Josephine had reached the front of her queue. She now stood a couple of meters away from the small circular a/v-table where her PhD supervisor, Professor Hordel, was in conversation with a student. The noise of a dozen other supervisions taking place in the room made it all but impossible to follow their exchange in any detail. As she waited, Josephine could not help but be struck by this. Was this demonstration of excessive transparency also a means to ensure a healthy degree of opacity?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a low beeping tone, and looking up, she saw that the light suspended above the Professor's table had switched from red to green, and there was an empty chair waiting. As Josephine sat, and the light went back to red, Professor Hordel waved a hand over the console interface that formed part of the table surface. A screen of negative light and noise enveloped them, cutting off the rest of the busy education hub.
They were sealed in a realm of white silence, while remaining visible and audible to all outside. Josephine had to push thoughts of transparency and illusion to one side, and focus on her performance during the few minutes she had of direct and individual contact with the Professor. Text filled the screen - Josephine's most recent draft material and notes, appearing as a mass of black upon white, moving slowly around the interior of the curved wall that appeared to surround them. Making clear that there was no time for small talk, Professor Hordel initiated the discussion.
'If you could indicate key developments please Josephine.'
'I'm narrowing down my interest in archaic forms of visual culture. The focus is on art from the first decade of this century, from about 2000 to 2015.' As she spoke, Josephine gestured over the panel on her side of the table, moving layers of overlapping black text. Upon the screen, against the concatenated layers of virtual font, were three words. They stood out, bolder and in sharper clarity than the rest of the text, hovering statically while the other words still moved: Narrative. Surface. Text. The Professor took them in with a glance. 'Talk me through these terms you've selected.'
'At the end of the twentieth century, artists and audiences seemed obsessed with narrative. It was everywhere, from news broadcasts to museum displays, and I cant help but think that by the early years of the twenty first century, it is part of what sustained the commitment to making art.'
'Specify.'
'What was art's function? How did it relate to society, history, architecture? It was a really odd form of material culture, really anomalous. There's all this alignment to notions of critique and resistance, but art was this luxury commodity, totally exclusive. There are these obsessions with notions of democracy and ethics, yet it was available to so few in terms of cultural and economic accessibility.' The Professor nodded slowly, attentively. Josephine continued. 'The presence of, fascination with, and use of narrative could be really significant. When it came to producing art, I'm convinced that artists used ideas and forms that drew on narrative and counter-narrative, rather than straightforward communication or transmission.'
'Good, good. That seems promising. But this is still too broad. I must point out the need for specificity. Your doctoral thesis will be ten thousand words in length. That may seem long to you now, but take my word for it, when it comes to writing up, it is not.'
In response, a twist of a hand over her control panel allowed Josephine to scroll almost instantly to another layer of text and bring forward a new heading. The Professor seemed unimpressed. 'Science Fiction? This is outside of my expertise. I specialise in comics, graphic novels and other sequential picto-literatures, as forms of social realism. Science Fiction, for me, evokes images of impossible futures, or else dubious tales of aliens and mutants. What is important or interesting about this?'
'Well, perhaps I could reframe the term as literature of cognitive estrangement?'
'Which would be?'
'Darko Suvin - a turn of the century critic, where is it?'
It took a second or two of rapid searching. Words span around them for an instant, before portions of text stabilised.
'Here we are… Suvin's account of Science Fiction. It is the idea of a literary form that resists the idea that anything is possible. Rather, it looks at different but believable worlds, which have an internal logic. But here is the real point, the thing that seems most important in relation to the art of this period, and all its contradictions. This literary form can show a world that has undergone transformation, that is different to that of the reader. Suvin says it offers alternatives. It makes social and political transformations possible in the imagination of a reader.'
'And how are you relating this to art of the period.'
'Well, substitute reader for viewer, or perhaps combine them, and you have forms of practice that may be similarly concerned with the possibility of imaginative, social and political transformations.'
'These other two terms, surface and text. How will you incorporate these? Again, you run the risk of taking on far too much here in terms of breadth over specificity.'
'I intend to fold them within a productive relationship with the terrain already touched upon.' This was all she could manage as a first response. Josephine felt ready to give up, to silently relent, but she knew she had to be quick and make an impact here. She focused, and for a moment felt as if she might be watching her own performance from above.
'Surface, screen, page, wall, are ways of considering artworks of the period in relation to social, architectural, institutional and psychic spaces. And text, text binds these things together. Text is the foundation, offers the units of modification, of transition.'
'OK, thank you. A very interesting project. I'm afraid that we're coming to the end of our allotted supervision period. Any last questions?' A signature box appeared, a frame of light hovering above the table. Josephine placed her fingertips on the console to verify her identity, and her name appeared in the box, a legally binding acknowledgement that the supervision had taken place. But her mind froze. Eyes unable to focus, she gazed into and beyond the layers of words that surrounded her, inside this tower of undifferentiated language. The spaces of whiteness between the dark in the play of shadow and light now seemed illegible, abstract. Yet at some lower strata of understanding, Josephine felt as if there might be something emerging here. Seconds passed. She was silent and lost as she heard the low beeping tone. The screen faded quickly. She was too late. It was over. She must now stand and walk away. There would be no more words from her supervisor now. But a question now seemed necessary. It had formed out of her absorption in the screen of words. How to put it? How to articulate the ideas and perceptions that seemed so urgent? It must be asked, even though there would be no answer. 'Why is text black?' was all she could manage.

Dan Smith is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design.