aesthetics of joy

When my studiomate Hayyim brought copies of these incredible 18th century color charts to the studio yesterday, I couldn’t wait to find and share them. They come from a book (which is online in its entirety) on the development of color technologies in Europe in the 18th century. The charts show the emergence of the color wheels most artists and designers are familiar with, and some more novel approaches, such as triangles and pyramids, that reveal a generation of thinkers’ joyful struggle to make sense of our chromatic world in the wake of Newton’s theory of color.

I hope the color brightens up your weekend. See you next week!

xx Ingrid

Addendum: In the original post, I linked but did not cite the source of these wonderful charts. Please see the following reference for more information on this fascinating topic:

Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Gutenberg-e Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard

The lure of the new is a looming constant in industrialized society. Shiny and fresh, novelties constantly beckon: giant glossy plasma screens, sweet-smelling candles, cute kitchen utensils, sexy shoes, and the next must-have gadget of the moment.

Against this relentless parade of newer and better, it’s occasionally nice to take a moment to appreciate the objects and stories of old. Ancient Industries catalogs an array of traditional arts, crafts, and designs into the simple categories “living” and “extinct,” reminding us of treasures we’ve lost and ones that we should appreciate while they still linger.

Perusing the blog is like a joyful history lesson told through beautiful and beloved objects, like those above. Some have cultural meaning, others just have personal meaning for the writers. See more here.

Cluster ballooning is your inner child’s (or inner daredevil’s) fantasy come true. I thought this was something scenic done for effect in movies (see The Red Balloon) — I never imagined people did this in real life.

Oh, but they do, some flying up to 4 miles high (!) in what they call a “something between a sport and a personal eccentricity.” John Ninomiya, a cluster ballooner with over 60 flights under his belt gives a beautiful explication of the sport’s peculiar combination between delight and daring:

Cluster ballooning is also something very beautiful and whimsical – like something from a children’s story, or something from a dream. For me, the tension between those two elements – being carried away with these huge, colorful toys, and at the same time, exercising the appropriate skill not to end up in trouble with the FAA, or possibly injured or killed – that’s what I find so interesting about cluster ballooning.

Cluster ballooning aesthetically is the confluence of so many joyful elements, it’s hard to name them all: round, shiny balloons, gathered together in an abundant mass; the transcendent floating and rising movements that make us look above the horizon; the freedom of flight, unencumbered by heavy craft; the wonder of being above the clouds, leaving the earth and then returning to it; and the absurdity that all this is done by a toy, the very same thing used to decorate a mailbox on a child’s birthday.

It’s an extraordinary feeling when something you never thought existed is revealed to you. As I child, the tug of a helium balloon on my wrist filled me with a fantasy of being carried aloft that was part wish, part fear, but all joy.

Read more about cluster ballooning here, and if you’re feeling brave, check out a tutorial here.

With its latest ads, Microsoft is hoping that some tooth-aching cuteness will make you forget all about the nightmare that was Vista. We might quibble with the logic, but the execution is hard to fault. Kylie’s cute, and I can’t help but giggle when that music comes on and the cat with the marshmallows flashes on the screen with the words, “snappy and responsive.”

A few weeks ago, Virginia tweeted me the question: “What is the relationship between cuteness and joy?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now. My theory on the subject is still evolving, but in short, it’s based on the fact that we have a visceral, positive reaction to children and childlike things, even those that are not related to us. This is adaptive, of course, because raising children requires sacrifices of a society, not just a parental unit, and so a natural affinity and protective instinct towards children protects the species as a whole. (Chowing down on a few of your neighbor’s hatchlings might be ok when you’re a crocodile with 70 eggs, but with us low-yield humans this kind of behavior is evolutionarily unwise, not to mention socially unpopular.) The assertion that we have an innate positive reaction to children is supported to some extent by research by Morton Kringelbach in his book The Pleasure Center, in which non-parent adults show greater activity in a region of the brain associated with emotion and reward when viewing infant faces than when viewing adult faces.

