When thinking of the concept of containers, I am not only interested in their physical and metaphorical value but also in the empty space filling them up. They are structures that actively shape our understanding of absence and the human materialistic approach. I will examine through the research materials of ‘absentology’ how an empty space can be seen as potential, as an opportunity for transformation and new narratives. The urgency of the topic lays in its opposing nature to the current productivity-oriented society and constant information flow. It claims a moment of stillness, a different approach towards viewing graphic artefacts in the urban landscape and questions function as a tool, providing access to new points for engagement. This essay is based on the relation of the container (in this context can be any kind of bigger design element or structure that holds others in itself, for example a layout, a publication, a visual identity) and the unfilled space inside of it in the fields of visual designs, the glorification of the accidental and of the absent, and thinking about the potential fear of emptiness. Through this process I aim to explore the question: how can design celebrate the accidental absence sourced from containers in the urban landscape? Methodologies include reading relevant (academic) texts, listening to interviews, engaging with movies, photographs, pieces of design, analysing real life examples, scanning, collecting and archiving.
existing in a graphic overload,
noticing what was there,
thinking of what could have been there
Being brought up and spending most of my life in an Eastern European capital, the view of a graphically crumbling street feels familiar and creates a weird sense of home. Seeing the place of a missing poster, stickers covering up each other on a streetlamp or faded labels in the window of a store I experience excitement and delight to see that these pieces of design grow and change with us, I see them as signs of the area having a soul. They can be a strategy for artistic imagination or reimagination, serve as a tool for expressing opinions or even silencing. I am interested in the idea of highlighting graphic events that are not the main subject in the general discussion but the counter parts of it. For me, unfilled spaces become more interesting when they are created unintentionally, for example the ‘non-places’ in architecture, originally defined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé. I enjoy spending my commuting time with looking for design components of the landscape that could be considered damaged or broken. My eyes are mostly drawn towards small scale elements that are incomplete or imperfect, for example posters that have been partially torn off or single use public transport tickets on the floor, barely legible by now. I find beauty in these accidental artefacts because they gain an additional layer of design and through that a new narrative as well. In connection to the fetishized role of objects in our culture, the research will also touch up on the concept of the container in relation to absence through The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's the idea of the ‘accidental emptiness’ that I would like to explore in the coming chapters and rephrase it to absence in the context of design to give a more positive connotation to it, since the term empty reflects a materialistic view, it proposes that something is missing instead of not being. Many times, this new design decision means a part of the original being taken away, creating a sense of absence or loss but this idea of something not being present or getting covered up is what makes these pieces extremely exciting. They get a layer of mystery added to them and become somewhat interactive for the viewer. Questions start to arise:
‘What was originally there?’;
‘What will end up being there?’;
‘Was there anything at all to begin with?’.
Honouring the idea of the ‘graphic event’ proposed in the book Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design, this bouquet of thoughts aims to emphasise the radical state of flux that graphic matters experience through being exposed to the public and the urban landscape. James Dyer and Nick Deakin write: “We define a graphic event as the dynamic condition of a graphic that, by its nature, evades design.”
a
Dyer, James and Deakin, Nick. Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. Onomatopee, 2022. Page 13.
It's this dynamic state that fuels the absence which I recognise as a phenomenon deserving more attention and care. One could say that a poster being half ripped off on the street means the end of its life from a design perspective but looking at it through Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy it's just the next step in the object’s life. Whitehead in his philosophy talks about interconnectedness and emphasising change, the transformative method of extensive abstraction, how things ever change and become. In the above-mentioned book James Williams describes it as “Process philosophy is a philosophy that prioritises events as things that are always changing and becoming different – and this is the important bit – in multiple ways. Such that whenever you fix an event in a structure, a definition, identity, a picture or a representation, you lose something that’s the key. So process philosophy is asking: how can we try as hard as we can to not lose that dynamic, how do we keep things in motion?”
c
Dyer, James and Deakin, Nick. Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. Onomatopee, 2022. Page 35.
