for anything else that has ever been done, negative space is due credit.

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this is no ordinary field of study. negative space, essentially, is a meditation on everything that exists in contemporarily understood 'gaps', 'anomalies', 'buffer zones', 'absences', wherever applicable, and the larger exercise of applying meaning and context to it. whether these gaps are created/influenced  by us or any other source, negative space operated under the assumption that there is a omniscient intentionality to it. and the only way to arrive at this narrative conclusion is to read, preserve and internalise these patterns as equally meaningful information vital to our understanding of things.

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NEGATIVE SPACE is an honest attempt to ascribe value to anything that is ordinarily discarded/perceived as void.  

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it is a principle and practice.

 

one of the earlier experiences with negative space occurred on a train ride - which i was predisposed to trace the adjacent train tracks as they advanced with my journey through the suburbia of Sydney. here, city planning was such a comprehensive colonial task that it was awkward to see evidence of the city’s failure to organise traces of waste, weeds, and other miscellaneous jargon. while a trace amount, as mentioned, it resonated deeply within my psyche, as it felt like a wake up call telling me the story of something so profound and deeply rooted in all of consciousness; this idea of what is through evolution or by laws of nature and physics - or simply a cosmic commentary, truth itself, or a bias dictating the limits of individual cogs in a composite universe - felt so confronting. everything had always been this way for me, but one singular experience presented the most meaningful and most ambitious practice of my life. 

 

right now, to me, negative space exists in every possible dimension and occurrence. simply drawing two lines and marvelling at the scale between them is a simple every day exercise to appreciate what negative space means for us. now, repeat and draw any configuration of line(s) for any amount of time. it’s now time to really focus on the information that exists by default between the lines. just concentrate on it, and it may just reveal its own existence and value to you. 

 

the implications of this exercise are heavy. it opens up another door in the deepest caves of your conscious. everything begins to take a dual-value. one, that you probably deem as regular and ‘of use’ to human form and function…say all the items in your living room right from the coffee mug you’re probably holding on to. if a satisfactory choice of filler substance was poured into the room, then solidified to provide us with a mould of the room but expressed through negative space - what would that initial response from you be? negative space is an argument that demands that equal significance be placed on this alternate pattern of information. 

 

the incident with the train tracks talked about earlier deserves a second chance because it tied to my experience of being an immigrant from a country that is not yet ‘desirable’ to a lot of stakeholders in the system. for its lack of polish, noise, dirt, and many a reason, it was a symbolic emotive experience to engage with such a minor stimulus. a consistent look through my seat window revealed all the ‘buffer zones’ that existed between

 

A) the train track

B) nature - the bush, bodies of water, other natural systems

C) human architecture as roads, infrastructure, suburban houses, shopping centres, power stations

 

as nothing but an unassigned section of collected discard, neglect, rubble, mud. 

 

something like that.

 

in a system like Australia where everything is hyper specific and prescribed, surveilled, instructed, and positioned to the last perceivable detail, this felt like a massive irony. 

 

from this example itself, i was able to scale up and down and reapply the same concerns and principles into a more systematic practice of my own dedicated to highlighting in any way possible this other component of complete information. 

     

negative space is everything that originally was thrown in the cognitive/ in the vocabulary of void. in meditation, if we take a stimulus of our choice and really concentrate, we realise a pattern exists between a system of valuables we originally were conditioned to neglect. for example, if we marked every single occurrence of when we breathe in and breathe out through out the day, an important sequence of information exists in that pattern to demonstrate something of profound value that we probably do not see potential in on first glance -  but it has value and meaning. 

 

a truly infinite body of work escapes our embrace not the daily, simply because we are not predisposed to recognise this omnipresent intelligence that is its own language, system, economy, particle theory, and an endless expandable meditation, etc., etc. 

 

the reason why this information matters (maybe not to you today) is because we do not understand it yet. it is meaningful and needs to be recorded as an archive - something nature does in the way of fossils and cross sections of specimens of all types. there is a meaningful system that exists in these patterns that has resourcefulness in inspiring a more existential way of acting and feeling. 

 

everything exists to us because of its contradiction. once we build a vocabulary around defining negative spaces and applying the same level of engagement as we have with anything else, we are getting multitudes closer to our own meaning. 

 

this is a meditation. its a piece in the puzzle. but current practices and way of life for this piece to only grow larger and more interesting to incorporate and solve with as opposed to solving by itself. if we are one singular chain of a single particle existing across multitudes. between zero and infinity exists one value. negative space captures an innate narrative with its own vocabulary and complexity, rules and negotiations. it exists as a metaphor for a bridge that the cosmos is trying to architect with us. 

 

today, it is just an imaginative quality handed down by a spiritual exercise, but it is an important start. negative spaces is a pattern and a voice waiting to be heard. to engage with it and dissolve with it opens its expansive value as a cornerstone of all disciplines.