Whereas Fludd's hyle is an example of bereft nothing, enlisting the viewer as a meaning-making machine in order to make the meaning of "nothing;" Arakawa and Gins' installation and book project The Mechanism of Meaning is an example of fecund nothing -- the viewer's ability to make meaning is purposely sabotaged and counfounded, so that other affective, material, a-linguistic forms of experience may rise to the surface. Rather than making the semiotic meaning of "nothing," the viewer is stranded in a state of aporia, unable to make any definitive semiotic meaning at all.