How does this translate to cuteness? Many cute things are defined by abstractions of neotenized (juvenilized) qualities: big eyes, round cheeks, proportionally large head, and prominent forehead. You would think abstractions would be less effective at evoking our emotions, but actually the reverse may be true, due to something psychologists call the peak-shift effect. Evidently the brain recognizes features made more salient through amplification and distortion even better than the real thing. This is why caricatures are so easy to recognize and so compelling. Cute things are like caricatures of children, distorted by the overemphasis of certain childlike proportions and features. Compare the big-headed Bratz dolls with Barbie, and the features of any stuffed animal with the real thing to see how this abstraction plays out. You can also see abstraction of childhood in cute movements, such as the wobbling of Weebles, which mimic an unsteady toddler. And perhaps we will also find the same to be true for sounds, as children’s voices are higher in pitch than adult voices, and have a less regular cadence.

Maybe Microsoft is hoping that by associating Windows 7 with all this cuteness, there will be a halo effect of protection and tenderness towards the operating system. I’m not sure but it could work, at least in the short term until the emotional impact of daily use takes prominence. Emotions are curiously non-directed, and though they are triggered by one object, the feelings are often transferred or ascribed to another. Microsoft is also shrewdly and not-so-subtly tapping into something else here, which is the cute photo and video forwarding meme (epitomized by sites like Cute Overload) which consumes significant bandwidth on most social media platforms. So it’s not just an innate emotional programing this type of ad appeals to, but also a cultural moment.

At the end of the ad, Microsoft promises “more happy” is to come. Very curious to see what that will look like, and whether Windows 7 actually incorporates any aesthetics of joy into the design of the software itself.

Every now and then I have a look to see what search terms are bringing new visitors to the site. It’s always interesting to see how people find the site and what topics readers are most curious about. My favorite among the search queries of the past month is “Why is bubble wrap so good?” bringing people to this earlier post I wrote exploring the subject.

It delights me that there are others out there who wonder why bubble wrap (or rainbows or cupcakes or fireworks) bring us joy. These questions may seem unimportant in the face of all we are confronting at the moment, but they speak to profound curiosities about our human nature and our world, curiosities that are no less important for being about what creates pleasure than about what helps avoid pain.

Re-reading the earlier post, I think my answer is still the same, but I’d add two things. First, bubble wrap has a certain amount of magic to it because it contains air in a permanent way, in contrast to all the bubbles of natural world. Bubble in water float to the surface, bubbles in air pop, bubbles trapped in ice eventually melt. So bubble wrap makes the elusive air bubble tangible in a way that seems mundane but is actually quite magical.

The other thing I would say is that it also has something to do with sensory immersion. Bubble wrap has a unique tactile sensation, and it’s also an aural experience. This richness contrasts with many materials which have expected textures and that don’t “speak” to us. Bubble wrap could be an even richer sensory experience, and in fact there’s at least one person out there who intends to make it so. Check out this genius patent I found for scented bubble wrap. It’s like the love child of bubble wrap and the scratch ‘n sniff sticker.

And finally, here’s a fun bubble wrap fact: did you know that it was an accidental innovation? The inventors were actually trying to create a new kind of easy-to-clean wallpaper! Thankfully, the experiment went awry and the world’s most joyful packing material was born.

Image: Feeline
Original post

If you were out and about in Carroll Gardens yesterday, you could have been forgiven for thinking there was something mysterious afflicting the canine population of the neighborhood. But it wasn’t exactly clear who were the ones affected: the dogs or their owners.

Everywhere you went on Smith and Court Sts. you could find dozens of people carrying invisible dog leashes, pretending with great self-conviction to be walking their dogs. Dog walkers would stop and chat with each other about their dogs’ names and breeds, ages and habits. Walking past, you might overhear, as I did:

Dogwalker 1: Ugh, Buster, don’t sniff his butt!

Dogwalker 2: Oh, it’s ok. It’s what dogs do.

Just a normal dog owners’ conversation. Except there were obviously no dogs. As I passed a group, one woman wielded her leash in my direction, as if her invisible dog had come over to sniff my groceries, then grappled with the air as if trying to rein him in. I saw others break their gaits down the street as their invisible charges paused to water a tree, and one particularly zealous owner bent down with an invisible plastic bag (one hopes) to pick up an invisible poop.

