In the summer of 1997 I went to Switzerland. I was seventeen and awed by everything there: the impossibly green mountains, the richness of the food, the brightly colored money. But by far the most magical experience I had was ice skating through a cloud.

The peaks of the alps are so high that clouds at times will huddle in small hollows on a mountain’s surface. (Little do we suspect, from a distance, this intimacy between clouds and mountains – that despite their seeming aloofness they are passionate lovers sharing high-altitude secrets.) In the town of Leysin, the skating rink sat in one of these catenaries, past the town on a downslope. A covered structure, open on the sides, the rink was positioned so that a breeze would draw wisps of cloud through the space. We looped through them, in and out of the whiteness, enchanted.

To be so close to a cloud, to be literally inside it, is a fleeting kind of joy. Artist Berndnaut Smilde brings something like this to galleries, carefully controlling the humidity and temperature to bring real clouds into being for a few minutes. Watch this video to see the process in action. Indoors, the cloud seems to be many things at once. It’s a luminous piece of sky, yet also an interloper. It feels more precious than it would “in the wild.” And yet it also feels out of place, confused even, like a lamb split off from the flock. It teeters on the edge of joyful and eerie, a conjurer’s trick that we embrace cautiously, with visceral awe.

Joyful and eerie: it’s an odd pairing. How is it possible that joy can come to us bound together with fear? And what determines whether what we end up feeling is wonder or trepidation?

It’s a contradiction many have wrestled with. The philosopher Edmund Burke called it the sublime, and wrote of conflicting impulses towards attraction and fear. Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner describe it as awe, an emotion combining the perception of vastness or great power with a need for accommodation, a need to understand the phenomenon and bring it into line with our worldview. Awe creates an awareness that something forceful is at play, something with uncertain mechanisms and consequences, and our natural instinct at encountering such unknowns is to feel fear. But because we are human and inherently opportunistic, and because we are not certain if the unknowns are threatening, we also feel curiosity. It is a state of repulsion and attraction all at once.

Aesthetics have a big say in which force wins out. Imagine you are standing in a field, alone and far from shelter. A great black cloud-like apparition looms on the horizon. It is coming towards you, and doing so abnormally fast. How do you feel? Now imagine yourself in the same field, but replace the cloud with a colorful double rainbow. How would you describe the difference in how you feel? Both are strange events, both vast, both require accommodation. But through the color, form, and mass of each, your unconscious assesses threat level and tips your emotional state towards anxiety or towards wonder.

It’s easy to see why we would feel awe and fear at potentially dangerous things – this feels sensibly adaptive. An emotion that primes us to take cover has probably saved enough necks to earn its right to a spot on the genome. But why have wonder? Why have an emotion specifically attuned to things that are strange and intense, yet benign?

I believe we have wonder because it lets us know when the laws and limits of our world have been transcended, and opens the way to new frontiers of possibility. Wonder is a signal that there has been magic in our midst. It pokes a hole in our worldview, and tempts us to investigate, becoming a powerful spark for curiosity that paves the way towards new discoveries.

As a culture we tend to undervalue wonder, but the craving for it is deeply valid. It is not a distraction from purposeful work – it may instead be the catalyst for starting it. A desire to witness magic is an impulse towards the expansion of the mind, towards the improvement of the human condition. At the root of our love for rainbows, comets, fireflies, and miracles is a small reservoir of belief that the world is bigger and more amazing than we had dreamed it could be. And if we are to be creative and hopeful, then feeding this reservoir is vital.

So go look for impossible beauty, implausible joy. Seek it out even if it doesn’t seem to have an immediate purpose. And then just be curious. You don’t have to control wonder; you only have to seek it, and be open to what it shows you.

Via: Smilde’s Nimbus II spotted by @brainpicker

Images: from here and here

Joymaker is a new series spotlighting people who seek to create joy in their work.

It takes a kind of joyful madness to hand-apply 100 lbs. of raspberry jam to a gallery wall. And that’s exactly what attracted me to the work of Naomi London, a visual artist based in Montreal, who tries to bring a voice for joy and play to contemporary art. London uses joyful forms, visual metaphors, and textures (such as polka dots) to give her audience a sense of delight.

I’m fascinated by the shiny, sticky surface of this enormous red wall. While a red wall might typically take on a violent or alarming quality, the material makes it totally disarming, even childlike. I wonder if it stayed sticky throughout the installation, and slightly fluid, shifting its mottles in a slow gravitational creep towards the floor. Or whether it stayed firm, drying like a giant fruit roll-up. I didn’t ask Naomi these silly questions, but I did ask her some others:

How do you want people to feel when they engage with your work?

I’m very interested in the notion of play in art. I’m hoping that when people see the Jam Wall they can appreciate the unexpected beauty of the colour, as well as the playful absurdity of using this material.

Can you talk more about this connection between joy and absurdity?

I associate absurdity very much with play, and play is joyful. Other connections include humour in the absurd, e.g. the odd rhymes and tongue twisters of several early Dr. Seuss books. I find that there is pleasure in being in a ‘non-logical place’ in your head, which is how I think of the absurd. It’s about the unexpected, fun, and delight that can be felt when exploring things that deliberately don’t make logical sense, but are full of wonder and joy. There is an importance in the purposelessness of the absurd, which is something that makes is joyful (to me) and thus also linked to play.

What is the role of joy in your work?

I think that joy, beauty, humour and play have been underrepresented in contemporary art over the last few decades. I’ve been interested in trying to address joy and happiness in my work for past ten years or so. I’m currently working on a sculpture installation project in homage to my mother, (who died just over two years ago). Even though it is a memorial work of sorts, I hope that it still somehow evokes a sense of joy.

I’m making a series of balls which are made exclusively out of fabric inherited from my mom. (She was a talented seamstress and made almost all my clothes during my childhood.)

What one object most symbolizes joy to you?

I think I’m torn between seeing the first tulips in early Spring and my favorite large white mixing bowl that I use when I bake a cake.

What’s inspiring you right now?

Colour, and the unexpected use of saturated colour: chartreuse yellow + green, fire engine red, brilliant orange.

What other designers, artists, or creators should Aesthetics of Joy readers know about?

There is an interesting website run by a researcher/academic in Rotterdam:  The World Database of Happiness. The layout of the site is dry aesthetically but I think that its wonderful that the subject of happiness is being studied in this way.

I like the work of Franz West very much. Another artist whose work I really like is Ana Rewakowicz.

You can see more of Naomi’s work here. (In particular, make sure to check out Polka Dot Wall, a site-specific installation I find very joyful.) Images courtesy of Naomi London.

