Around-ing the Void: Approaching the Unknown in Context

“Around-ing the Void” is a method for understanding entities, materials, or modes of matter that are unknown, intangible, or resistant to definition in specific contexts. 

The “void” is the ambiguity, complexity, and relational entanglement between definitions: ‘entropy’ in material experience, ‘dark water’ in scaled time, ‘contamination’ in book design. Rather than treating the unknown as a subject to be defined, this method frames it as a blank space where the unknown resides.  

Instead of directly probing into the subject, assuming its boundaries in advance, ‘around-ing’investigates its neighborhood: the surrounding relations, materials, and systems that contour it. Through sensory attention/material experiments/embodied encounters, this method approaches the unknown and depicts it without pinning it down. 

Across our projects, this tactic appears in different contexts: Shenhuan explores ‘dark water’ as a context for worlding across vast time scales; Helen uses a single drop of water to guide audiences through a journey to ‘entropic exchange’; Jiyoung translates ‘binding’ into contamination, positioning book design conventions as performative ground. 

You are lying down
Angel in the freest cosmos
Without knowing, wondering within the pond, almost drunk and suffocated.

You hold your breath
Earth, your tears is mixing the stars
What if your lungs can breath like a fish?

You wept, you wet
In the silent amniotic fluid, every new life feels lonely.
Grasping the air, letting it penetrates eagerly, with tears in the eyes, almost fall in the center dot of the void.

You roam along the canal, for you cannot arrive where you hope.
Collapse! Before the void you can never penetrate; surrender, curse of clouds.
In the spectrum of darkness, the great finale.

Transparent
Ether
Closer