Thinking through this view, the accidental absence created in design can become a new opportunity for the next layer, an open call for transformation.
material being flexible at the core,
defining a territory of its own,
accessible for so many,
yet overlooked by most
I first started thinking about empty spaces in relation to a silver locket that my mom gave me years ago. It’s an object that offers a hollow space to be filled with something or to be filled with nothing. Since its main purpose is to hold something, it occurred to me how important of a design choice it was to make it empty in the first place, to create this object at its core, to make it a container.
“The first cultural device was probably a recipient … Many theorisers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).”
d
K. Le Guin, Ursula. Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Atlantic Press, 1989. Page 166.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin writes about containers as the first protagonist amongst inventions in human evolution. She positions them on the timeline before the hero stories of ape men killing animals as a primary source of food: “[…] with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.”
e
K. Le Guin, Ursula. Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Atlantic Press, 1989. Page 167.
The focus on the first tools humans invented for basic survival needs gives the topic of unfilled containers an urgency of grounding in human culture, returning to the beginning and understanding where the idea of the container stems from: the need to collect, categorise and preserve. The need for a container means a need for a designated empty space to be utilised later. It is a tool to shape our surroundings, practice organisation and selection: include and exculde.
The voice of the material/matter is also an important aspect when defining the container, and realising how the material in itself contains meaning since it is a result of concious choice. In The Material Kinship Reader Kris Dittel reflects on the relationship dynamics of human and material: “material was made more alive through social encounter, by being passed down the supply chain.”
f
Dittel, Kris and Edwards, Clementine. The Material Kinship Reader. Onomatopee, 2022. Page 3.
It allows the object to be shaped and morphed after being called finished and also holds the object’s history in itself. This material aspect was a core element of my research at the start since it determines how a physical graphic element can be transformed. The different scratches, marks and stains are all new layers that alterate the original piece through time and social encounter, through the accidental – a phenomenon so present in our everyday lives but less utilised as a design tool. Often times it creates absence in the original which can create a negative conotation: it’s interpreted as faulty, broken, disfunctional. I aim to shed a positive light on them, to participate in a more forward thinking and experimental discourse.
a piece of the whole kept so neatly isolated from the rest,
being held as a special secret,
it’s only the absence of it being present
The conscious choice of empty space being applied can be seen in many different areas, for example in the typographic layouts of Stéphane Mallarmé’s concrete poetry from the end of the 19th century. Here absence is a vital element of the poetic genre and the movement, it is what makes it surprising and radical, it liberates language from the conventions of typography adding a new layer of visual language to the content.
To take this new approach of layouts one step further, Marcel Broodthaers Belgian poet, filmmaker and visual artist took Mallarmé’s book titled Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) and translated it to a purely visual experience through detaching it from the page completely. He created a binary system on the page where language becomes rhythm and typography becomes alterations of a single shape of a rectangle.
The relation of these two works is a great example of the interconnectedness of their visual language and how they resonate with the process philosophy, how they both apply the same attitude but on different scales. To understand the absence being present in Broodthaers’ work one must take a different approach to it and try to grasp why is it so powerful. Prof. Shannon Mattern explains this view in her lecture titled
How to Map Nothing: Geographies of Suspension
g
“How to Map Nothing: Geographies of Suspension.” Youtube, uploaded by The Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment, 5 Feb. 2021.
when she is talking about scientist examining black holes: “Scientist couldn’t directly look at nothing to see something, they had to listen and look around the void. […] You have to look, listen and feel around it to grasp all that holds it, surrounds it, feeds it.” Later in the lecture she broadens this idea to the comparison of something and nothing: “We have to acknowledge the countless somethings that make that nothing imaginable.” So in order to understand the importance of the absence, one has to look at the content as something that claims and deserves space to fully blossom in, meaning the absence is a vital ingredient for the whole entity for a full bloom.