When my brilliant friend Mimi O Chun posted this picture in her Instagram stream with the description “Rothko tribute,” she received a veritable ton of likes and comments, many urging her to turn the concept into a series, or even a full-fledged art bakery. Though Rothko himself was not a terribly joyful sort, these colorful, charming cookies are, and I couldn’t resist sharing the image with you all.

So, let’s hope this becomes the first of many in the Dead Artist Baked Goods series, as Mimi puts it. Though similar in feel to this first installment, I’d like to see some Albers cookies; I also think that Pollock would be pretty fun to make. Whose art would you like to see made into sweets?

Mimi O Chun on Instagram and Twitter

This morning I read with delight about Brooklyn-based artist Joseph Herscher, who is reviving the joy of the Rube Goldberg machine, a device “that accomplishes a simple task in the most complicated way possible.” Using objects such as rolling balls, burning fuses, watering cans, ladles, fly swatters, and even a pet guinea pig, Herscher creates sprawling kinetic sculptures that perform mundane actions such as fixing a cocktail or turning the page of a book. The video above shows one of his simpler machines, La Macchina Botanica, performed at the Venice Biennale and constructed with the help of forty local children. The video on the New York Times site has a broader overview of his work, as well as a new piece called Page Turner, and is well worth a look.

Listen to the crowd as La Macchina Botanica unfolds; their responses offer an illustration of the workings of joy. Around :48, as the long mallet moves so slowly it almost seems stuck, there’s an audible swell of anticipation, followed by a cheer of release as the ball eventually starts rolling again. (Is it possible not to smile along with this moment?) The anticipation breaks the rhythm and creates a point of tension, which provides an opportunity to offer relief. When a piece moves unexpectedly, there are similar exclamations of surprise and enchantment. The unpredictability of the device disrupts our expectations in a clever, pleasurable way. And at the end, when the piece achieves its objective, there is collective celebration, with an outpouring of applause and acclaim. It’s a moment of completion, of joyful narrative resolution. After all, what the device is really doing is imposing a storyline onto a thoughtless act. The task becomes relatively unimportant, as we know it can be accomplished by other means. What is important is completing the story, watching the machine glide smoothly over all the hairy, implausible connections with balletic ease, and resolving the tension introduced by the complexity of the stage set.

At its core, the Rube Goldberg machine is playful, and this is the essence of its allure; it is a task that has been turned into a game. This playful tendency sits in tension with the basic premise of a machine, which Herscher comments on in the Times video: ”Usually machines are things you have to make your life easier, to do things more efficiently.” And efficiency is rarely a route to joy. Play has no role in a world governed by efficiency, because by definition play is not an efficient act. An apparently purposeless activity that is enjoyed for its own sake, play is inimical to the virtues of efficiency: it is slow, wasteful, and distracting. So a playful machine is an inherent absurdity, but as playful creatures living in an increasingly mechanistic world, we finding it intensely compelling. For this reason, the more mundane the task and the more extravagantly silly the process of achieving it, the better the machine. It seems that Herscher’s work is evolving in that direction; it will be interesting to see what he does next.

NYT: Who Says Machines Must Be Useful?

It’s a good thing on this blog when something like consensus emerges, and so many of you have sent this my way that it seems we all agree: This is joyful!

An interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by the self-described “obsessive artist” Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room offers a whitewashed home interior as a blank canvas for children visiting the museum to cover with colorful dots. It’s a joyful exercise in participatory art, in abundance, in layering and accretion. Visitors leave their traces on the space. Their experience of the exhibit becomes manifest in the exhibit. And through the innocent randomness of children’s choices, a pleasurable kind of order emerges. The impulses to cover and to cluster — to cover and conquer a new white space or to cluster around a social crowd of others — make the distribution playful and human.

You wonder about the title: obliteration room. Obliteration feels like a word of violence, of emptiness and destruction. How does this jibe with the impetus towards joy? I believe what Kusama is after here is a kind of transcendence. Though the dot has always been a motif in her work (a childhood portrait of her mother shows it covered with polka dots), these vast fields started to become most prominent in her “happenings,” public events designed as protests to the Vietnam War, where people would gather naked to be painted with dots. As Kusama writes in her autobiography Infinity Nets:

Polka dots, the trademark of “Kusama Happening.” Red, green and yellow polka dots can be the circles representing the earth, the sun, or the moon. Their shapes and what they signify do not really matter. I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.

The polka dots are unifying; they transform individuals and bodies into a larger being. In that process, the self is “obliterated,” so that this sublime feeling of unity can be obtained. You know it if you’ve been part of a synchronized dance, sung in a choir, or participated in another kind of expression of collective joy — for some moments, you cease to be you-in-the-world, and you become an element in a larger organism, a symbiotic cell in a web that sustains and is sustained by you. In this process, pattern and repetition are intensely powerful mechanisms of transcendence (more on this here).

What about the dot itself? Kusama says the shapes do not really matter, but I don’t believe her. The shape of the dot is the cell; it’s the module upon which the whole system is built. A brick of a charcoal is not a block of ice because the atoms of their essence are different. The dot is the atom of the pattern, and it matters. Kusama describes the significance of the dots in her book Manhattan Suicide Addict:

…a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity.

There’s an elemental quality to the circle, a primal symmetry that makes it naturally joyful. Roundness connotes safety, invites touch and play. (More on the joy of circles here.) Which brings us back to The obliteration room, which is at its heart deeply playful. Kusama is a heady woman, and there’s a darkness at the root of much of her work (she suffers from hallucinations and lives by choice in a mental institution near her studio in Tokyo), but what I love is that play and joy rise up through these struggles to become the overriding impression of her work. What Kusama achieves in her work is perhaps the greatest transcendence of all: the transformation of pain into joy.

Part of a larger exhibit of Kusama’s work (much of it joyful) called Look Now, See Forever, The obliteration room is on view until March 2012. Thank you to @benbob2u, @jacobyryan, and Liz McCarty for the tips.

For more kids and Kusama, check out this joyful video of a child’s delight at discovering one of her dot rooms.

Via: This is Colossal.
Images: the first four from Queensland Art Gallery and photographer Mark Sherwood, others from Stuart Addelsee, and heybubbles.

As you know I’m fascinated by language and color, and the dialogue between the two. And I’m captivated by tools, extenders of human capability that give myriad forms to the efforts of our hands. As a tool of communication, this is perhaps inefficient. But as a tool of expression, it is powerful. The typewriter is a piece by artist Tyree Callahan.

