Meaning & Nothingness
Interactive puzzle book inspired by existentialism, the grandmother of performance art, and conceptualism.
“Meaning and Nothingness” is an interactive piece that has the reader solve a series of puzzles to reveal a hidden message. The book is type-driven and includes excerpts from Starlee Kine’s live storytelling of her experience waiting 15 hours in line for Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present.”
Similarly to Kine’s experience, the process of solving the puzzle makes the reader feel anticipation and, eventually, disappointment — revealing the importance of the process rather than the result. Moments of insight or illumination cannot be planned, and it is up to us to give our own experiences meaning, instead of waiting around for someone else to do it for us.
Print as Performance
An important aspect of performance art is it’s inclusion of the viewer in the overall piece. To mimic that, the book includes the participants’ thoughts and feelings about their experience in the last pages. It also leaves the book perpetually incomplete; the possibility of new readers keeps "Meaning and Nothingness" indefinitely open-ended.
