored, corrected, forecast or optimised is first of all to be made readable. Each rebuilding of the system leaves a residue, and what the three practices share is the instant a structure designed to perfect something meets what it cannot read.
Rita Osipova’s Soft Archive traces memory distorting in the act of retrieval, its cable-built flowers carrying something between two people and altering it in transit. Benjamin Schoones’s ssh (it can do the talking) (in a quantity quantized) stages a voice seeping through its own auto-tuned correction, so that what reaches the room is neither the original nor the fix but a third, unresolved presence. Noa Zuidervaart’s As above, so below pairs cosmic and economic diagrams until each borrows the other’s authority, asking whether the infographic describes the world or helps build it. Leibniz desired an image of creation; what remains is a grammar so ordinary it no longer looks like a claim. The claim is still being made.