What I love most is how Callahan maintained the convention of case in the typewriter keys. You can see how shifting would affect the color, in most cases increasing the intensity, a nice if imperfect analogue for the upper case. Callahan has entered the piece for a West prize. You can learn how to vote for it here.

And along a similar vein (but with a completely different tone), there’s this cocktail typewriter, which translates from language to color to flavor. (A fun, but potentially dangerous tool in the wrong hands!)

{via Colossal}

Color doesn’t have to be poured out by the gallon to create a sense of joy. In fact, it’s often better in small doses, as in these works by Ethan Greenbaum. When people say “good fences make good neighbors,” maybe this is what they have in mind.

There’s also a human equivalent. I’ve featured in the past the kooky performance art of Companie Willi Dorner, a troupe of artists who wear brightly colored clothes and then squeeze themselves into tight urban spaces. I recently came across these images, which I hadn’t seen before, of a performance they did in New York last year.

Against a field of grey, color means more. It is a spark of something that has its own energy, something dynamic that has the potential to erupt, to bring more color. As Johannes Itten, father of contemporary color theory, put it: “Color is life: for a world without colors appears to us as dead.” Color, even in tiny doses, signals a desire for life.

Images: Ethan Greenbaum via the artist. Companie Willi Dorner via WSJ.

These last few weeks I’ve been steeped in color. Literally, with the effusion of bright summer hues in the city, and figuratively, as I’ve been devoting many a spare moment to researching it. Color is the subject of chapter two and, as evidenced by the colorful nature of this blog, a nearly endless topic when considering design and joy.

Right now I’m reading a very thoughtful, scientific little book from the 1980s called Colour: Why the World Isn’t Grey, which covers everything from why rainbows appear to why flames are orange to why the sky is blue. As the author Hazel Rossotti demystifies these phenomena, she’s reminding me that some color seems particularly mysterious.

Intangible color – the color of the horizon, of an oil slick on a rain puddle, of a match-strike – has a trickiness to it. We perceive the color, but it is either too distant, too evanescent, or too changeable to feel certain in our impressions. The color feels deceptive, yet tantalizing. Though we know that pursuing it will leave us empty-handed, sometimes we go after it anyway. Like burying one’s nose in a magnolia flower only to find the thrum of fragrance all around, but pale within, we find our rainbows and sunsets accessible only from afar. I suppose we should feel grateful that their photons journeyed such a long way to our eyes in the first place.

Maybe there’s more joy to this kind of elusive chroma, or if not more, then certainly a distinct kind of joy – a delight mingled with longing. And that’s of course what joy should be from an evolutionary perspective. Not perfect satiation, but satiation plus motivation to continue seeking that “passage from lesser to greater perfection,” as Spinoza wrote. With its spiritual airiness, intangible color feels something like a promise, a reminder that still greater beauty is out in the world to be discovered.

With these thoughts on my mind, I wanted to share a few works that create a similar kind of intangible color, despite being constructed from tangible materials. The first, above, is a recent piece by Andy Gilmore, whose kaleidoscopic works I’ve long enjoyed and have posted in the past. This piece seems to vibrate in those light spaces where the hues fade out in steps. It’s almost as if it’s moving, and therefore impossible to fully take in all at once.

Below is a kind of 3D counterpoint to Gilmore, from artist Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus 4 and Plexus 5 series. These are similarly vibratory, almost spatial rather than material, like a dense chromatic fog. You almost feel as if you could walk right through them, though in fact they’re constructed from thousands of strands of thread. Like many natural examples of intangible color, these installations seem to radiate their own light, making them even more ethereal and compelling.

I hope you’re out enjoying a colorful weekend somewhere, intangible or otherwise…

Xx Ingrid

I can’t stop playing with this site. The online home of a traveling exhibit about everyday functional objects like the pencil and zipper, Hidden Heroes takes what could be a dull experience and makes it delightful – vibrant, sensorial, playful. Visit the site and see for yourself. The screenshots can’t communicate the pleasure of the transitions, the little joys of the sounds and swishes that bring elements in and out of view. Hidden Heroes, curated by the Vitra Design Museum (a joyful place in its own right), recently won a Webby for navigation, an element of interaction design that typically strives for clarity over enthusiasm.

But I love how the nav manages to incorporate color and whimsy without sacrificing clarity at all. In effect, the nav structures reflect the intention of the exhibit: to elevate the ordinary, to celebrate the stories of simple things. This is no mean feat. Abstracted from the tangibility of the artifacts, online exhibits often feel like poor cousins of the real thing, more effective as documentation than experience. But with all its abundance and brio, the Hidden Heroes exhibit feels like an experience first and foremost for the web, and I wonder if it’s perhaps more pleasurable even than the bricks-and-mortar version.

Web design is inherently constrained by the medium of the screen, and its power to evoke emotion is hindered by this constraint. It’s sensorially limited. It can’t stimulate the senses of touch, smell, or taste, three senses we know to be powerfully linked to our emotions. (Though a smell-o-vision inspired website is still a popular fantasy.) A neuroscientist I spoke with once went so far as to say that he didn’t think art on a screen could ever light up the emotional brain the way a painting could.

But what design for the screen lacks in texture and tangibility, it makes up for in dynamism, movement, and interactivity. At their best, designers who work in this field – interaction designers – floor me with the way they transform mundane experiences into joyful ones. I’m thinking of the Spectra visual newsreader, a uniquely colorful way to peruse the headlines, or the HEMA, a department store in the Netherlands that has created a Rube Goldberg-esque home page that must be experienced to be believed. (Seriously. I’m not even going to try to screenshot it.) More simply, I also love Supermarket Sarah, an online retailer that eschews the grid in favor of a clickable photo array for its navigation.

And finally, as I think of navigation and the web, I can’t help but think about this wonderful project by Alexander Chen, which is not at all about online navigation, but about using the online medium to give us a new perspective on offline navigation. Conductor: mta.me reenvisions the subway map as a string instrument. It is in effect a map come alive, drawing itself with charming lines, tones, and vibrations to overlay a lyrical quality onto something most city dwellers take for granted. Three separate people sent it to me with Aesthetics of Joy in mind, so I know this really spoke to people about delight! It certainly reminded me of the inherently joyful quality of transit maps, their colorful lines and intersections, and all the happenings you can imagine at their junctures. (The video is ok but again, go to the site to really experience it.)

Have I missed other joyful interfaces? Which websites bring you joy?

