@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2023.0993, 

TITLE={Challenging the void}, 
  
AUTHOR={Ruth Scheps, }, 
	
JOURNAL={Art and Science}, 
	
VOLUME={7}, 

NUMBER={Issue 2}, 
	
YEAR={2023}, 

URL={https://openscience.fr/Challenging-the-void}, 
	
DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2023.0993}, 
	
ISSN={2515-8767}, 
	
ABSTRACT={Whether physical, metaphysical or psychological, the void is a polysemous and often paradoxical concept, generally associated with absence (of matter or any other content), or even lack. The question of the void has haunted mankind since time immemorial, and has accompanied the entire history of science. In ancient Greece, Parmenides and then Aristotle denied its existence, while the atomists Leucippus and Democritus asserted its omnipresence in the universe. From the scientific revolution of the 17th century to the relativistic revolution and beyond, physicists have sought to create and conceptualize it. With each successive theory of the vacuum, the opposition between the void and the full has evolved into complementarity or interdependence, culminating in quantum field theory, in which the complete vacuum is in continuity with matter. Visual artists, for their part, first represented the void as a foil to visible forms, in a static complementarity with the full, then confronted it as such, as in the "void exhibitions" of contemporary art. In the Taoist- and Buddhist-inspired Chinese pictorial tradition, on the contrary, this complementarity is a dynamic interpenetration, stemming from the original Vacuity.}}