for this project I had a briefing to produce a photograph of nothing, and if came in with a frame with nothing in it then I didn’t understand the briefing. By responding to hiedegger’s discussions around nothingness and being I create this piece in response to the following extract:

“What is Nothing, anyway?

It's not anything, and it's not something, yet it isn't the negation of something, either. Traditional logic is no help, since it merely regards all negation as derivative from something positive. So, Heidegger proposed, we must abandon logic in order to explore the character of Nothing as the background out of which everything emerges.

Carefully contemplating Nothing in itself, we begin to notice the importance and vitality of our own moods. Above all else, Nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread {Ger. Angst}. This deep feeling of dread, Heidegger held, is the most fundamental human clue to the nature and reality of Nothing.“

As Heidegger proposes, nothing is the background of which everything emerges. So as a result of this logic, I attempted to bring everything to the table, by condensing all the elements of everything into 3 catagories: air, water, and compost. The 4 atomic elements which compose up of everything, or can be negated together to produce something else are: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, which is in all 3 of these properties. Now by abandoning logic, to which Hiedegger says to, I have concerted a rational by showing everything th only missing is, nothing. Therefore by showing everything, I have achieved the most optimal way to capture nothing.

Now I have managed to capture nothing, how can I make this into a photograph without actually taking a photograph of these 3 elements I have placed onto a plinth? This plinth is now a photograph is the only proof of the piece, however debated if I should have photographed this at all as it would derive from the negation of the brief. I decided to take and show it int order to represent a visual stimulus to the idea just for this piece as a document, but it will still exist as an experience.

This plinth is a moving image, as it s an image we see moving in time. As for the properties of a moving image or film, the film consist of a several photographs at the state of a particular shutter speed, and it is then our consciousness that converts these photographs into a moving image. So how can I extract the external variables of time and our experience of the object visually in order to suspend this moving image into a photograph? Well unfortunately time is an external factor to which I have had to maintain but I used strobe lighting in the space as I asked people to enter the room one by one. Based upon the colour theory our use of sight is only utilised when light is introduced into the setting. BY extracting the light, I extract the visual stimuli of the object, therefore each flat of the light is the moment in which the spectator takes a visual photograph of the plinth.

Alongside the plinth, I played a sound which I produced in the space of this site specific ‘photograph’. Derived from the ideas of Alvin Lucifer’s ‘I am Sitting in a Room’, I appreciated the ambeincace of ‘nothing’ in one space nd how that had been made into a reverbrative sound. Therefore, I recorded the sound of ‘nothing’, which as established by John Cage is impossible, in this room and played the recording in the space. I then recorded the original recording playing in the space, and then played this recording in the space and repeated this process 10 times. I then left this sound playing alongside the plinth as people entered the space as their experience of my ‘photograph of nothing.’