Looking on the counter side of embracing absence, there is the fear of the empty space (horror vacui) which in visual arts means that every possible space is filled up with something, leaving as little emptiness reviled as possible. It originates from an Aristotelian theory that states that it is nature who escapes the emptiness (“natura abhorret a vacuo” meaning “nature abhors an empty space”), just how all gas and liquid tries to fill up any space. This approach was represented by cartographers mainly from the 16th to the early 18th century where they filled up the blank parts of the map with decorative lettering or imaginary sea creatures. In retrospect it is hypothesised that it could be a result of the cartographer’s fear from being perceived as someone who is not familiar with some parts of the world they are depicting. In our current society this resonates with the need for filling every moment with some sort of sound avoiding silence, with making sure that every opportunity is used to advertise something and by our need for immediate answers for any occurring question. It turned into a constant need for brain stimulation, a continuous information flow and an urban view highly packed with the advertisement fingerprints of capitalism.
The first image to capture a human presence on the street focuses on the counter side of this though. Opposing the previous examples, showcasing an accidental absence, Le Boulevard du Temple (Paris, 1838), a daguerreotype by Louis Daguerre, works with revealing and concealing people. The most interesting aspect of this photograph is that it depicts the busy Parisian intersection almost completely empty since, during the about 10 minutes exposure time for Daguerre’s silver coated copper plate in his camera, nobody stayed still long enough to be captured aside from that one person getting their shoes polished. Through Daguerre’s example it is visible how the absence is a powerful tool in (re)drawing the urban landscape.
“This democratic aspect, the fact that the camera is indifferent in reproducing whatever the photographer frames, […].”
h
Salvo. Side Show. Salvo, 2015. Page 15.
The camera as a container is inevitably filling up the absence that it holds in its nature when taking pictures. The photographer framing an image actively includes thus excludes a list of things. Design processes are streams of choices being made: while choosing one thing the designer (sub)consciously decides not to implement even more.
The modernist composition 4’33” from 1952 by the experimental composer John Cage writes an interesting sidenote on the margin of absence. It is a piece written for any kind and number of instruments, purposefully meant not to use them. The piece is intended to test the audience’s attitude towards silence; furthermore, to question the existence of absolute form of it. I find it fascinating how while the musicians remain silent, the unchoreographed noise from the audience (breathing, coughing, squeaking etc.) becomes a part of the piece, which closely connects it to dadaism too. Thanks to this variable element, it cannot be played twice the same way, making every performance a fully unique experience. This approach showcases how the collaboration of the accidental and the absent is a transformative design tool. It can also be projected onto the visual design scenery in the urban landscape, where the material gets morphed through the public.
there is nothing to grasp, to hold onto,
yet I’m eager to see and understand it,
or even if I can’t understand it,
I want to fabulate my own narrative
“Absentology: what does it mean? First coined in a 2014 article by sociologist Jennifer Croissant, absentology is an epistemology of things that aren’t there.”
h
Lovász, Ádám and Horváth, Márk. “A Brief Introduction to Absentology.” Sūdō Journal. Vol. 1, 2019.
I look at absentology through the lenses of design and aim to make sense of it in a way to rethink the material aspect of design objects. This part of the research is mainly fed by the Absentology Collective’s published materials by Ádám Lovász and Márk Horváth, two Hungarian contemporary philosophers.
“Is it philosophy? Is it art? Is it cultural studies? Such questions of methodology have certain, relative importance. But labels can only get us so far. The actual absence of objects demands a transdisciplinary perspective that does not get itself mixed up in boring debates relating to the borders between scientific disciplines.”
j
Ibid.
Regardless of it not being defined as a certain field of study, it’s a tool to make the unknown visible, to create a presence of the forever unknown in the present time through ‘agnotology’, which is the social science of doubt, ignorance and not knowing. I believe this is why some graphic events are looked at as unwanted or unsettling, such as a missing street sign or an out-of-order vending machine. There is a component of unknown in these events which creates uncertainty and can be seen as unfunctional or broken. They often become something to be fixed or removed, a chore to get done. One purpose of absentology is to raise awareness of the inaccessibility of things which in design reflects as a (partially) missing function or content. For example a poster being covered up with another one, then torn off, road signs being faded away from the concrete, or an advertisement missing from a tram stop so only the lit up frame remains as a placeholder.
