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Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques’s ongoing open-form collaborative project, Eden, is a post-documentary work exploring processes of re-enchantment.
In 2017, he collaborated with Fred Cave, later joined by Joe Cave, to create Zero Player: a Photoshop script that unceasingly recomposes anew from a shared archive of images and texts. Inspired by mathematician, John Conway’s, Game of Life, the images form an ecosystem in continuous flux that draws the border between automation and life.
Here, Zero Player becomes host to the Werkplaats Typografie for their creation of the game, Ethereal Zero P(layer).
Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (1983) is an artist whose works often explore processes of collective re-enchantment through the concepts of retcon and virtuality. The global issues of immaterial data circulation, private property and collective appropriation are the basis for a visual and sculptural exploration.
Fred Cave (1985 – 2017) was an artist, graphic designer and alumnus of the Werkplaats Typografie. His body of work spans the domains of art and design questioning the possibilities of montage and processes of reproduction to create new narratives through text, sound or images.
Joe Cave (1989) is a composer and sound designer collaborating on a variety of projects across the arts. He brings compositional and programming tools to be applied in other artistic fields.
The Werkplaats Typografie (WT), part of the ArtEZ University of the Arts, is an experimental master program in graphic design located in Arnhem and Zaandam in the Netherlands. WT offers a progressive and exciting curriculum that allows for independently motivated work and research of 28 international students. WT continuously evolves and is amorphous by intention, this distinguished approach enables the students to position themselves in an artistic field of their choosing. The Werkplaats Typografie is globally renowned for its specific view on design and education, next to its method of educating, that contributes to a highly diverse group of designers, artists, thinkers and writers whose work is research driven, conceptually strong and visually outspoken.
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Ethereal Zero P(layer) is a game played by the students of Werkplaats Typografie, in the Galerie du Crous, from the 4th — 16th of November. Loosely circulating around the notion of somewhere like paradise, Ethereal Zero P(layer) can be observed as divided into three parts: an exhibition, a performance and a workshop.
Visitors to the gallery take on the role of spectators. The students act as Players, bringing individually curated archives of images, texts and colours, in response to algorithmically-generated themes. In the workshop, they transform their archive with the Photoshop script, Zero Player, into renewed compositions. These visual outcomes, existing initially as one-dimensional prints, become spatial, metamorphosing the gallery realm into a physical landscape that grows as the Ethereal Zero P(layer) exhibition takes place. Certain pathways are followed by the Players, akin to the script, Zero Player, itself, in the vein of Conways’s Game of Life.
Zero Player is a project by Fred Cave, Joe Cave and Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques.
Ethereal Zero P(layer) is a project initiated by Amira Prescott, Emma Hazen, Jiahui Feng, So-Yeon Kim and Theetat Thunkijjanukijj.
Players are: Amira Prescott, Chiara Simion, Daniel Senior, Emma Hazen, Eva van Bemmelen, Jan-Pieter Karper, Jiahui Feng, Johanna Himmelsbach, Kaisha Murzamadiyeva, Kai Udema, Kaixin Chen, Marianne Noordzij, Megan Tatem, Mijia Wang, Mirelle van Tulder, Natnapat Kullananant, Oriol Cabarrocas, Philipp Hesselberger, Qihang Li, Raoul Audouin, Seo Kyung Kim, Sixin Chen, So-Yeon Kim, Theetat Thunkijjanukij, Terezie Štindlová, Vennica Sidibanga Kaseye, Yara Veloso, Young Eun Park and Zuzana Kostelanská.
Special thanks to: Angie Keefer, Anniek Brattinga, Armand Mevis and Robert Milne.
We also thank agnès b. for the loan of one Zero Player from her collection.
