Onym

Onym is an online audio-visual artwork that was funded by an Arts Council COVID-19 Crisis Response Award. The project uses animated typography and sound to explore the malleability of language and meaning.

Onym is based around pairs of antonyms forming conventional binary oppositions such as "life" and "death". For each pair of antonyms a thesaurus was used to build a chain of synonyms to bridge the gap between them. Starting with one word the process was repeated until its antonym was suggested by the Thesaurus. The process was continued, without reusing any words, until the original word was suggested.

The title from the suffix -onym, derived from the Greek word "onoma" meaning "name", and found in the words "synonym" and "antonym".