In a Lachmacun radio interview Lovász and Horváth mention the phenomenology of ruins, and how some of them can take the role of a romanticised location such as old castles. On the other hand, the less appealing and inviting versions such as the abandoned factories, train stations and mental hospitals are considered as grey areas of a city, ghosts of the past, places to stay away from.
k
Lovász, Ádám and Horváth, Márk. Svādhyāya – Önkutatólabor: Az abszentológiáról [with Lovász Ádám and Horváth Márk]. Lahmacun Radio, 13 July 2022,
They are also seen as dysfunctional since they don’t fulfil their original purpose anymore (maybe they never did) or they are not completely beneficial for the society and are only inhabited by non-human existence, which in itself I believe is a function. I see them as time capsules, as landmarks of the past being actively excluded from the present. They relate to the absent visual language; they are left with the accidental alone hence they are undergoing an intriguing transformation. One needs a different approach to be able to see these places as valuable, “one needs to have their relationship with absence heterogenized in order for the perspective of absentology to be enhanced.”
a
Ibid.
These abandoned places are often referred to as non-places which term I first came across in the Future of Ghosts magazine in Horatiu Sovaiala’s chapter titled Supermodern ghosts and architectural fossils – a visual anthropology of the ‘non-space’. He describes them as “spaces with erased and/or shifting histories and identities. ‘Non-places’ are out-of-joint spaces found in some form of existential limbo, infrastructural and architectural fossils that remain, nevertheless, pervasively resonant with contemporary culture”
b Sovaiala, Horatiu. “Supermodern ghosts and architectural fossils – a visual anthropology of the ‘non-space’ ” The Future of. Vol.1, No. 2, 2022. Page 17.
Later, he also adds that “isolation should not be mistaken for emptiness or nothingness”.
c
Ibid.
The term was originally defined in 1992 by Marc Augé, French anthropologist, in his book titled Non-places: An introduction to Supermodernity, where he elaborates on how contemporary urban architecture reproduces the time passed in reverse by the spectacles of ruins: “What we perceive in ruins is the impossibility of imagining completely what they would have represented to those who saw them before they crumbled. They speak not of history but of time, pure time.”
d
Augé, Marc. Non-places: An introduction to Supermodernity. Verso, 1995. Page XVII.
From this idea I will reflect on the “impossibility of imagining completely” what these identities were like before time left its mark on them. This narrative is present in the absence in the graphic world, through which the leftovers of the designs communicate in a broad and mysterious way, making it somewhat difficult or even impossible to decode their message. They stand in the city as a puzzle with missing pieces that are awaiting to be recognised by somebody. They are blank spaces giving a canvas to the passer-by to create their own narratives through them, maybe even to use them for something they were not intended to be used for. “It’s the difference, not design, as such that is essential to the graphic event. Difference is felt when we are encountering the limits of a design. It is where spontaneity of graphics – rather than the bounded certainties of design – are most prominent.”
e
Dyer, James and Deakin, Nick. Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. Onomatopee, 2022. Page 57.
They are reminders of the flux that keeps the city alive, yet they remain in the hidden background of the scenery.
These graphical elements are also entities protesting against the immediacy society is so used to. There are either answers given straight away or tools are provided for finding them within seconds, leaving no air for doubt. I find beauty and excitement in the unknown and in the art of fabulation. Through standing so resilient in a screaming city, these visuals communicate the need for exploration and experimentation, a call for designers to collaborate with their surroundings.
they are whispers of the past,
ideas for the future,
a designated piece of the landscape,
asking to be recognised
Considerably the most visible governmental measure that plays an active part in creating absence on streets is graffiti removal. Matt McCormick created an experimental documentary in 2001 that elevates this practice to an artistic level titled The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.
g “The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.” Vimeo. Uploaded by McCormick, Matt, 3 Nov. 2007.
