MILAN.- In experimental physics, dead time is the time that a measuring detector uses, after receiving an external impulse, to perform a new survey. For detection systems that record discrete events, such as particle and nuclear detectors, the dead time is the time after each event during which the system is not able to record another event. It is the instant immediately following a stimulus during which a device is insensitive to further stresses. This is also the case for the flash of a camera, which takes a few seconds to recharge between one shot and the next.

Dead Time is also a synonym for downtime. Downtime means that a system or service is not working at a given time. The term is usually used in discussions about the provision of information technology systems or services. Downtime is also known as idle time. Business managers and those in positions of responsibility plan for downtime, which is called planned downtime. Otherwise, unplanned downtime has a negative effect on productivity and business processes. In the provision of services, downtime, or dead time, and its opposite, uptime, are often covered in what is called a service level agreement (SLA), which spells out the extent to which a client can depend on the service.

Finally, dead time is Temps mort. Often used in cinema this is perhaps the most characteristic of Antonioni’s stylistic effects and Anne Carson explains it like so: ”When everything has been said, when the scene appears to be finished, there is what comes afterwards… The actors continue out of inertia into moments that seem “dead”. The actor commits”errors… Later [Antonioni] took to letting the shot run even after the actors had made their exit. As if for a while something might be still rustling around there in an empty doorway.”1

In Cally Spooner’s second solo exhibition with ZERO... a variety of elements co-exist in a state of waiting, and this waiting could also be considered to be the event. An exposed partition wall, a crime novel in progress, a sporadic soundtrack for the room and, through open windows, the road outside. All talk in different ways about the process of being backstage and remaining accidental. They imagine how to tell the difference between what is alive and what is deadened under a particularly ferocious social, political climate.


1 A. Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005)