Thinking emptiness

Our Network aims to stimulate cross-disciplinary fertilisation of methodological approaches to place and space through site-based workshops and reflective symposia; to produce new understandings of place and space; to generate genuinely interdisciplinary methodologies that can be introduced to the wider academic and cultural sphere. Our workshops are not 'sharing' events, or attempts to see the world through each other's eyes, but take the form of 'fieldwork' recognisable to scientists, social scientists and artists. We are not interested in discovering the meaning or defining the character of site, but rather in producing multiple sites through our various disciplinary practices. What happens when we people site? What kind of place do we practice through our particular, self-aware practices? This is not new. From the antiquarians roaming the British countryside in the company of artists to the Boyle Family fieldwork of the 1960s through to the Brith Gof/archaeology projects of the 1990s, site invites collaborative action.

The Network’s specific focus on emptiness is a provocation of sorts. We all 'know' emptiness when we see, hear and feel it, yet clearly it is not empirically 'true'. Our focus on emptiness refers obliquely to Derridean presence and, also, Auge’s meditations on non-space. Rather than void, absence or undifferentiated space, however, emptiness calls up the mathematical potentiality of zero and the very material ‘emptiness’ of the physical world on a subatomic level. That is, most of what we touch is made up of truly empty space. Yet, emptiness is also that which contains all binary oppositions (-1 / +1) and is, therefore, complete. In set theory, the iterative observation of the empty set – {} – always already performatively produces something from nothing. To consider {} we have to frame it {{}}. There's also the Buddhist connotations of emptiness, as explored in Nagarjuna's second-century AD discussions of sunyata. This is absolutely a performative emptiness that argues against any fixed, interior individual identity. We might also consider practical emptiness across the disciplines represented by the Network, from the potentiality of the blank canvas or empty stage, the seemingly evacuated landscape or the excavated site: emptiness as a series of moments in the life cycles of material culture.

We all have specific takes on emptiness. In the context of this Network, Angela Piccini's was informed through her participation in the Locative Media workshops organised by Andrew Patterson. In 2004, he invited a range of artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, programmers, cultural commentators to participate in a week-long fieldwork exercise at Rautatiesema railway station, Helsinki. Angela was invited after Andrew saw her 2003 Guttersnipe project. In Helsinki Angela wished to do more work with litter, but Andrew told her she wouldn't find any as the station was so clean, empty. It wasn't. Yet, there were specific circumstances that produced a sense of emptiness, that hid the various dwellings of the place.

Mike Pearson was there, too, and with PhD student Lotta Svinhufvud worked on an archaeology of the station's sounds.

Other Network partners think and do 'emptiness' differently.....

Practising emptiness

Our diverse practices need to grapple with emptiness variously, from emptiness qua emptiness through to the plays of plentitude through to the romantic pull of ghostings (the pressure on your back in a darkened stairwell, the whisperings of the past in the landscape) through to questions of erasure/memory/forgetting/obliteration/inscription.

At the same time, we need to maintain an awareness that the very act of writing on these pages gradually erases the memory of being-there, while at the same time this writing produces site anew:

'the mark of deletion is not, however, a "merely negative symbol". That deletion is the final writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible. Is effaced while still remaining legible, while making visible the very idea of the sign....it de-limits ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism' (Derrida, J. 1980. Of Grammatology. Trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 23).

Writing emptiness

"an exercise in telling otherwise" (Ricoeur 1999)

We might use this page as a crucible of emptiness? Add what you will.

What might we do with the generative tensions between:

• an interest in how emptiness is itself performative, that is, how emptiness produces itself;
• how human and non-human agents produce emptiness;
• how human and non-human agents might perform, enact (as distinct from performativity) emptiness as a salvo to the alienating modern desire for presence;
• the relationship between 'lack' and emptiness, viewed through the lens of interdisciplinarity - which in itself produces lack via its reification of disciplinarity and the notion that the inter is neither one thing nor the other.

If - and this assumes an agreement in the network that might not be the case - we aim to inform non-representational ways of experiencing site/place/locale/network through our working weekends (perhaps a more satisfactory term than workshop) how might writing in proximity of emptiness contribute to this process? What modes of writing are we comfortable with? Might various voices help to foreground the gaps. the unknowability of place?

it is a question of inventing apparatuses such that citizens [and places] of whom [we] speak [and with which we act] can be effectively present, in order to pose questions to which their interest makes them sensible, to demand explanations, to posit conditions, to suggest modalities, in short to participate in the invention'