www.DictionaryofNegativeSpace.com is an ongoing, online exhibit of entries and illustrations from the Dictionary of Negative Space, an interdisciplinary lament for the words that the English language lacks for lamenting. It was inspired by my experiences in the aftermath of a car crash that killed my mother, father, and older brother in 2012. My father was an early prospector of the information age and I launched this site on June 1,2018, a day that should have been his 78th birthday.
Previous to that fateful August afternoon, I had been the type of person who could talk to a stump for hours according to my mother. Afterwards, though, I struggled just to find a way to answer the ubiquitous question: how are you? In organizing this odd dictionary, I chose not to name the words, to leave them as blank spaces so that people would feel the awkward pauses that survivors face. Even that word, survivor, fails me on a daily basis. It makes it sound as though I just won some kind of ridiculous reality television show and not that I lost the three people woven into every single definition in my life.
But, it wasn’t just me or the English language whose glitches are documented in this dictionary. While there were ordinary people who helped us in extraordinary ways, there were also so many people who responded with an almost inhuman level of callousness. One of those conversations inspired my Audio illustration for [125]. ( https://dictionaryofnegativespace.com/portfolio/125/) This sound piece recreates an actual phone call that I had with an HR person. I used the voice of online translation software to play the part of the woman at the HR department because I could only understand her callousness by imagining her morphing into a slave to her algorithm.
