Whoever glances first at this post will be the only other person than me for all these years, to see my forensic measurements of silence filling my Los Angeles studio residency between phone calls in 1996. Before, that is, the next person who sees the post.

Compared to the socially astute and declarative character of artists these days in Melbourne, my studio processes can’t help but seem archaic. Did I think I was some undercover spy recording the cryptic vacancy of inert matter before the phone’s shrill call for action dispelled everything? Should I be embarrassed? Agent Anon decoding silence into meaningful information to help win the next, as yet, undeclared war? Such whimsical jinks wouldn’t have kept me at it for page after page (after page). Yet here I speak as though outside this moment, casting it off as yesterday’s delusion. When I am still inside its earnestness, adding to its pages day after day, giving a substantial existence to space.

Re-reading Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific gives me another strange parallel. Swimming through the pleasure of Smith’s insights, held buoyant by the previously unexplored history they yield, I began comparing my investigative note-taking to the newly developed empirical observation and scientific rigour that exploring the Pacific opened for artists of the late 1770s. Smith writes: ‘In consequence, their mode of perception became increasingly less dominated by neo-classical theories of art and increasingly more influenced by empirical habits of vision’. Is my studio process but a centuries-old by-product of the region’s empirical breach with European expressive naturalism?

This page of silence-evidence in particular measures a 12 hour and 49 minute silence between Thursday 25 July at 9:41 pm and Friday 26 July at 10:30 am that equates to a 38.45 cm length of space — the length of space in the green space holder in a silent corner 2, exhibited in Munich in 1997, and the silence turned into substance on the opposite fold of the corner.