Looking for the ghost in the machine we instead find the designer. We find ourselves, staring back. This is you, the abyss your baggage brought.
Writing about blank art you are confronted with the theater of your skull, your dome's skeletal movie screen. It's called "prisoner's cinema," a useful term for art. Eyes phosphene in darkness, in vacuity your mind alights. You project. Blankness rewards the already full mind, handing the viewer back to themselves, allowing all the self-satisfied self-congratulations they can self-muster. Art abhors vacuum. You cannot kill content if you tried. Because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al.
[Because] not knowing is unacceptable, and rejection would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.
The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. ...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.
The tension: whether this beacon actually broadcasts idea. Or simply clears space for fill, me, this, now."
In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning.
