Notes Towards Silence

“A Blank of the Visible Universe” is both a diagram and a non-linear poem. As a diagram, it uses the language of mathematical certainty, geometric precision and scientific ideation to arrive at absurd impossible conclusions.

For example, the kinetic sculptural element in the middle is a Venn diagram made with moving clock parts so that each clock hand corresponds to each smaller category in the diagram. It tries to mathematically formulate a recipe for the perfect overlap of a self and an other; a source and reception; and an artist and viewer. The resultant formula is a knotted, implausible and yet poetic linguistic formulation.

Poetry is also attempted in the textual labels of the circular diagrams interspersed with clock hands keeping an account of seconds. These poems may be read through many non-linear pathways, breaking the temporal continuity of the text by introducing the synchronous reading of an image. However, regardless of the pathways and their seemingly opposed contents, the meaning more or less remain the same i.e. there is no escape from time.

This time is both kept and lost by the clocks across this diagram. It is the same synchronous time, and we know each passing second from the next. However, there is no measure of time in the installation, no way to tell which hour or second is passing, thus expanding an everlasting present.

Time again is addressed through the idioms one uses to differentiate it. One of the graphs in the diagram contains the often contrasting verbs used on time such as find time/lose time, own time/free time and so on. However, despite the attempts of language, it cannot be differentiated.