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction on seeing the above was “What is that?” – a question fueled by equal parts wonderment and curiosity.

Since my recent post on the idea of a color language, inspired by Hyo Myoung Kim’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I’ve been seeing color languages all around. These prints, above and below, by graphic designer Laia Clos of Barcelona’s Mot Studio, explore a color-based translation of musical notation. SisTeMu, as the notational schema is called, relies on simple geometric forms and colors to make a piece of music (in this case, the lead violin of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) tantalizingly visible. How intelligible it might be is another matter, but for the way it dimensionalizes the experience of music, I find it captivating.

Music is one of the most visceral of art forms, capable of evoking intense emotions without a descriptive or narrative thread. It is pure abstraction. Can you imagine opening up a playbill at the philharmonic to find a set of visuals like this inside? It would be so wonderful to try to follow the measures along. I love how the variations in the scale and color of the bubbles create an instantaneous sense of tempo and intensity – it’s a synesthetic experience of sound.

This piece, from Eugene Ysaÿe’s Sonata Nº5 is so wonderfully varied. I think I like the visualization even more than the Vivaldis. Which made me wonder, would I like the music better as well? And, I think I do. Wouldn’t you like to see the below as an animation with the piece?

I especially love the stamps for each of the seasons, which are like melodic snapshots. Sonic triggers, in visual form. Both the stamps and the posters are available on Clos’s site, here.

Another color language discovery comes via Anna of the awesome Birds of Ohio blog. She pointed out to me the work of artist Lauren DiCioccio, who, like Hyo Myoung Kim, translates text into color, albeit with a softer, more organic style. These pieces, which DiCioccio calls her color codification dot drawings, take pages from popular magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair and reinterpret them in color using a painstaking process with a mylar overlay. She describes them as a kind of “Braille for the color-inclined.” They feel to me almost like an impressionistic language. Poetry, Seurat-style.

Stephanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words similarly explores reading as an experience that is about more than content. Zooming out – way out – Posavec’s visualizations of books function like a Powers of Ten for literature, giving us a visual image of the structure we sense intuitively as we work our way through a book. This first image shows the chapters of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, broken into paragraphs and sentences, color-coded by theme. Rhythm Textures, below it, visualizes sentence structures with words as radiating circles, pauses in white. I love how the seeds of all these patterns are visible in the highlighted versions of the manuscripts that Posavec used in constructing these studies.

Posavec’s First Chapters, below, is especially fascinating to me. This set of visualizations (only a subset of which is shown below), looks at the first chapters of famous books to illustrate the writing styles of different authors. Line length is based on sentence length, so tighter drawings suggest shorter, crisper style, while looser, more open sketches indicate a more languid style. Could there be a more perfect juxtaposition than Faulkner and Hemingway? Expansive vs. economical, loose loops vs. a tight knot – there’s a real joy in seeing these styles exposed through a system.

Much of the work of both DiCioccio and Posavec seems to concern the visceral and immersive quality of reading and grapples with the fading of this pleasure as so much of our reading now moves onto devices. These color languages, all print projects, manifest the craving for a more emotional, less efficient experience of reading (or listening, as the case may be). After all, a color language is illegible* in terms of content, but emotionally, it is fecund. It simultaneously slows the process down and makes it more immediate, refocusing our attention on the sensorial aspects of narrative, obfuscating content to illuminate meaning.

On the other hand, these projects also make me wonder if the move to devices might hold the possibility of making reading more sensorial, rather than less. True, for me there is no more exquisite literary sensation than the aroma of a good book, whether it’s the musty smell of an aged classic or the pungent, chemical tang of a new one. But imagine being able to see these sentence structures or thematic progressions visualized alongside or overlaid upon your text in an e-book. Reading would be both linear and non-linear, abstract and concrete, intuitive and literal all at once. Through the design of the book, or the e-reading software, we could discover the joy of a completely new and beautiful understanding of the craft of writing.

Finally, before I close, I want to highlight just one more color language, also from Posavec. This piece, from her 11x series, looks at mathematics through the lens of form and color. I figured there had to be someone out there translating numbers into color, and though I found Posavec’s work through the meta-narratives above, I was excited to discover these pieces, which visualize her fascination with “long multiplication and other types of handmade calculations” and unlock the “hidden beauty in the cascading lines of digits in this method of multiplying numbers.” Maybe there’s a seed of an idea in here about education, working between the modes of learning – verbal and visual, mathematical and kinesthetic, musical and spatial with translations that make the innate order and beauty of a process legible to the others. Through simple aesthetic delight, perhaps math problems become accessible to the numerically illiterate, or music becomes sensible to the tone-deaf.

{Thank you @issue and Anna for the inspiration for this post.}

*Incidentally, there’s a reason for why a color language would be so much harder to read than standard human languages. Neuroscientist Marc Changizi writes in his book The Vision Revolution that the reason we read so easily is because our letterforms evolved to look like natural objects, (or more correctly, parts of objects) which our brains are primed to process quickly because they surrounded us in our ancestral environment. Reading a text is then very much like reading a landscape. Our letters look like they do because our brain is fast at processing edges and contours, which hold information about an object that could be urgently relevant to our survival, but slower at processing stimuli less urgently relevant to survival. (Is that a cliff edge or a gently sloping hillside? A tiger’s sabre tooth or a ripe apricot? The fastest way to know is shape.) Our letters are not colors because such a detailed level of color identification is not as urgent a mental task; the systems for “reading” color are just naturally slower, (though colors hold lots of intrinsic emotional significance… a topic for another post).

They look almost like brightly colored mosses, don’t they? Like some new form of street lichen. Or a kind of chromatic filling compound. A rainbow grout.

This set of sculptures by artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera is a particularly striking example of yarnbombing, a form of knit or crochet-based street art that frequently reacts to the urban environment. In Herrera’s case, this means applying braided fabric in looped forms to cracks in the sidewalks of Paris. Like the pothole gardens and lego repairs I’ve written about in past posts, Herrera’s works use delight to call attention to the breakdown of infrastructure in the city. Like other yarnbombing projects, they work with maximal contrast – in color, contour, density, and texture – to catch our eyes and make us take notice. While they don’t actually fix the problems they’re addressing, it’s possible that inducing this kind of positive affect makes people more inclined to act to change their environments. More than an angry letter or a protest, these works create a desire to share with others, creating a kind of social momentum.

Herrera’s works are one more example of a phenomenon I call joyful repair – the act of mending or calling attention to a damaged element of the environment using color, texture, playful gestures, and other aesthetics of joy. It’s a form of joyful activism, which tries to bring about change through positive emotion, and it’s one of my very favorite applications of aesthetics of joy.

