Introduction

In Small Survey on Nothingness, the artist Christoph Keller investigates the relationship of nothingness to the ambivalent medium of ether in the context of art and science. While ether has been investigated by scientists as a medium for the transmission of light since the late seventeenth century, in philosophy it represents the absence of absence – that is, the impossibility to think nothingness or absolute emptiness.

In 1881, Albert A. Michelson made his first experiment at the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam to prove the existence of light-ether; the experiment, however, “failed”, thus laying one of the foundations for the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Exposed as a scientific fallacy, ether was banished from scientific research at the same time that the substance and its properties were discovered by the artistic avantgarde.

In two new video productions and an open experiment for visitors, Christoph Keller explores the traces of nothingness and ether, from Michelson’s experimentum crucis to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.