Episode 3: THE TWO VOIDS
[IN THE BEGINNING]
and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
— Genesis. God, probably.
[YOUR VOID]
I’d like you to use your imagination for a minute.
I’d like you to imagine yourself floating in a void.
Just you, and absolutely nothing else.
How does it feel?
And what is this void like?
Is it a void of endless blackness, a dark nothing that extends forever…
Or is it a black white canvas of nothing. An infinite blankness?
These are the two voids. The black void and the white void.
[THEIR VOID]
Meanwhile, as you are floating in your void, whether it is a black forever or an infinite white, there is another void. The void you left behind in the solid world.
You have been subtracted, replaced by a hole.
People will notice this. Some will remark on it.
Maybe something will move in to fill the space you’ve left behind.
The laws of physics would suggest that it has the same volume, perhaps even the same density.
The laws of physics do not account for the value of the replacement.
[BLACK BOX]
The modern black box theatre space has its roots in the early 1920 where Swiss architect and artist, Adolphe Appia, proposed them as a way to explore dynamic staging and lighting and the betterment of mise-en-scene.
The avant-garde of the early 20th century rather liked this proposal and many adopted it. You can see the influence in German expressionist cinema too.
However, the majority of black box spaces have a stronger link to the early 1960s and the rise of university courses in theatre studies.
Universities rather fell in love with them. There’s a certain combination of multi-purpose utility and economic frugality that appeals to higher education.
And so, in a way, these voids started shaping the work that was made in them, and it can be argued that the black void was instrumental in creating what we now call ‘contemporary performance’.
This is the black void.
[WHITE CUBE]
If you look at pictures of galleries before the 20th century, you will likely see walls almost entirely covered with pictures of all sizes encapsulating a room that is crammed with objects.
It was the modernists that demanded more space for their images. They also saw white as a neutral background. Each painting in isolation without connotations of its neighbour.
The point here was to take each image, each painting, on its own merit, devoid of the context of the world outside it.
It is a way of saying, “this is important” and “look only at me”.
Some people like this. It allows them space and a distraction free environment.
Other people feel intimidated by it. They think it is elitist.
This is the white void.
[THEATRE]
I can still remember the first time I found myself alone in a theatre.
Just me, an empty seating bank, and that overwhelming silence.
I think it is easy to forget that most people won’t ever experience this.
Alone in the void.
[GALLERY]
I thought I was alone in the gallery. I had walked past one docent at the entrance, but they were either asleep or attempting to recall some great work in the depths of their memory.
I turned a corner and came face to face with a Rothko. One of the Seagram Murals. Deep, dark furrows on a searing red.
If anyone else had been there I would have looked and moved on.
As I was alone, I was looked at and quietly cried.
[VACUUM]
The complete absence of all matter and pressure. The word vacuum is derived from the Latin word, vacuus, which can be translated to mean ‘void’.
However, that’s the definition of a perfect vacuum. A standard that doesn’t exist in reality.
In space, most of the vacuum is filled with odd particles, free gases, yet this is as close as you get to a perfect vacuum.
Even if you were to remove everything in a laboratory setting, there would still be photons and gravitons, as well as dark energy, virtual particles, and other aspects of the quantum vacuum.
The point here is, I think, that there is always something, even when there is nothing.
[QUAKE]
It would still be an understatement to suggest that Quake was the most important part of modern video game history.
This is the ancestral Eve of modern 3D games. The engine, and its successor, the Quake II engine, ushered in a new era of possibility.
It also turned me into a game developer.
Having played the game a fair bit I heard that there was a possibility that you can make your own levels, maps, for it. You just needed an editor.
I found QuArK.
I’ll spare you the details of nights spent playing in abstract geometry, and give you the short version.
In the Quake engine you start with an infinite void. The big nothing. You then apply shapes to this void. You construct rooms using these shapes. There are floors, walls and ceilings.
When you are finished designing the map, you compile it. This process looks at the void, and looks at the void inside the void, the rooms you have made, and it renders them into a mesh. A waterproof, lightproof container for your game activities.
