The Materiality of Nothing

14th July 2016, 10.30 - 17.00

Lancaster University, LICA Building , C01 Design Studio

A one day symposium at Lancaster University bringing together practice and perspectives on negotiating the absent, unseen and unknown across art, science and social science.

Across the arts and sciences that we call ‘zero’ ,‘absence’ or ‘nothing’ remains a potent and powerful entity shaping the way we make sense of the world. It is staggering to reflect that 95% of our universe is invisible to human sensing; the provocation of the unknown and unseen is arguably at the core of creative thinking in the arts and sciences.This event brings together a range perspectives on materialising the absent, unseen and unknown to reflect on the following questions:

How can ‘nothing’ be embodied?

How does it feel to encounter the immaterial and how might we negotiate it?

How might mathematics - as a speculative 'messenger' to and from the unsensed - be understood as a medium for generating touch and relationship (or not)?

How might absence, uncertainty be used as provocations and tool for creative thinking?

What can this offer in terms of understanding relationship and non-relationship, affect and non affect?

The event will provide an opportunity to extend conversations initiated by the AHRC funded ‘Dark Matters’ project which considered the provocations around Thresholds of Imperceptibility. It aims to building on the success of a workshop at Lancaster (2015) and to develop a network of researchers working with the interstices between presence and absence from the arts and humanities, the social and physical sciences.

Speakers include: Anna Lovatt ( SM University, Dallas) , Gary Sangster ( Director Arts Catalyst) Charlie Gere ( Lancaster University) Bron Szerzinski ( Lancaster University) Liz deFreitas (Manchester Metropolitan University) Rebecca Fortnum ( Middlesex University) Ian Bailey and Laura Kormos ( Lancaster University).

Registration: There will be is a small registration fee of £15 to cover lunch and refreshments throughout the day. Please register via eventbrite. and pay the fee via this link

Any questions ? Email sarah.casey@lancaster.ac.uk

Call for drawings, notebooks and things we think with : As part of the event there will be a session on Negotiating the Imperceptible. We invite
workshop participants to submit small drawings , notebooks or other object they use in thinking around the intangible.

To submit a work, please send an image and description email Sarah Casey: sarah.casey@lancaster.ac.uk by July 1st 2016

Speaker details

Anna Lovatt

Scholar in Residence, Meadows school of the Arts, SMU , Dallas

Almost Nothing: The Early Work of Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle has described his work as an attempt to “create something that begins at ground zero or is connected with ground zero,” with the aim of engendering “a more profound understanding of what ground zero is.” But during the mid 1970s, critics eviscerated his work on the grounds of its physical slightness and near-invisibility. This paper will trace Tuttle's career from his early engagement with the artists of the Betty Parsons Gallery (including Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly), to his scandalous retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. I will argue that Tuttle's pursuit of the zero degree can be understood as part of a career-long interrogation of the practice of drawing.

Liz de Freitas

Professor of STEM Education, Manchester Metropolitan University

Speculative Mathematics

The term ‘speculative mathematics’ is likely to evoke a variety of quite different images – everything from Pythagorean mystics, to less cosmic but still audacious acts of pure mathematics. The mystic makes an ontological claim – for instance, the Pythagorean declaration that “all is number” – or perhaps invests in an “absolute necessity” that finds solace in the mathematics of the transfinite (Meillessoux, 2008). Oddly, such projects often misrecognize the creative, material and indeed speculative activity of mathematics itself, treating it only as an axiomatics that serves the logical foundations of thought and reason (Deleuze, 1994). In such cases, the diverse material activities of mathematics – mammalian or otherwise – are overlooked. If the act of speculation also plugs into the body, refuses reason in creative ways, and works on the material plane, then we should look for how speculative mathematics pursues this kind of artful (often monstrous) technicity as a kind of media event. This presentation discusses possible proposals for a speculative mathematics.

Charlie Gere

Professor of Media Theory and History, Lancaster University

Fukushima-Hiroshima-Sellafield

In this presentation I start with a recent visit to a Japanese garden in Eskdale and to Sellafield to think through some ideas about the limits of language in relation to nuclear power and weaponry. I look at the work of the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho and the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, to think about the point at which language fails in relation to such phenomena.

Bron Szerszynski

Reader in Sociology, Lancaster University

Gary Sangster

Director Arts Catalyst

Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing will consider the escalation of transdisciplinary research and collaboration amongst artists and scientists, its impact within those fields and on the boarder economies and publics, as well as the barriers and deleterious effects of these new strategic engagements amongst different fields of knowledge.

Two Arts Catalyst projects focused on loss, disappearance, and invisibility, Graveyard of Lost Species, a project that both explores and documents loss in the Thames Estuary, and the Nuclear Culture research project exhibition, Perpetual Uncertainty, that considers the residual effects of nuclear radiation and the notion of deep time, provide insight into complex issues of material presence and absence. Apropos of Nothing is about the pursuit of meaning and its elusiveness, its imprecision, within the data-driven, information-based knowledge framework of our current socio-political economy.

Laura Kormos

Senior Lecturer in Physics, Lancaster University

Ian Bailey

Lecturer in Accelerator Physics, Lancaster University

Detecting the invisible world

The physical universe contains enigmatic particles, some real and some hypothetical, that have tangible effects on the day-to-day operation of the universe and yet for all practical purposes are invisible using our usual detection methods. This talk introduces some of the ways in which we can "observe" and thus shed light on some of the shyest constituents of the universe.

Rebecca Fortnum

Professor of Fine Art Middlesex University

The apophatic in a/my material art practice

Within apophatic discourse is art, and the tradition of painting in particular, related to discourses of silence? If as William Franke says ‘American abstract art was once in the vanguard of the [new apocalyptic apophatism]’, what does this means for work now, after that high point of modernism and the move to more discursive (even cacophonous) forms of contemporary art practice? Can current painting and drawing, that deals both in images and stories, texts and voices, maintain the silence it has preserved over centuries? I will discuss these issues with reference to my own art practice.