THESIS STATEMENT:
Pseudo-Śūnyatā
Equally focused/Not focused at all
Pseudo-Śūnyatā is used to inscribe a collective image, where the individual pixel remains absurdly high-res to perpetually disturb the attention of its readers, forcing them to oscillate between the image and the pixel; and to describe a social landscape, where public-gathering space is functionally marginalized in order to establish equal hierarchy between such space and conventionally-ignored, quasi-infrastructural space.
Śūnyatā is a Buddhist concept meaning extreme emptiness or voidness, where it requires one to focus on neither oneself nor one’s surroundings. It is “an ontological feature of reality, a state of meditation, or a phenomenological analysis of experience”. In other words, any intrinsic or extrinsic existence of an object is intentionally suppressed, to the extent where natural emotion, perception and imagination remain at their most default state.
Pseudo-Śūnyatā is registered through entities that are equally-focused within an image, to a degree where each entity is in fact not focused at all in the most plain and tedious way. Without such object-oriented reading onto each entity itself, the entity starts to behave visually altruistic in order to constitute the collectivism of the overall image; yet, these entities continue to exhibit traits of individualism upon approaching anew due to the fact that they are naturally focused from the start. It is more about the reading onto the collective image and less about its individual pixels, while each pixel remains too high-res to be ignored.
*This thesis assumes one single pixel is to be infinitely high-res upon reader’s adaptation towards zooming-in camera.
In order to render such experience, the visual interface between an image and its reader must be a reciprocal one, which is determined by the focus-insensitive nature of the image: equally-focused entities within an image will impose a temporary perplexity on its reader. Failure to land the focus lens onto anywhere within the image at their first attempt, readers are then encouraged by nature to look for the embodiment of existence through the collective reading of the image instead of each individual entity. To further exacerbate the visual oscillation of reader’s focus lens on the image, the collective reading of those discretized entities must also be unobtrusive, meaning that it belittles itself to attract minimized attention as possible. At this point, Śūnyatā has already been established due to the fact that neither the individual entity nor the collective image is asking for attention, although they both hinted the readers to shift their focus lens towards the other. Yet, pseudo-Śūnyatā can exist if and only if enough resolution is given to the individual entities at the beginning in a disturbing way, so that: nothing is in the picture, yet everything is in the picture. Pseudo-Śūnyatā looks for the coexistence of both.
