The most enigmatic of Tót’s strategies is Rain, the repeated typing of the “/” character, often with a built-in duality (“my rain, your rain”), or a distinct character based on the image it overlays, or the way the slash symbol is formatted (“inside rain,” ”isolated rain”). The Rain works’ carefully arranged typings are a time consuming, rhythmic activity that, with their attendant clacking keys, is the sonic equivalent of a rain shower. In Tót’s world, anything can be subjected to rain, from Budapest's Heroes' Square (a frequent victim of Tót’s downpours, and a loaded site in Hungary’s national identity), to world tourist locations and even photographs of domestic interiors. They bear a certain resemblance to his zeros, which sometimes also appear as rain—they can be perceived as zeros collapsed or on their sides, or as even further negations of zero, agents of division.

The Rains often emphasize Tót’s feelings of isolation from the goings-on of the Western art world. It is hard to determine whether having rain visited upon you is a blessing or a curse—and most probably, it is neither—they are only typed because it makes him glad. Rain may simply be a way of treating and distinguishing differences of time and space, in Geneva it is raining in a certain way, in New York another way, and in Budapest, the sky may be totally clear. This conception of rain echoes Tót’s photographic doublings, works that convey the kind of doublespeak artists had to negotiate in order to secure a minimum of creative freedom. In duplicating himself, Tót has an imagined audience, whereas in his Rains, he imagines other climes where his audience may exist.

The foundational strategy of Tót’s conceptual oeuvre is the statement “I am glad if…”, first found in a 1971 postcard reading, “I was glad to print this sentence,” and then in his early series of photo and video performances, Joys. In Joys, the artist proclaims his gladness at enacting the mundane or absurd, such as “I am glad if I can take one step.” In the context of 1970s Hungary, these Joys were subtly subversive—when Tót’s first Joys video performances were screened in the presence of a state censor, the film was confiscated and destroyed for its tongue-in-cheek gladness. In other instances, his unique blend of sincerity and mockery is more pronounced, as in his “I am glad if I can read Lenin,” a text which accompanies a photograph of Tót reading a book of Lenin’s writings so closely that it obscures his own face. These photos are representative of a distinct Eastern European genre of performance, the “photo performance,” actions performed for one time documentation and afterwards distributed as photo prints, though Tót’s international ambitions are clear in his use of English for his Joys series.

A second, less performance-centric sub-series of Gladnesses depicts Tót as doubled, such as I am glad if we can look at each other (1971). Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch suggests that these photographs represent the “...self having become subordinate to surface. Both selves are surface.” In the flattening that happens, he assumes what Thomas Strauss, his collaborator of the late 70s, called his “laughing mask,” a logofied visage of permanent mirth regardless of circumstance. Gladness frequently appears in combination with Tót’s other motifs, “I am glad if I can type zeros” or “I am glad if I can type rains,” providing a raison d'être for their obsessive repetitions.

The Zero in Tót’s work is both counterpart and foil to Gladness, a kind of happy nihilism that pervades Tót’s work of the 70s and seems heir to the disillusionment of 1956’s failed uprising. In a characteristic doubling of Tót, it is a cypher in both senses, the numerical and the cryptographic. It represents nothing, but also serves as a coded language; legible to the neo-Dadaist tendencies of the Fluxus and mail art communities, but opaque and nonsensical to the repressive bureaucracy, to which it is legible only as document, not as artwork. Tót’s zeros take on a variety of forms, often repetitiously typewritten on pages or postcards, other times stamped or printed, and still other times, occupying his demonstration banners and placards, strung into nothing sentences such as “0000 000 00. 00000-0000 000: 000000!”

Along with his own face, the zero would become his totem, the sign of his self-proclaimed Zero Tendency, by which he was recognized in the mail art community, as his ubiquitous Zeropost stamps would attest. Tót’s zero lives as a signifier alongside the great conceptual artist logos of the period, and its iconic nature inspired tributes as far away as San Francisco, where Carl E. Loeffler and Bill “Picasso” Gaglione recorded their own zero sound poem Homage to Endre Tót in 1977. Fluxus member and polymath Ken Friedman argues that Tót’s importance lies in giving “a discrete and particular voice to the emptiness of the void,” a practice in the lineage of Arabic and Indic conceptions of the zero as a key to transcendence. At the very least the zero is the symbol of a universal language, understood across cultures where little else would be.