It was inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), entirely white canvasses that work as blank screens to register shifting shadows and reflections, and project them as art. But that empty space also has a positive presence since, for the atomists, ‘the void exists’, as Aristotle says in On Generation and Corruption. If the void is the absence of an atom, the atom exists as what fills a void. With the den, Democritus builds negativity into the very heart of his physics and metaphysics: nothing lurks within something. Meanwhile, the science of quantum vacuum is cashing out Democritus’ intuitions about the void, in the process spurring new experiments and new theories.