The Production of Emptiness

On Harun Farocki, Ho Tzu Nyen, and the Migratory Image

In 1947, as Europe emerged from the ruins of war and Hiroshima’s shadow stretched across the globe, the French architect Claude Parent spoke of a necessity that went beyond physical reconstruction. «We had to start from zero,» he recalled decades later, «create a new metaphysics, a new architecture. We all were convinced that atomic energy would allow us to start with the void.» Parent’s formulation was about clearing space: emptying memory of its comforting narratives in order to build forms of thinking adequate to catastrophe.

More than seventy years later, the imperative to «create the void» has migrated from the ruins of architecture to the digital screens of the twenty-first century. Yet, the ethical problem remains unchanged: How does one show violence without aestheticizing it? How does one engage viewers affectively while maintaining the distance necessary for critical thought? These questions, which have animated political filmmaking since the 1960s, now face a new institutional reality. It has become a displaced image—evicted from the linear flow of cinema and television, it now inhabits the exhibition space, demanding a different kind of attention.

It is within this condition of exile that the convergence between the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944–2014) and the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) becomes most legible. In a 2022 conversation, Ho explicitly acknowledged Farocki’s significance for his practice, particularly «his approach to montage and the relationship between images.» Yet this affinity runs deeper than stylistic influence. Despite the technological gulf between Farocki’s analog editing tables and Ho’s virtual reality environments, both artists have developed a shared methodology of resistance. Their works construct a specific form of knowledge production based on negative dialectics. By migrating into the gallery, they transform the passive act of viewing into a form of spatialized thinking, constructing the «void» not as a metaphor, but as a structural necessity for the survival of the critical image.

To understand the affinity between Farocki and Ho, one must look past the surface differences of their media and observe the shared operational logic of their practice. Both artists reject the immersive documentary that promises transparent access to «what really happened,» just as they reject the purely analytical essay that maintains absolute distance. Instead, they employ a constellation of techniques designed to expose the gap, or the non-identical, between the image and its meaning.

Central to this shared morphology is the principle of distance montage. Inherited from the Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian, this technique defies the logic of continuity editing. Rather than connecting adjacent shots to create a seamless flow, Farocki and Ho connect images separated by vast temporal or spatial distances. In Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), aerial photographs of Auschwitz are juxtaposed with Renaissance perspective drawings and 1980s robot vision. The meaning resides not in the images themselves, but in the tension produced by their collision—a spark that illuminates the shared logic of «enlightenment» and «reconnaissance» governing both the painter and the bomber.

Ho Tzu Nyen translates this principle into the vertical architecture of Virtual Reality. In his installation Voice of Void (2021), the tea room of the Kyoto School philosophers, the sky of the Kamikaze pilots, and the prison of the dissenters are spatially separated layers. They never appear simultaneously. The viewer must perform the labor of connecting these distant spaces, discovering the structural pattern that links high theory to brutal practice.

This spatial separation is reinforced by a rigorous exposure of construction. Farocki, famously, always showed his hand—literally and metaphorically. In his seminal installation Interface (1995), he placed two monitors side-by-side: one showing his films, the other showing his own hands at the editing table. By foregrounding the manual labor of selection and assembly, he transformed the gallery into an operating theater of the image, insisting that meaning is made, not found.

Ho Tzu Nyen adopts a similar ethic of transparency, yet perhaps the most arresting encounter with the void arises from what appears to be an accident. Inside the VR environment, a «colored sphere»—likely a default artifact of the software—floats visibly in the darkness. To the observer, this object reads less as a technical leftover and more as the system’s raw, unconscious state. Here, the «Absolute Nothingness» of the Kyoto School philosophers is stripped of its mysticism, appearing simply as a geometric primitive—the default setting for «nothing.» This rupture extends to the physical act of transition. As the viewer stands up or lies down, moving between the Tea Room and the Sky, they pass through a glitchy, undefined tunnel of geometry. In this vertigo, the void ceases to be a metaphor. It becomes a visceral passage—a haptic sensation of falling into the blind spots of history.

A particularly striking manifestation of transparency appeared in the 2025 exhibition at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. In a departure from previous presentations, the Berlin installation revealed its technical infrastructure. For the first time, in the VR room, the hardware—computers and control systems powering the experience—was displayed openly, breaking with the convention of the ‘black box’ typical of VR installations. This curatorial decision, specific to the neugerriemschneider presentation, resonates with Farocki’s transparent editing table. By placing the hardware in the room, the installation configuration transforms the ‘black box’ of VR into a ‘glass table.’ The viewer sees not just the hallucination, but the machine generating it.

The operational power of this method becomes most visible in Voice of Void, a work that explicitly addresses the problem of intellectual complicity in historical violence. The installation centers on the roundtable discussions of the Kyoto School philosophers during WWII—Masaaki Kosaka, Keiji Nishitani, Iwao Koyama, and Shigetaka Suzuki—who utilized the concept of «Absolute Nothingness» to justify Japanese imperialism.