The infinite void, becomes a very finite space.
[UNREAL]
A little later on I fell into another 3D map building spree.
A game called Unreal Tournament, a first person shooter, came bundled with its own map editor and game engine. UnrealEd.
This one is sort of the opposite of the Quake engine. Here, you are presented with a different void. It is still infinite and uniform, but rather than being empty, it is solid.
You make maps by carving out space in them, like a digital troglodyte.
Eventually I made some decent maps. I shared them on the internet and people played them. One day I met one of these people in real life and they just happened to know of a job going at the company where they worked.
During my interview, we talked about the relative merits of the engines and I was asked which I prefer. I said I liked UnrealEd.
They asked why.
I told them that I liked it because it didn’t leak.
[THE MAGENTA VOID]
Leaks in the geometry of the level are like terrible wounds. At best, they will make the map fail to compile, so at least you know you have made a mistake. At worst, the void slowly sucks memory and resources as it tries to exist in the game world.
The game will slow to a glitchy crawl.
And they can be rather difficult to hunt down. Tiny little absences in geometry.
A trick we used was to give the void a colour. Black is easily lost against the backdrop of textures and darkly lit rooms. It is too easy to miss when there seems to be a lot of other things going on.
The colour we tended to use is striking, unpleasant even. It is magenta.
It stands out. You might see it as you casually move past.
The magenta void is hard to ignore.
And the same goes for missing assets and textures too.
The colour of absence is not black or white, it is bright pink. It is magenta.
[PALIMPSEST]
Paper used to be far more valuable. Specifically, vellum, which isn’t really paper at all, but prepared animal skin.
The word "vellum" is borrowed from Old French vélin 'calfskin', derived in turn from the Latin word vitulinum 'made from calf'.
The term palimpsest derives from Greek, via Latin, and roughly means to scrape clean.
Scribes would remove words from texts that they had no use for in order to write more important ones on the vellum.
It’s a bit like recording over a show on VCR.
Except, if you look closely, you can still find the original writing underneath. It may exist as slight scratches or indentations in the surface, possibly hidden from the naked eye, but it is there.
Even when the vellum is wiped clean it is not blank. It is not a void. Instead, it is history and everything that has gone before.
[BLACK BOX]
The black box space isn’t really a void. There’s an awful lot in there, even before a company starts to load in their stage and props.
There’s the lighting rig, or grid. A sort of Damoclean structure that holds the weight of ancient lighting apparatus.
There’s the seating bank, which may be raked, and probably referred to as ‘the rake’.
There’s the scene dock, perhaps. Large doors that let companies move their set in and out. Sometimes, and no one knows why, these usually feature steps at the other side just to make things more difficult.
There will also be a tech box somewhere. A sort of adjunct void. It will somehow be even darker and blacker, and will feature tiny flickering lights and passive aggressive notes nestled between rolls of gaffa tape.
These things remain constant in the space. Shows come in and shows leave. The black box theatre is a performative palimpsest. It is reset. It is washed and cleaned, but the history is present.
Frequently that history is evident in the dust. The detritus of a thousand events. The last acts of glitter in the crevices. Flyers and printed materials under the seating bank, discarded as soon as the show starts, because who can read in such darkness?
[DUST ARCHIVES]
In 2010 The Studio Theatre at Leeds Met closed.
The university’s decision to close the space seemed shortsighted, not least because it would also lead to the retirement of Annie Lloyd who had, for over twenty years, championed hundreds of works during her stewardship and role as director.
Just before this all happened, Annie made a book with Alex Kelly, the Co-Artistic Director of Third Angel. The Book is called ‘The Dust Archive’.
It’s a beautiful object.
