The potential for irony—and humor—is fundamental to the idea of the designed gap. A single, dramatic disconnect is particularly satisfying when it violates traditional audio–video relationships.

Nick Park interviewed the British public about ordinary topics, and repurposed the recordings for his clay animal animations. Unlike other kinds of ironic gesture, his technique continues to sustain and build on our engagement beyond the initial punch line. The juxtaposition of audio and video— somehow both incongruous and apt—isn’t a method for him to remain aloof, commenting on his subjects from a higher plane. Instead the gap resides within the work, structuring a playful whole that nevertheless takes all of the parts seriously. The first interview here is with a circus performer and the second is with staff at a science laboratory.

In a broad sense, graphic design always deals in gaps: every project requires some negotiation between type and image, intention and interpretation, and representation and reality. These videos are good examples of what I would call productive ironies: the layers of meaning they contain are separately intelligible, but the distance between them—their unawareness of each other—constitutes the voice you hear most clearly. So this is what I’m after in graphic design: not just a way of deploying evocative type and image, but a method where the gaps between elements— whether manufactured or discovered—come to the fore. After all, if we look at the nature of time, of typologies, or of irony, gaps seem to have “come with the place.” Design can make them an active player in the construction of meaning.

Gaps can be amplifications of divisions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Mark Dion uses a polluted diorama to describe cultural representations of nature and humanity. Gordon Matta-Clark’s split house is an architectural dissection, making interior and exterior visible simultaneously. As bizarre as these objects look, they remain linked to our everyday experience.

We think of three-dimensional space as continuous. Here the construction of a stitched panorama is betrayed by duplicate people and incongruous shadows. Since the joins in the representation are artificial, perhaps there is an honesty in letting them show. Similarly, Thomas Demand’s photographs reassure us with their familiarity just before revealing themselves as paper sculptures. His images are calibrated to oscillate across the gap between real and fake. As photographs of sculptures, they stand at two removes from reality, but those removes serve to incorporate our perceptions into the work.

Entire London neighborhoods have a type we apprehend through the gap of difference. Though no single characteristic is shared by every member of the set, the internal family resemblances are strong enough to reveal a difference of a higher order when we compare one set to another. Paradoxically, those differences are as necessary to define a group identity as the similarities.

Dutch teenagers, and even a single image of a single person.

Take a set of similar things and put them side by side: the differences become the subject of the image. It can be done with office parks, taillights,

For example, can the gaps bleed into the representation? Is the serial quality of live theater made more real by collapsing two iterations, a day apart, into one image? In this video by Mike Mills, dance becomes a series of held poses, cut together. Fluid movement is discarded for the sake of a different kind of rhythmic expression.

Film has further shaped our understanding of time, to the extent that we think of it as a sequence of 30 discrete moments per second. There are, of course, 30 gaps per second interspersed. What if we focus on those gaps? How large are those leaps of faith between instances, and what does it mean to manipulate them?

We read sequences differently from compositions. Since the act of narration requires editing, the divisions between temporal moments define the rhythm of the representation. Our eyes and our minds are so well trained to fill in the gaps that we do so involuntarily.

Erasure is a kind of gap. The imagery that our culture produces tends to have its own coherence and legibility, and the set of expectations that comes with that legibility can be disrupted through visual interventions. On the left is “Two Crowds With Shape of Reason Missing” by John Baldessari. Since the subject of the crowd’s attention is missing, we naturally turn our attention to the crowds themselves. On the right, in “Two Voided Books,” a similar act has erased the usual identifying features that separate the objects, leaving us to discern new ones. Gaps redirect our attention.