Da Void of Nothing

Abstract

How to begin to talk about “nothing”? …Space! The vast expanse of “empty space’ is not actually empty. It is not nothing. The distance between phenomena in space is a part of the phenomenon of space. This characteristic, the interconnectedness of, and the gaps between phenomena Timothy Morton calls “the Mesh” in defining “Hyperobjects”. Utilizing the phenomenology of the Hyperobject, which attempts to describe the invisible and visible threads of climate change, the visibility and invisibility of other systems can also be put into question. Blackness, as a phenomenon, is contingent upon, disrupts, and expands beyond the systems it is enmeshed with. Blackness is a Hyperobject. This work defines Blackness as a Hyperobject while allowing it to perform a dissolution of its own edges, in the manner of Hyperobjects. Recalling Morton, Moten, and Motown, this work seeks to decenter conventional methods of reading which render the systems invisible, a refusal that (re)performs the disappearance, making visible the reader/viewer, instead of defining the constraints of the subject. If ‘Nothing’ is ‘space’, it requires a repositionable awareness to notice that the void is not empty, because you are in it.