A conceptual explanation of an artwork may be nothing more than a setup, a way not to speak about its substance. Fruit-bearing plants have a similar survival strategy: a fruit consists of a hard seed, a core that must be carried as far as possible, and soft, sweet flesh.

So let us get to the point: remember the speech bubble in a comic. As a graphic image of a speech act, it is not usually empty. Its very appearance outlines the unity of a message or a line of speech.

But what if we remove the message? The Speech Bubble becomes a Bubble. We get a visible embodiment of a medium without content, a paradoxical situation in which what is normally invisible becomes visible. Its conditional ontology coincides with its representation: it is drawn to make its emptiness available for whatever may enter it. Yet the emptiness of the Bubble can itself be understood as a message. Taken further, the empty Bubble communicates a potential, a readiness to contain any object, event or thought.

An empty Bubble is a unique case in which a medium becomes visible without content. Usually content actualizes a medium and at the same time conceals it. Trying to grasp media actuality against the logic of spectacle and discursive occupation, artists often have to perform special procedures. To make the medium of cinema visible, Guy Debord used repetition and arbitrary montage. The viewer falls into the cuts and becomes a witness to the medium exposing itself.

But what do we need an empty Bubble for?

Perhaps to outline the idea of an emptiness that can contain whatever — an emptiness we propose to call Nonknowledge — and to draw attention to the relation between Nonknowledge as empty potentiality, the nature of a medium, and the “ontology” of an art object. There is another point. If an empty Bubble is a graphic actualization of a speech act, Nonknowledge also appears as a political phenomenon, recalling Jacques Rancière. Nonknowledge marks a zone in which those previously deprived of a voice in shared discursive systems emerge from concealment and become political subjects.

In Russian, the word lyuboye usually means “any” or “whatever,” something that does not matter which. At the same time it is related to the verb lyubit, to love, and to lyubimoye, the beloved — paradoxically the opposite of its everyday meaning. Giorgio Agamben pointed to the same contradiction in the Latin word quodlibet in The Coming Community.

For the empty place not to be lost, to fall out of memory or merge with the totality of Nonknowledge, it has to be occupied by something. Artistic practices make it possible to register this place in space and time and provide for its cultural transmission and representation. The work can always be actualized by putting anything — Whatever — into the empty place. The object that actualizes the work becomes an ersatz art object. Its only task is to point to the empty place and create material conditions for its provisional storage and representation. All its other qualities — plot, medium, materiality — are accidental. They descend genetically from us, the people who materially produced the work.