It talks about graffiti removal as an “intriguing art movement at the beginning of the 21st century with roots of abstract expressionism, minimalism and Russian constructivism”
h
Ibid.
and associates it as a progressive continuation of these movements. He draws connection between “the balanced composition of densely layered free-floating shapes and areas of colour”
i
Ibid.
in the streets and the works of Rothko and Malevich with tasteful irony. This subconscious visual exercise “will always make a decisive rejection of recognisable imagery and in fact, repress communication entirely.”
j
Ibid.
While it is an active practice of silencing, it also creates a new canvas for something new to take over the absence on the walls. In an online lecture he reflects on the documentary as “an encouragement for people to look at their surroundings in a way that is not predetermined”
k
“Matt McCormick and Avalon Kalin on The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.” Vimeo, uploaded by McCormick, Matt, 8 March 2022.
and explains how “the foundation of the idea stems from the overarching concept of an appreciation of one’s surroundings.”
b
Ibid.
I find this act of regulating the urban surroundings an alternative approach to design, to practice reduction and filtering. At the same time, I see it as a counterproductive vicious circle that creates platform to what it is trying to oppress.
On an architectural scale these design protagonists are mesmerizingly represented in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s movie titled Homo sapiens.
c
“Homo Sapiens.” Vimeo. Uploaded by Geyrhalter film, 19 May 2021.
The whole movie is a 94-minute-long chain of still videos of non-places without any depiction of human presence. In my opinion the essence of this movie lays in its power to make the viewer slow down and focus on the smallest details while creating an intriguing, mysterious sometimes even disturbing stillness. I also found that it redefines beauty, through putting these images in the context of the cinema and takes the public on a journey where most of them otherwise would have never gone. Having the raw audio of the clips as the only sound also allows the visuals to completely take over the experience and present themselves as they are: out of order and eternally mesmerizing. Their beauty lay in their volume and unproductiveness, how they have rather a pure presence than a function.
Lovász and Horváth in the podcast episode elaborate on how the current performance-oriented society rejects these places since they are not beneficial in a monetary way and how this society actually produces what its refusing to be associated with in the first place: unproductivity.
d
Lovász, Ádám and Horváth, Márk. Svādhyāya – Önkutatólabor: Az abszentológiáról [with Lovász Ádám and Horváth Márk]. Lahmacun Radio, 13 July 2022.
A period like this will manifest the need for absence since it will be (arguably it already is) oversaturated, just how any action-reaction force works. Or at least it will construct new understandings of (un)productivity, for example how memory can be considered as a non-present productivity since it evokes a non-present event/object/person/etc., while being able to break the linearity of time. It will manifest an urgency of slower and more detailed way of observing and a new approach to the value of productivity. A view finding value in taking a breath from the obligatory and encourage the desired. This need is exactly the driving force of this research, the need to discover the why’s and the how’s of the flux of the container and content relationship and the urge to utilize them in design.
In reflection of wondering how can design celebrate the accidental absence, the research process circulated around the importance of the void in a society where productivity and material excess are desired. Through close reading and analysing different sources a non-linear and speculative narrative came to life. The core values of it are the impossibility to imagine completely what something was like before we encountered it, the selective practice of seeing and designing, and the idea of material becoming more alive through interaction.
With all from above to take, I hope one leaves this theoretical interlude with eyes open wider and mind keener to absorb the surroundings in a more purposeful way. It is about a way of looking, a mindset and a tool for all designers to treat absence in a refreshing way. An offer to reflect on the accidental and let it happen, further embrace it when possible. While questioning the overpowering dominance of productivity in our current society, alternative ideas of function give urgency to rearrange thoughts on predetermined structures in design. The thought process aims to open a discussion between the individual and the absent design artefacts and asks the viewer to question predetermined beauty archetypes and the definition of function.