ZERO, ONE, ZERO (0,10): SUPREMATISM AS PROTO-BLOCKCHAIN & THE PIXEL AS ULTIMATE BLACK SQUARE
Genealogy of dematerialization: from Malevich's 1918 "Anarkhiya" dispatches to AMOLED matrices and MUMOK Vienna.
1. "0,10" as Binary Machine Language & Voxel Dust
In 2015, while developing the project
#0,10 (w/ Katja Novitskova and others) at the iconic Dobychina Art Bureau apartment at Marsovo Pole, St. Petersburg—the exact site of Kazimir Malevich's historic 1915–1916
Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10—I began reading Malevich's team publications as a prophecy of digitalization, onchain primitives, and the metaverse. At first,
0,10 reads like a token denomination (
0.1 ETH); in reality, it is literally
zero, one, zero—binary machine code before silicon. As Malevich noted,
"Cubism was turning images into dust. Cubes." In contemporary terms, this is pixelization and voxelization (the spatial logic of Minecraft and volumetric engines): dismantling physical objects into discrete data units so that a new non-physical world of color, sound, and volume can be compiled.
2. "Anarkhiya" (1918): Decentralizing the Museum vs. Elite Extraction
"With the rising sun, when birds sing and the air is filled with the scent of flowers, proletarian masses were driven to fetid and dusty machines, and when they returned home exhausted, the rays of the sun were already dying, and oncoming night closed the doors of art salons... Now we walk the path of liberation, and the ship of art that sailed away must turn toward the running people and reveal its secret signs. This will happen when the people remove the helmsmen and tear art away from the private dilettante hands of collectors, ending the walling-up of art treasures inside patrons' salons..."
— Initiative Group of the Association of Artists (Malevich et al.), "Anarkhiya", Moscow, March 27, 1918, No. 28
Read through the lens of contemporary tech infrastructure, Malevich's 1918
Anarkhiya dispatch is a radical cypherpunk critique of the 1% patron class. Just as early 20th-century patrons walled up art while workers were exhausted at industrial looms, today's tech monopolies wall up human cognitive and somatic output inside proprietary weights while exhausting creators in algorithmic factories.
3. AMOLED Night & The Uni-Colour
"The world of things will vanish, and color, sound, letter, and volume will establish their form, revealing a texture from which a pure, light run will lie across infinity as the emergence of new realities... I invented nothing; I only felt night within myself and in it saw the new, which I called Suprematism... The uni-colour celebrating triumph in space as a unit." — K. Malevich
On an
AMOLED HD display (Google Pixel), black is not a rendered color; it is a physically unpowered diode—zero voltage, pure night, a latent black plane waiting to emit new realities. In my 2016 solo exhibition
Shifting Expectations (32 C-prints shot primarily on an iPhone 5), a key photograph captured a shattered mobile screen where glitch and fracture turned the
pixel itself into the subject of the photograph.
4. Pixel as an Ultimate Black Square (MUMOK Vienna, 2017)
Developed over five years at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in dialogue with my professor
Heimo Zobernig—drawing on his interrogation of institutional display, architecture, deadpan humor, his permanent MUMOK intervention
White Cube (2002), and standalone
Black Cube (2010)—
Pixel as an Ultimate Black Square became my final conceptual "splash" in traditional institutions. Exhibited in
Dollhouse of a Poem (2017) and acquired into the permanent
Ludwig Collection at MUMOK, the work reduces the image to its irreducible unit: a single black dot on the wall of a dollhouse. Translating Malevich's modernist icon into a physical pixel, it asks what remains of abstraction when the picture becomes pure data. [
Research Video //
Vimeo Archive]