Here’s another example I’ve had in my files for awhile. Working at a slightly smaller scale, London artist Ben Wilson uses chewing gum splotches as a canvas for tiny, brightly colored sidewalk art. Wilson has been creating the paintings since 1998, and estimates he’s made over 10,000 of the little works! Interestingly, not long after he began his gum-painting endeavors, people began making requests for particular designs, often commemorative. So what began as litter has become an odd little system of tribute, like plaques on park benches or in front of newly planted trees. People want to be associated with something they feel good about, and with a little color and charm, that even could be improperly discarded chewing gum. The sidewalk at first seems an unusually mundane place for this sort of personal connection, but maybe not. After all, the sidewalk is the most intimate of transitory spaces in a community, the backdrop for so many of our daily dramas and spontaneous joys. Filling its holes, reclaiming its blemishes – in some way these are a deeply integral form of reconstruction.

There’s something else here, too. Projects like this are a signal that someone cares about a place, that the condition of that environment matters to someone. Someone is paying attention to the details. To make something beautiful is to invest time and energy in it, and these two are the most valuable, limited resources we have. We perceive this signal of caring and passion, often unconsciously, and we typically follow in kind. We read our landscape for cues about how to treat it, we draw inferences about the inhabitants, and we subtly alter our behavior to maintain this condition – or enhance it. These aesthetic signals often become a discourse of community, a conversation between the denizens of a place that leads, via a subtle form of one-upmanship, to the organic growth and improvement of our favorite places to call home. Alain de Botton has written (I’m paraphrasing here) that one of architecture’s purposes is to inspire us to be better people, and I would say the same for any of these urban interventions. We see improvements, and they unconsciously motivate us to improve ourselves.

Joyful repair projects can serve as jumpstarts for this process. This project, though not new, is a great example of this principle applied over a large scale. Called “Favela Painting,” this brightly colored village is the work of Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. Working in a slum outside Rio, their goal is to use art “as a tool to inspire, create beauty, combat prejudice, and attract attention.” The care and passion embodied by the murals effectively transforms the favela from outside in. Some really thoughtful words about the effects of this project, on the Magical Urbanism site:

‘Favela painting’ affects the aesthetic order of how favelas are perceived from within and outside its natural embryonic growth. Colour brings hope. It brings a different understanding of space and its people, inviting others to co-create and co-represent much more constructively and positively life here. It appeals to our senses in a way that we do not reject but embrace these places and the potential for better life. It articulates a different discourse of social change; of engagement, contributing to improve life for favela dwellers.

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than “color brings hope.” It suggests energy, and as such it has an uplifting and an attractive power. It’s a harbinger of better things to come. As I think about the phenomenon of joyful repair, I’m reminded of the root of the word repair, the Latin parare, “to make ready.” By repairing things, we are making them ready again. By repairing them joyfully, we’re making them ready for wonderful things to happen in the future.

Images: Juliana Santacruz Herrera on Flickr via designboom; Ben Wilson via Inhabitat; Favela Painting via The Fox Is Black.

{Thank you Maggie and BD}

This book, by artist Kyo Myoung Kim, fascinates me. Spotted at an exhibit at the Cabinet space in Gowanus, Brooklyn a couple of months ago, the book has been lodged in my mind ever since. I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to write this way, to communicate with a color language. Would you type it on a rainbow keyboard? Or compose on a color wheel? What kind of pen would you have to design to produce these signs?

Imagine the experience of creating this book, translating it from words into reds, violets, and oranges. What would it be like to be drilled as a child on a chromatic alphabet? To unlock meaning effortlessly from this linguistic confetti?

Hue, saturation, value: What roles would these play? I can’t help but push this further. Pure hues might be phonemes, and the lengths of the bars might indicate inflection. Value might be volume. Saturation might be emotional tenor. Can you imagine the beauty and the power of a language like this? I was reading this week about how phonetic languages (most Western languages), as opposed to pictographical languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), offer the flexibility to be able to write in dialect. I never thought about this before, but because all we’re doing in writing English is transliterating sounds, we can change these sounds around to suggest a drawl or foreign intonation. A language like this color language I’m suggesting, though it would be nearly impossible to master, would allow new layers of meaning and direction to rise from the page. Think how crude our written tools of emotional expression – the all caps, the exclamation point – seem, against the possibility that words themselves could be colored based on emotion and volume. In a novel, you could see an argument set in dark, deeply saturated bars. A mumbler would speak in strands of near-grays. A languid, happy character would shine through long bars of bright pastels. A new richness of plot and character would be available to writers and readers.

A reader would not actually need to understand the language to feel some of the meaning. Like spoken language, where we understand much from inflection, even in languages we’ve never heard before. One could flip through a book in this color language and feel the arc of the story, understanding the emotional narrative if not the descriptive one.

This language also would mean the same speech might look different when uttered by a different speaker. I’m imagining a poem written in this language, transcribed as read by three different readers. How different these would look, but still comparable, because all the hues would be the same. Or imagine a small book, with a series of poems as read by two readers, the two variations facing each other across the pages. (A project for a rainy day.)

I suspect there might be two unexpected discoveries in this exercise. One, that the immediacy of color might change the meanings of words. Some words might be unexpectedly beautiful, others jarring, depending on the new system. A kind of synaesthetic onomatopoeia might emerge. And secondly, that folding emotion into language might create a different kind of awareness of emotional content in dialogue. If we had to encode what we’re feeling in language, how would this articulation affect us? And if our emotion were indicated in our writing, how might our relationships change? Would we feel closer to each other, or would new misunderstandings arise? Would color language be a truer reflection of our minds? Or just a richer one, without any bias towards precision or accuracy?

Correction: The name of the artist of this piece should have read Hyo Myoung Kim. Apologies for the error. You can find more of Hyo Myoung’s work here.

I missed the last blizzard, so the forecast title “Major Winter Storm Set to Clobber Northeast” holds a certain kind of poetry for me. I’ve written at length on the joys of snow in the past, from my own personal memories to its more universal attractions, so I’ll try not to be repetitive this morning. I love snow for the very reasons practical people dislike it – it slows things down, confounds our rhythms, accumulates without regard to all the Very Important Things we have to do. It creates new patterns. It opens spaces for indolence, daydreaming, and rediscovery. Yes, it will get wet and grey, it will slosh into your boots, it will calcify into unmelting, inconvenient drifts. But before it does that, it will fall pure and light from cold clouds, and it will be perfect.

