like pornography the popularity of the smoother and smoother fields and fully rendered three dimensional simulations of contemporary computer games reads like a symptom of the desire to transcend natural imperfection and ultimately death and nature itself

dan zero's original medium was that ultimate instrument of pornography the camera - today in the digital realm he uses the computer like an extension of the camera to look for the sublime in a different place (2) : manipulating low resolution low bandwidth fragments of reality appropriated from the media

through his work and in statements and interviews over the past decade zero has variously expressed irritation and depression in the face of postmodernist 'cool' and its cultivation of a-political irony and distance - "i don't believe in postmodernism" he has said (since) "by its very nature the project of modernism can never be finished..."(3)

the watt space 10^th anniversary provides a rare opportunity to see dan zero's three major works from the nineties exploring his favourite themes and motifs which include death, love (lost unrequited impossible), doubt, innocence and powerlessness

epitaph (1998-9) randomly selects from his ever growing internet database of faces of murdered children producing an infinite stream of layered images which never repeat themselves

in the sad men (1996-7) the faces of political leaders tv preachers and business men are made to rotate inside their heads turning into steaks mincemeat and sausages and their voices into scratchy gloomy ditties and sombre songs

walter benjamin (4) identified the revolutionary potential of the fragment in 1936, and in the current political climate of economic rationalism where compassion and social responsibility are less fashionable than ever dan zero attempts to establish that there is, now more than ever, an urgent need for an avant garde

although constituted by doubt and lack and whilst the entire world of images and men is always ready to collapse into a heap at the click of a mouse or a touch of the screen in the realm of dan zero's art we are able to begin to embrace our mortality, our human incompleteness and imperfection, and perhaps we can see a glimmer of a possibility of how they may become the raw material of personal and social change and a meaningful whole