In the introduction Annie states
…I discovered that the physical is really quite a small part of it. What I take away is an emotional memory of how things made me feel and what thoughts were elicited. I take away the people, the connections made, the shared moments of joy and wonder, boredom, embarrassment, revelation and sheer delight
The recollections are drawn on tracing paper, the outlined shape of the theatre contains them. As the light shines through, each one feels ephemeral and fleeting, but the overall effect, when they begin to stack together, is that you can see through each show. The palimpsest is evident.
It all exists, at once, not as individual maps, but as an interwoven whole.
The memory is leaking through.
[WHITE CUBE]
I can’t remember.
Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a true cube.
Sometimes they have more than four walls too.
They are not always entirely white either. Frequently they have a rather expensive looking hardwood floor. Or a functional concrete one.
A mostly white polyhedral gallery.
[PALIMPSEST]
The palimpsest of the white void works differently. Often this is mistaken for austere eliteness.
It relies instead on short term memory. You look at an image on the wall, and only that image, but as you move to the next there is nothing.
It is this space, this void, that allows your thoughts to exist without the image. You feel the impression that it has made on you.
The indentations on your mind.
And when you reach the next image, those valleys exist and the inky reality of this new image flows quicker into them.
The result is cumulative.
Without this space the experience is too constant, there is no room for you, or your thoughts. The white void is not about the importance of the work. It is not about the monolithic standing of the artist. It is about giving you room to be part of it too.
You are the thing that is being repeatedly marked upon.
And when you leave, it leaks out with you, into the messy, noisy, constant non-void.
[BLACK BOX RECORDER]
They’re orange, not black.
It’s to make them easier to spot, should things go terribly wrong.
I’d like to suggest that they make them a sort of sickening magenta colour.
You could use game developers like sniffer dogs to hunt them down.
Imagine the time that could be saved.
The idea with a flight recorder is that it carries with it a record of everything leading up to a catastrophe. It is the memory of an event taken outside of that space.
In a way, every passenger is a black box recorder of a successful flight.
[THE LIGHT]
This is a personal note. A peevish observation.
I promise I don’t speak for anyone else.
I detest watching a show when they turn the lights on the audience.
It’s somehow worse than when they turn the lights on at the end of a night in a club and you are confronted with the sweaty, ugly, humanness that is your own reality.
It feels like being ripped out of a void.
The reason I love theatre so much is that it gives me a little private void to hide from reality. A dark space to forget myself and my worries. It lets me ignore the close proximity I am in with strangers, and makes me feel like we are one formless mass of minds and emotions.
It feels like a cheap violation and an abandonment of responsibility by those on stage. Your job is to be looked at, not mine. And yet here I am, in your show, and what’s worse, you made me pay for the privilege.
[VOIDS]
Every work starts as a void.
First, there was nothing.
Then there was something.
That’s essentially what art is.
Sure, the crazy modernists that demanded white cube galleries tried to subvert that by renaming already existing things as art, but it is still the same. They are still creating an idea where none existed.
And every space starts empty and then is filled, first with set, then light, and people, and props, and breathing, and eyes, and words, and sound, and more dust.
Or as a wall, and then an image, and a frame, perhaps some text, or one of those weird ankle-high thin metal ropes to stop you getting too close, and eyes, and breathing, and sometimes tears.
Nature doesn’t abhor a void, it adores them. It adores watching things trickle in and then trickle out.
A void is not static, it is the cause of movement and progress.
Every void is already full.
It is overflowing with history, of everything that came before and has moved on.
It is loaded with potential. Heavy with everything that might be there or could be there.
And that is true of galleries and theatre spaces, but ultimately these are just reflections of the single true void. A sort of yin and yang of a singular something far greater.
The void of infinite capacity and complexity. The void that can be filled repeatedly with images and sound.
It’s a void of tremendous power.
You.
[EXCEPT]
Except, there is a type of void that persists.
It’s the ghost of things that were not made or could not be made real.
The void of things we might have had.
What shows and artists might have filled our voids if that theatre hadn’t closed, or if that gallery had remained open?
It is an absence, and it has a colour all of its own.
It is that magenta void again.
[NEXT]
Episode 4: We Should Leave