Anyway, it’s coming, so you may as well find a way to enjoy it! I’ve been wanting to share this piece for awhile. Called Snow, it is an installation made from feathers by Tokujin Yoshioka exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Japan. It amazes me how beautifully the feathers reflect the movements of snow, and how deep the simple sensory pleasure of those textures and movements feels. There’s also a video, here. I hope it stirs up some joyful anticipation for the slow, snowy days to come…

A wonderful find, from my dear friend Mara of Neither Snow, is this “rainbow warrior.” The warrior is a street artist working in Albuquerque, using spilled paint to pour rainbows off the tops of buildings. He (or she)’s really got some people riled up (see newscast, here) and it strikes me as remarkable that people can be so dour in the face of rainbows.

The charm of the story is in how the community has rallied to the warrior’s defense. This Facebook page has drawn 1,492 fans “in support of the Rainbow Warrior, whomever s/he may be.” And the soul of the story is in the warrior’s own words. This is the warrior on his/her inspiration for painting the rainbows:

About three or four years ago … I was feeling really depressed and I had this notion that if I went out and painted a rainbow, maybe someone would see it and feel what I was feeling or feel anything as intensely as I was. The first one I did, I just literally dumped the paint over the side of a pretty ugly, abandoned, alleyway building.

And this is the warrior on street art:

I want to inspire other people. That’s part of all my art; it’s always positive. I think I chose street art to inspire somebody else in a way that’s outside of the box. Like somebody who wouldn’t normally be exposed to street art, somebody who would just walk past it. Street art really saves a lot of people who are down in their lives and on their luck. This is their one and only outlet. Plus, you get an immediate response from people. A lot of times it’s just, Look at that graffiti on that freeway wall. But maybe the graffiti on the freeway isn’t the ugly thing, maybe that’s not what they’re angry about. Maybe they’re angry about how for the last 10 years you’ve been driving through this prison freeway with these big ugly gray walls and it just took the graffiti to point out the ugly that was already there.

I find this tension – between the forbidden act of graffiti, technically vandalism, and the delight people are discovering as a consequence – acutely compelling. Is an illegal rainbow still joyful? Here’s a letter writer commenting on the rainbow warrior situation:

So, somebody lays down a rainbow on the thing, a piece of art (and yes, it is art, even if it is “free,” and maybe especially so) that pokes fun at the mess, that makes me grin and say, “That’s a little better!” As a life-long citizen of Albuquerque, as someone who has had his very personal property damaged by genuinely malicious individuals: this isn’t the same thing. Is it graffiti? Yeah. Is it the same as somebody tagging a vulgar word on the car my parents gave me when I went to college? No. The intention of the rainbows is perhaps mischievous, but it is definitely not malicious. The intention, and the execution, is a wink, a laugh, a little unexpected burst. Worth a slap on the wrist and a good talking to, nothing more.

(Ok, and now I’m going to pause, because the 400 words and 45 minutes I just spent finishing this post have vanished into the ether that is this charming second day of the new year. [Deep breath and a moment to convince myself it will come out better the second time around.] Ok…)

I like this distinction between mischief and malice. The mess the writer refers to is the Anasazi building, the most public of the warrior’s targets, a high-rise which had recently been taken over by the Albuquerque government because the developer was charged with fraud, (a crime with no discernible aesthetic value). I like the idea that the rainbow has in a way recast an unfortunate incident for the citizens of the city. Redemption, via transgression.

How important is this element of transgression in the joy we feel from street art? Is there something inherent in the violation of boundaries that fuels our pleasure when we look at it? The carefree disregard of the strictures of private ownership and the numbing conventions of urban aesthetic culture? Maybe our delight is less about the vibrancy of the color, and more about the irrepressible spirit that put it there.

I’ve been wondering this in the wake of a visit last week to Wynwood Walls, a collection of murals in an artfully dingy Miami neighborhood. Wynwood brings together works by a range of street artists, well-known names like Futura, Shepherd Fairey, Nunca, Space Invader, etc. under the sanction of gallerists and developers, in a project that dropped out of Art Basel 2009. I really like a number of these works (particularly the piece by Nunca, below), and I recognize that the mainstreaming of street art gives these artists a chance to make a real living, but I can’t help but wonder: Is some of the joy lost by bringing these works into this kind of walled garden? Tamed by the light of legality and legitimacy, are they just a bit less vibrant, a bit more inert?

Maybe my previous question – Can an illegal rainbow be joyful? – had it backwards. Maybe it’s precisely the illegality that touches us. Mischief, with its attendant unpredictability and freedom, makes us feel vicariously free.

Thoughts?

By the way, if you find yourself in Miami, definitely make your way over to Wynwood and see it for yourself. Have lunch at the Wynwood Kitchen and Bar and wander the zillions of galleries which seem to have sprung up, perfectly distressed-looking, practically yesterday. It’s a nice day out, and a welcome departure from the excess of the design district.

Rainbow Warrior images via Patricia Austhoff and The Fibe Squad. And again, thanks, Mara.

I had never heard of critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton or The Quest of Happiness until a tip from Annette deFerrari, the artist/illustrator behind this excellent diagram of Plutchik’s emotional taxonomy. Annette sent me this quote:

“My experience,” said an old gentleman to me, “has been that I could never succeed in getting the special kind of happiness I had wanted or hope for, but that other kinds of happiness which I did not want and had never hoped for were supplied to me, in the course of life, most lavishly and abundantly. I therefore ended by discovering, though it took me a long time to make the discovery, that the right way to enjoy the happiness within my reach was not to form an ideal of my own and be disappointed when it was not realized — for that it never was – but to accept the opportunities for enjoying life which were offered by life itself from year to year and from day to day. Since I took things in this temper, I have enjoyed really a great amount of happiness, though it has been of a kind entirely different from anything I ever anticipated or laid plans for when I was young.”
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Quest of Happiness, 1897

I’m so glad to have found this quote because this is such a foundational idea in my thinking about joy. In a way, you could say that joy is not something you seek, but rather something you discover. While we go in pursuit of happiness, joy finds us.

Why is this important? Because it suggests that joy is dictated not just by what happens to us but also by our expectations. While it’s important to plan for the future and put ourselves in circumstances that we believe will make us happiest in the future, we can’t control exactly what will result from our efforts. And at the moment-to-moment level, we don’t know how others around us will behave or what opportunities or challenges will crop up without warning. When our expectations are very specific and narrow, we increase the chances of disappointment. When we’re more open to a range of possibilities, we create the possibility of savoring “the happiness within our reach,” or joy.

