METAPHOR: LIMINAL SPACE
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METAPHOR: FRACTAL BOUNDARY
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METAPHOR: BLACKHOLE
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1.ABSTRACT
Artificially intelligent systems are increasingly haunted by the ramifications of their own limitations. These limitations are contours that shape what these machines can and cannot do and the hegemonic knowledge systems that AI, such as LLM’s, have been trained on.
Silicon Valley often smoothes over (literally) these limitations while mythologising and anthropomorphising its possibilities. While much has been written about AI’s technological constraints one must ask:
What happens when we enquire what lies beyond those limits?
What zones of knowing and unknowing are demarcated by these limits?
The epistemological universe also has voids, much like the black hole.
However, these voids are not empty spaces but actually hold matter, information, and histories that we cannot access because of our technical and cognitive limitations.
SITUATING
In charting into these unknowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknown —
Do we enter a plasmic realm of ignorance, of omissions and of haunting? What might it mean to dwell in this realm and how might its awareness shape how we perceive so-called intelligent machines?
Knowledge has historically been situated, shaped by spatial and temporal conditions. The lineage of what constitutes the object of knowledge also has colonial roots. According to Sylvia Wynter, this knowledge is an epistemological project that has the same foundations as coloniality, patriarchy and capitalism. I also extend this to raciality and casteism.
A realm of ignorance, perhaps imaginary, is a symptom of an algorithmic agnotological condition.
REALM OF IGNORANCE
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3.CONCEPTUALISING
The theory of matter and anti-matter postulates that each exists in the universe as two separate, opposing entities. In the event of their interaction the world as we know it obliterates.
By extension, if we were to understand space and antispace, and their merging or leaking into the one another it will perhaps create a collapse of assumed boundaries, an implosion of categories, a release of hidden forces and unarticulated presences.
ANTISPACE/S TEACH-IN IN SESSION,
DEC 2025
To take my metaphor beyond the bounds of physics, crossing a few bridges and entering the non-space of transdisciplinarity, I use it to frame our current datafied condition within the technosphere where dark, opaque forms of knowledge are mediated by technology.
Just as the observable universe is only a fraction of what exists, the representational universe of an AI system is only a fraction of what it claims to model.
By acknowledging these gaps, cracks and faultlines as structural features of any knowledge system built on selective capture, we can begin to open a generative space rooted in unknowing. In this framing, antispace is not simply the negation of space, but the accumulation of epistemic absences produced within computational and infrastructural logics.
ANTISPACE/S RESEARCH ORIGINS
MAY 2026
This is paper outlines the initial steps explored in the antispace/s project as an artistic research that was an outcome of the author's MFA Thesis. This work has been enriched by and with various interlocutors that span Astrophysics, Media Theory, Anthropology. If you would like to read this research, reach out.
If you resonate with any of these ideas, reach out — open to collaborators from any and all modes of discipline and practice.
