Aria Notturna, ZERO...

Group Exhibition

Organised by Neue Alte Bruecke, Matt Williams + ZERO...

Via Carlo Boncompagni 44

20139 Milano

Italy

13th February - 28th March 2026

Ionisation, 2026

Music score, dowel, tape.

A wooden dowel placed in the space and wrapped in a published score for “Ionisation” by Edgard Varès who identified “sound as living matter”. Transmission device to charge particles in the air. A mirror is inserted at either end of the dowel reflecting and extending the notation indefinitely.

Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds. Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumble down upon him.

• Charles Dickens (The Uncommercial Traveller, 1860)

The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighbourhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their quickly attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. The motions they have impressed on the particles of one portion of our atmosphere, are communicated to constantly increasing numbers, but the total quantity of motion measured in the same direction receives no addition.

• Charles Babbage (The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 1838)

Upstairs:

20%, 2026

Ink on paper.

93 × 120 cm. 

Downstairs:

40%, 2026

Ink on paper.

93 × 120 cm. 

An inverted version of the Ringelmann Smoke Chart to be used as a series of nets that recognise miasma within the local environment and magnify the particles captured. 

The Ringelmann Smoke Chart, giving shades of gray by which the density of columns of smoke rising from stacks may be compared, was developed by Professor Maximilian Ringelmann of Paris. Ringelmann, born in 1861, was professor of agricultural engineering at l'Institute National Agronomique and Director de la Station d'Essais de Machines in Paris in 1888, and held those positions for many years thereafter.