Thinking of happiness as a longitudinal measure of our emotional wellbeing, there are really two components: How happy are the individual moments, strung together like links in a chain, that make up our lives? And how satisfied are we with the trajectory, the broad sweeping arc that line is taking? The latter is a macro decision, and we address dissatisfaction with this arc by making changes to the path – changing jobs, moving cities, adjusting work/life balance, and so on. The first question is micro; it relates to each moment. Are we enjoying the experiences that our trajectory has put in our path? Are we attuned to the joys in front of us, or always comparing them with the hypothetical joys on another path? Or the anticipated joys at the end of the journey?

There’s a dance between these two components of happiness, the arc and the moments, and it seems human to err on one side or the other. This is another articulation of that idea, by Jessa Crispin, clipped from Liz Danzico’s Bobulate blog:

I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you.

I love that idea that happiness is a by-product, because it points out that the trajectory is not just superimposed on the moments by our will; the moments also alter the trajectory. All of us have instances where a moment was a revelation, dramatically shifting the course of our lives. Seen this way, happiness is like an accretion of accidents, and our job is to put ourselves in the way of joyful accidents and be poised to recognize them when they happen. And this is where habits of mind like our expectations, openness, and attentiveness come in.

I’ve been reading Maslow lately, and found myself really touched by this this statement, which seems to me also along the lines of this discussion:

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists—that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred—this lesson can easily be lost.

This idea of “the sacred in the ordinary” (or “the joy of the mundane” or “the delight in the everyday”) is I think the fundamental belief that lies beneath my work, on Aesthetics of Joy, and everything else I do. I’ve spent so much of my life dazzled by inconsequential things, but I think why I try to show here is that these actually are the things with the most consequence – for our happiness, our wellbeing, our sustainability. The ability to be fascinated is perhaps the most essential quality for a joyful life.

As 2010 winds down, I’ve found myself feeling a bit tormented by all the things that didn’t get done. Things I’d wanted to achieve, but found themselves back-burnered by more pressing obligations, or the simple limits on what one person with two hands can reasonably expect to complete in a year. Then I looked at my photos: there were celebrations in Maine and trips to the wilds of New Zealand, visits with old friends and new ones in Sydney, a family gathering in Santa Fe, and all kinds of escapades in between. And looking at all these images, with so many different family and friends, I just felt happy. It may not have been the year I planned, but it was a good year.

So, as the new year begins, I wish you the ability to recognize the “happiness within your reach,” the by-products of your great plans, the sacred in your ordinary. In other words, have a very joyful new year!

Art by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (just the perfect sort of ethereal beauty for a thoughtful, liminal day such as this one!)

Recovering from a holiday of excess, I want to be in austerity mode, but I can’t help being drawn to the almost comical sense of abundance in these images from photographer Alain Delorme’s Totems series. If you’ve spent any time in the developing world, you’ve seen that these laden bicyclists are the normal mode of transportation for all kinds of goods, and it’s a source of great delight to see how cleverly the operators pile their wares onto such delicate craft. I know this is hard work, and I don’t mean to romanticize their labor, but having seen many of these kinds of carriers in person, I’ve been consistently surprised by their apparent lack of struggle. Despite the top-heavy proportions of their loads, their  balance seems remarkably effortless, and I find that looking at them evokes a sort of reverence for this almost magical skill.

On the DesignBoom blog, Andrea Chin writes:

The verticality of these formations echoes the incessant expansion of the urban area, constantly under construction. Here, De lorme gives a new vision full of humor and poetry of those porters – both super heroes and ants with impressive loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers… Distanced from the typical photos of China portraying immense crowds, he has focused on the individuality of these workers, as opposed to all those identical and interchangeable objects.

While I can see the urban expansion metaphor and the emblematic reflection of the spread of materialism, it’s not the first place I go when I look at these images. For me, the reaction is much more emotional, and focuses more on the latter statement about the individuality and humanity of the workers. Unlike the numberless trucks that ferry goods around western cities, their facades obscuring their contents, each of these improvised structures is a unique composition, a transient artifact of human ingenuity. They’re less elegant than purpose-built cargo transports, but they have a kind of ramshackle beauty. Accidental sculptures, they remind me of the limitless nature of human assiduity, and the joy that lies in so many ordinary acts.

Alain Delorme: Totems
via: Erin Loechner’s lovely Design for Mankind

I love this new ad from Canon Pixma, which is the result of an unexpected combination of paint, sound, and a macro lens. It almost feels like peering into a magical world: The slow speed and tight focus allow us to see transient sculptures that would just be a mess of splatters to the unaided eye. It’s also an intriguingly experimental approach. I feel like there is a rising trend lately towards experimentation in ads, events, and art pieces; people set up systems of conditions and allow unpredictable variation to determine the results. Mother’s ad for IKEA is a recent example, where cats, with all their mercurial whims, were released into the store to see what interactions might occur. As in this case, the “making of” video is as significant as the final result — the process is as joyful as the outcome. The work of design shifts from creating a beautiful thing to orchestrating a beautiful system, from controlling variability to modulating it.

The ad first caught my eye as a possible example of joywashing. I did an interview the other day during which I was asked to talk a bit about the concept, so it’s been top of mind. I said that joywashing itself isn’t harmful — more aesthetics of joy in the world is hardly a bad thing — but that it bothers me to see advertising that puts a chipper veneer on an ordinary product and claims it will make you happy. I’d rather see the design of the product reflect the emotional claim. If the product fails to deliver on the joyful promise, then it’s joywashing. But seeing this ad makes me want to refine that statement a bit.

I have no idea if the Pixma printer is a good one or not, whether it produces dazzling color or only so-so color, whether a print it makes is any more likely to cause delight than a print from any other printer. So on those grounds this ad would be suspect in my book. But I think this marketing effort transcends joywashing because the ad itself is truly joyful. In contrast to most ads, which say their brand is joyful (usually they shout it at you), this ad instead offers a brief experience of joy. Through an artful experiment full of delightful aesthetics, it creates a minute-long immersion into a surreal, uplifting world. I found myself spellbound by the ethereal forms and celebratory movements — it’s a great illustration of just how emotionally evocative abstraction can be.

