The most important thing is not the form, but the space made by the form.
— Sculptor, Umberto Bottcioni, 1812
That is exactly how I like to think about text and thought.
Let’s travel across the great space of the Pacific Ocean to Japan where the animator Hayao Miyuzaki celebrates emptiness and nothingness in his films like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988) and SPIRITED AWAY (2001) .
Sometimes his animated characters will just stop for a moment and watch the scudding clouds, a falling leaf or a fish leaping in a stream, to allow the audience time to sink more deeply into character, story and location.
MA
Clap your hands together three times. Now do that again, but this time slow it down and value the pauses in between the claps. Miyuzaki says:
The time and space between the claps is Ma. It is breathing space.
Graphic designer Alan Fletcher talks about Ma in his guide to seeing tangentially, THE ART OF LOOKING SIDEWAYS (2001):
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modeled space. Giacometti sculpted …