The work announces its digital origin from the outset through stylized CG representations of the four philosophers—uncanny, smoothed-out shells that appear throughout the installation. Upon entering the main gallery space, the viewer confronts a multi-screen configuration that spatializes the narrative before the headset is even worn. The tea room discussion occupies the central projection, flanked by lateral screens showing the ‘Sky’ populated by hovering mecha robots, while the ‘Prison’ space is implied in the architecture. This installation setup lays out the work’s topography horizontally, prefiguring the vertical experience that follows. When the viewer transitions into the VR room, this external view is internalized: the screens vanish, and the body itself becomes the interface connecting these layers.

But the core of the work is the VR experience, which functions as a rigorous cybernetic loop. Seated on a tatami mat with a notepad before them, the viewer is not merely a spectator but a variable in a permutational logic. The experience is strictly determined by body position. If the viewer sits upright and performs the gesture of writing, they occupy the position of Masuzo Ohya, the stenographer. Through the headphones, they hear the philosophers discussing «The Standpoint of World History and Japan» in November 1941. To write is to enable this discourse, to transform spoken words into the permanent text of history.

If the viewer ceases the writing gesture while remaining seated, the audio shifts violently in time. The year becomes 1971, and the voice becomes that of the aged Ohya reciting poems from his collection Asian Sands. These tanka poems confess his guilt for witnessing atrocities in China and remaining silent. The «void» here opens up within the viewer’s own body: the gap between the act of recording (1941) and the act of confessing (1971) is held in the same physical space.

To access the consequences of the philosophy, the viewer must physically stand up. This gesture transports them through the ceiling into the sky, into the cockpit of a Kamikaze pilot listening to Hajime Tanabe’s lecture on the «necessity of death.» The connection between the abstract theory of the tea room and the suicidal violence of the sky is felt as a vertiginous ascent. By lying down, the viewer sinks through the floor into a prison cell, encountering the texts of left-wing philosophers. Here, the system demands precise bodily orientation: leaning right activates the voice of Kiyoshi Miki, while leaning left activates Jun Tosaka. A fifth position exists: complete stillness while seated transports the viewer to a «bonus» zazen meditation room where Kitaro Nishida’s voice recites The Problem of Japanese Culture.

This structure enacts the central tragedy of the subject: the illusion of freedom within a predetermined structure. The viewer is «free» to move, but every movement triggers a pre-written outcome. The work spatializes the negative dialectic; the tea room exists only by suspending itself between the violence above and the repression below.

If Ho spatializes this dialectic in VR, Harun Farocki performed a similar operation decades earlier through the medium of the essay film. Images of the World and the Inscription of War is structured not by narrative causality but by the logic of the migratory image, weaving together the microchip factory, the history of measurement, and the aerial reconnaissance of Auschwitz.

Farocki’s film functions as a machine for reading what is invisible. He reveals that the American military analysts who studied the photographs of Auschwitz failed to see the gas chambers—not because the image was unclear, but because their operational framework was calibrated to identify industrial targets. The camera saw everything; the institution saw only what it looked for. The voice-over explains that later, CIA analysts—knowing what to look for—easily identified the crematoria. The evidence was always there, sleeping in the archive, waiting for a gaze capable of recognizing it.

Farocki extends this logic of «blindness through visibility» across disparate historical moments. The film opens in a microchip factory in California, where a female worker sits passively while a robot circles her head, measuring her facial features to create an «ideal template.» The voice-over observes the reduction of the human face—the site of identity—to numerical data. This scene is not violent, yet it produces a profound unease. It reveals the genealogy of the operational gaze: the same logic that turns a landscape into a bombing target turns a worker into an ergonomic variable.

Farocki’s critique extends to the logic of colonial violence, echoing his analysis of Marc Garanger’s ID photographs of Algerian women (1960). Though distinct from the aerial views of Auschwitz, these images share the same operational genealogy. Forced to unveil for the colonial camera, the women stare back with expressions ranging from defiance to humiliation. By juxtaposing the logic of the camp, the factory worker, and the colonial subject, Farocki employs negative dialectics to reveal the remainder: the persistence of an instrumental reason that transforms the human subject into an object of calculation. Farocki practices a form of «descriptive criticism,» creating a «void of explanation» by separating the image track from the voice-over. The viewer is forced to inhabit this gap, performing the inductive labor necessary to construct the meaning that the analysts missed.

The juxtaposition of Images of the World and Voice of Void reveals a thirty-three-year span during which the technologies available for artistic production transformed fundamentally. Farocki worked with film, video, and found footage—materials that must be physically handled. Ho Tzu Nyen works with CG animation, algorithmic processes, and real-time interactivity—materials that exist as code. Yet, understanding what persists across this transition is crucial for grasping the portability of the method.

