In the history of cartography, phantom islands are landmasses that were discovered by explorers and navigators, placed on maps–where they persisted for decades, sometimes centuries–only to later be debunked as sites that never existed.

Some phantom islands were born due to optical illusions experienced at sea; others were fraudulent inventions leveraged for colonial projects, nation building or reputational gain; others were simply the product of blending of myth and reality onto portolan charts and medieval maps which persisted through time. Perhaps unintuitively, the most recent un-discovery of a phantom island dates from 2012, when Sandy Island was removed from cartographic records, including digital ones such as Google Earth. These cartographic fictions, however, were rarely neutral: Bermeja's un-discovery in the early 2000s still shadows the maritime boundary and oil rights dividing Mexico from the United States.

Each work in the Still Nothing series is drawn from multispectral satellite imagery captured at a phantom island's reported coordinates, rendered in false color with spectral bands reassigned to register water depth, biological activity, and sediment through band ratios used by the remote sensing scientific community. These are speculative measurements directed towards detecting the presence of land. At the center of each frame, calibration target patterns are overlaid: the geometries used to teach aerial vision systems to see accurately, here standing in as the default markers of absence.

As our planetary observation systems become increasingly automated, with observation feeding prediction in a pipeline that performs as much reality-making as recording, phantom islands become fictions lodged inside an allegedly objective dataset. Historically, our infrastructures of knowledge production have always been partial and negotiated, each stacked layer amplifying the gaps beneath. Today's data-driven regime is no different.

The series currently contains six works, created from satellite data captured at the reported coordinates of the following phantom islands: Bermeja, Hy Brasil, Crocker Land, Sandy Island, Sannikov Land, and Los Jardines.

Still Nothing is part of "End of Signal", a research-based body of work which examines the epistemic implications of AI deployed at scale, staged through a speculative future in which a satellite becomes an unreliable narrator of the reality on the ground. The project investigates what I term "technological underdetermination": a condition enabled by generative artificial intelligence, in which the unknown is produced by a surplus of plausible explanations rooted in existing ground truths, rather than by a scarcity of information.