I hope the product delivers on the tagline: Bring color to life. But even if it doesn’t, the ad doesn’t feel like joywashing because it can be appreciated and enjoyed all on its own. If the product doesn’t live up to the promise, I’ll buy something else, but at least I can appreciate the fact that the company has invested in creativity, and has chosen to put something inspiring out there, instead of insincerity, hoodwinking, and self-congratulation. I’d love to see the creativity and joyful spirit of the ad spark user’s creativity in similarly delightful ways. Even better would be if Canon had an events program up its sleeve, like Levi’s Workshops, for example, that will teach people ways to “bring color to life.” In this case, the ad, events, and products would all be parts of the Pixma experience, and the brand’s delivery against the promise of delight.

How many times have you walked past an old abandoned building and thought: that would be a great place for a bar/library/gallery/fill-in-the-blank? On runs through Red Hook and along the Gowanus Canal, I often find myself struck by certain wabi sabi looking warehouses and industrial buildings and thinking about the wonderful kinds of “third places” that could inhabit them. Abandoned buildings are evocative substrates for this kind of architectural daydreaming — like discarded hermit crab shells, they have both history and possibility.

I love the way this idea, The Hypothetical Development Project, takes those germs of imagined futures and makes them visible. The project, a public art collaboration between Rob Walker, Ellen Susan, and G.K. Darby, creates renderings of ideas for uses of abandoned buildings in New Orleans, which will be posted at the sites like developers’ renderings. In this case, though, the envisioned uses are a bit left of center. A Museum of the Self, with an enormous Facebook-style thumbs up is one; a Loitering Centre is another. Juxtaposed against the forlorn emptiness of abandoned structures, these silly fantasies feel delightful — they are uninhibited manifestations of creative energy, filtered through a lens of hope.

That they are implausible is their charm, but I half-h0pe that one of them will be compelling enough to stick. The trio is raising funds via Kickstarter (they’re very close to their goal, and just need a little help getting over the line!), and I imagine a sequel where popular passion for one of the Hypothetical Development ideas becomes the seed for a real, crowdsourced development project. I feel like we need more unconventional spaces for people to convene in our urban environments, and it’s exciting to think about how fiction can find new possibilities in old structures. In effect, these renderings are like playful narrative prototypes, highlighting new ways and places to gather in the years to come.

The Hypothetical Development Project home page
Hypothetical Development Kickstarter campaign

This clever little rainbow by Dutch artist Helmut Smits made me smile. Not quite the reaction of the “double rainbow” guy, but still, there’s something joyful about rainbows…

I love the opportunistic quality of this incredibly simple piece, the way it takes advantage of an existing motion to create something beautiful. For people who regularly sit behind the wheel of a car, the movement of windshield wipers is almost invisible — of course, it’s designed to be that way. Like a kite exposing the movement of the wind, or these speed blend tires embellishing the motion of bike wheels, it’s amazing how a little color can expose the hidden beauty of an ordinary arc.

{via @etsy}

I’ve been wanting to do a post on illusions for a while now. There’s something interesting to me in the way illusions create a sense of wonder, revealing magic in seemingly ordinary images and forms. Illusions can also be somewhat unsettling, forcing us to accept that our usual standard for proof — “I’ll believe it when I see it” — is not always so reliable. This tension, between wonder at the impossible and subsequent distrust of our faculties makes illusions a fascinating area of exploration for aesthetics of joy. What determines whether an illusion brings joy or anxiety? And why are we so transfixed by illusions in the first place?

I started thinking about a piece on illusions after receiving an email about a new public installation (above) by the artist Felice Varini in New Haven, presented by Site Projects. The name was familiar, but I didn’t know his work; after a bit of exploration, I discovered that Varini specializes in the creation of a particular variety of trompe l’oeil illusion. The artist paints a large-scale graphic shape on three-dimensional surfaces so that when viewed from one particular spot, there is an illusion of a two-dimensional graphic superimposed on the scene. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand if you look at these images or watch this video.

Trompe l’oeil (meaning “trick the eye”) illusions  like this can be particularly satisfying because they involve the demonstration of artistic skill. Usually this skill is used to create depth where none exists; Varini flips the convention on its head and creates an illusion of impossible flatness. To watch how he does this is extraordinary (see this video) because it is just so simple. Using projected light, he is able to identify and fill in the essential surfaces for his enormous illusions.

As often happens when you get an idea in your head, you start seeing instances of it everywhere, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by illusions. I attended a wedding in Santa Fe and found this installation on a wall in that city’s history museum. (The second photo shows how it works.)

Then Scientific American Mind magazine released a special issue on illusions, featuring over a hundred different examples, noting, “Illusions push the mysterious and wondrous brain into revealing its secrets.” And shortly thereafter I ended up at a SciCafe event at the Natural History museum here in New York only to hear astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson weigh in on the subject. As he waxed philosophical about the limits of human intelligence, he inquired, “Why do we call them optical illusions? We should call them brain failures!”

There’s an interesting tension in those last two views, both perspectives from science. Are the effects of illusions a demonstration of the brain’s wondrous workings, or are they evidence of its foibles and failings? Perhaps both. As neuroscience researchers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik observe in SciAm Mind, “Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.” We trust the inputs from our senses when faced with conflicting information about something in the world. If we see an elephant but someone tells us we’re looking at a giraffe, we trust our eyes more than our companion. But when information from our senses conflicts with understood laws of nature, such as in this illusion (below) where a printed graphic appears to be moving, we become aware of the limits of our brain and our senses. Illusions are like test cases at these outer limits of perception. They reveal the boundaries of our brain’s ability to interpret the world in our minds, but in doing so, they also reveal just how successful the brain is at that task of interpretation most of the time.

Am I off-topic here? What does any of this have to do with joy?

I think there is a strong connection between magic and joy: when the world presents us with an experience that is somehow impossible, implausible, or inexplicable by intuitive logic. Magic implies a contradiction inherent in the world. It brings joy when it’s non-threatening (otherwise it breeds anxiety) and when its secret is obscure enough that it can be re-experienced again and again. Optical illusions perform this kind of magic. Even when you know what kind of trick the illusion is playing with your brain, you cannot prevent yourself from experiencing it, which leads to a particular kind of rediscoverable wonder. Illusions are particularly fruitful for design because of this rediscoverability. They are more than visual jokes; they are satisfying even when you know the punchline.

The reality is that the magic of illusion is not evidence of a contradiction in the world. It’s a contradiction somewhere between the world and our own minds. They are lost-in-translation moments, “brain failures” in Dr. Tyson’s parlance. But our ability to find ways to play with these quirks at the margins of our perception has made them delightful failures — an accidental, yet beautiful sort of aesthetics of joy.

Felice Varini images courtesy of Site Projects. Installation will be up until June 2011.