The most obvious transformation concerns materiality. Farocki’s editing table was a site of physical labor; the cut was a physical act. Ho’s digital processes eliminate this substrate. As Ho explained in a recent conversation, working with AI and algorithmic generation involves embracing the glitches, artifacts, and overly literal interpretations that these systems produce—as a starting point for transformation. The artist no longer cuts and splices but codes parameters, adjusting the rules of a generative system.

This shift enables new forms of interaction, but also new forms of control. Farocki’s installations allowed viewers to compare simultaneous screens, but the temporal sequence was fixed. Voice of Void introduces parametric interactivity: the viewer’s body functions as an input device. And this is crucial—Ho’s interactivity is not the open-ended «user-generated content» promised by Silicon Valley. It is constrained interactivity. There are exactly five configurations, predetermined and fixed. The system responds, but only within the limits of its programming.

The inherent material constraints of the medium converge with the work’s conceptual logic. Whether dictated by the technical limits of production or deliberate choice, this restriction is meaningful. Instead of sustaining the illusion of infinite freedom often marketed by VR, the work reveals the rigid boundaries of the system. Farocki anticipated this theoretically, noting that installations allow montage to become «spatial.» Ho extends this logic: not only can the viewer look again, but the system can respond differently based on how they position themselves. The principle—creating structures that generate multiplicity rather than fixing singular meaning—remains constant; digital technology simply realizes it more fully. However, the digital medium introduces the risk of false immediacy. Commercial VR pursues «realism» to eliminate the awareness of mediation. Ho navigates this by consistently undermining immersion. The hollow bodies, the visible polygons, the exposed servers in the Berlin exhibition—these are strategies for maintaining critical distance within immersive experience.

As these works migrate into the museum, their fundamental logic shifts. The linear argument typical of cinema dissolves into a landscape that the viewer must physically navigate. This spatial friction revitalizes the practice of critical dissonance, moving it from abstract theory to concrete experience. Adorno saw dialectics less as a system for sorting concepts and more as a practice of resistance—a persistent focus on the ‘non-identical, ’ those stubborn remnants of reality that refuse to be categorized or smoothed away.

This migration transforms the ontology of the work. In the museum, the viewer is mobile, allowing for what Kodwo Eshun calls Argumentation in Motion. The argument of the work is no longer a linear thesis to be received, but a spatial environment to be navigated. It is here that the relevance of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics becomes acute. Adorno argued that dialectics should not be a «method» or a «system»—forms which lead to intellectual automation—but a concrete practice. Unlike the synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic, negative dialectics insists on the non-identical, the remainder that cannot be resolved. «What is, is always more than what is,» Adorno wrote. There is always a surplus, a remainder that escapes the concept.

Farocki and Ho operate as practitioners of this negative dialectic. Their use of distance montage, layering, and permutational logic are techniques for producing this remainder. When Farocki compares the still life painting to the advertisement, he asks not how they are similar, but what the advertisement has stripped away. When Ho forces the viewer to lie down and lean into the floor to hear the prisoner, he ensures that this position cannot be synthesized with the position of the philosopher. The body of the viewer becomes the site where the non-identical is felt. The museum, functioning as a shelter for the migratory image, allows this friction to occur in a way that cinema never could.

The convergence between Farocki and Ho should be read as parallel strategies emerging from different contexts of historical trauma. Where Farocki excavates the Western Enlightenment’s complicity with genocide, Ho reveals how Asian philosophy’s encounter with Western modernity produced its own forms of violence.

In a contemporary landscape defined by the seamless flow of algorithmic content and the false immediacy of AI-generated images, the creation of this void is an act of resistance. The urgency of this practice extends beyond technological critique. We inhabit a moment when historical memory itself has become migratory—fragmented across incompatible platforms, rendered homeless by the collapse of shared institutional frameworks for remembering. The void that Farocki and Ho create operates as a counter-structure to this condition, maintaining the irreducibility of historical experience against its algorithmic reduction.

The convergence of Farocki and Ho reveals how the critical image persists across technological ruptures through operational strategies that transform viewing into a form of embodied critique. This practice redefines art as a «supra-aesthetic» form of knowledge production. It creates a knowledge that is situational, negative, and deeply aware of its own construction. Farocki and Ho do not solve the puzzle of traumatic history; they construct frameworks that allow us to inhabit its contradictions. They teach us that the «essay» is a method for navigating the cracks in the system. They offer a space where, finally, the migratory image can speak.

Liza Kin
Berlin, November 23, 2025

Ho Tzu Nyen exhibition: 2 stories: voids & times at neugerriemschneider
Christinenstraße 18–19, Haus 9
10119 Berlin, Mitte
September 12, 2025 — March 21, 2026