‘Horror Vacui’ - a transdisciplinary project at Bern University of the Arts (HKB), Spring 2011

The project featured a collaboration with Professor Jens Schlieter (Institute for the Science of Religion and Central Asian Studies, Bern University), and the Zen master Hogen Shuei Diethelm. Topics included: Degrees of vacuum purity, the history of NASA’s vacuum chambers, the Casimir effect, Hawking radiation, scale models of the solar system and interstellar space, models of the atom, the trope of death by vacuum in science fiction, tardigrades, fear of the empty page, the work of Ewerdt Hilgemann, and the writings of Frank Close. We visited the CERN in Geneva and floated in sensory deprivation tanks. The final presentation consisted of an Euphonium concert entirely drowned by white noise, followed by silence.