The book contains a collection of essays by scholars and artists from a range of different fields, including art, art history, architectural theory and philosophy. The essays are based on papers given at a symposium in Copenhagen in June 2008 and refer to fundamental considerations with regard to perception: When spectators confront and designers invent works of art and architecture, vital questions regarding their appearance arise. These are not simply questions about what appears, but also, and primarily, what does not; in other words, what it is that evades us when works are experienced and created. How do we cope with this withdrawal, with latencies that escape concretization? What are the productive paradoxes associated hereto and how do they influence the processes of creation?