It was all very ridiculous, and I couldn’t help but smile, though others seemed to be vexed by the odd behavior. I think when odd things happen, people like to know why, and the dog walkers stubbornly refused to acknowledge anything strange about their behavior even after much questioning. Rumors started to fly. One man at the farmer’s market told me it was some sort of protest against a new dog law. Another said it was to encourage adoption from shelters. But it turns out it was a good old flash mob, put on by well-known pranksters Improv Everywhere. Apparently the leashes came from Invisible Dog on Bergen, a gallery that occupies a former invisible dog leash factory.

Even being a spectator who wasn’t in on the joke, I have to say I thought it was fun. Times are tough, and we all need a little silliness in our lives. Improv Everywhere says their mission is to cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” It’s interesting to think of chaos and joy together. Chaos is often associated with lack of control and unhappiness, but that lack of control can also go the other direction and bring delight. More photos and first hand accounts from dog walkers here.

Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.

Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.

Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.

via PSFK

Charles Spearin finds music in the cadences of voices speaking in their usual ways. He interviews his neighbors about happiness and searches out the hidden melodies that underlie what they’re saying. Then he sets these to music.

He calls his work the Happiness Project, which you can find more info about here. Thanks for the tip, Mere!

An email from a reader got me thinking again about joyful behavior. I’ve written before about joyful behavior in the form of random acts of kindness and other unexpected actions. These are often 1-to-1 or 1-to-many exchanges, and done with a certain level of intention.

Flash mobs are another form of joyful behavior, but rather than focusing on making one or a few people feel good, they’re focused on collective enjoyment at a large scale. For those who haven’t encountered this phenomenon, a flash mob is a public spectacle usually organized by email, Facebook, Twitter, text, and other social networking technologies and services. Flash mobs gather groups of random people to do unusual things, such as ride the subway with no pants on, host a subway station art gallery, have a pillow fight, blow bubbles, or do a huge coordinated dance routine. This phenomenon has become so popular that you can find more than a couple MJ-themed flash mobs with little effort, and lots of events that require at least a marginal suppression of dignity.

It may not always be in good taste, but it’s usually in good humor, and good fun if you’ve ever experienced one. My dad and I walked through Times Square during this year’s Bubble Battle, and felt first hand the joy of a place we know well entirely transformed by the odd, but welcome spectacle. Flash mobs are also a wonderful way to experience the contagiousness of joy in action. Watching the videos you first notice a few bewildered looks from the immediate passersby, followed by smiles and whispers to companions. Others, who may not have noticed the spectacle, see the reactions of those around them and snap to attention, and you can watch as the processing happens in their brains, and the smiles spread across their faces too. Like a water ripple, joy spreads outward in concentric waves. Confusion turns to delight, and then comes back in on itself, as people converge to get a closer look. Then cameras emerge and text messages are sent, propelling the ripple even wider.

When people talk about the rise of flash mobs, they always talk about social media. But social media are only the enabler; what interests me is the drive. Media are the how, not the why, and the why is an infinitely more interesting question. I believe the rise of these events is driven by a craving for joy in everyday life, a desire to let the inner child out to play in a way that feels free. It’s a drive for connection, for tactile experiences, for oddity among the homogenized landscape, for reprieve not just from recession but from all of the rigidities and pressures of adult life. It’s a desire to participate in something where the outcome is uncertain and unimportant, because the experience is about being in the moment. And it’s not just about being in moments, but about creating moments that are worth being in, more worth being in than moments spent in front of the TV or swiping your card at a cash register. It attracts people of all ages and lifestyles because this is a deeply human need.

It is a wonder when technology provides opportunities for the new satisfaction of emotional needs; but because emotional needs can be repressed, rechanneled, and hidden for long periods of time, their sudden satisfaction can make it look like they are new needs, rather than long-buried ones. Flash mobs, in their  absurd way, make us conscious of this latent craving for serendipity in our culture and ourselves.

For more on flash mobs:
NewMindSpace
ImprovEverywhere

Thank you to Riaz for the link to the Sound of Music flash mob and inspiration for this post

Patterns give me joy, and this quiz from @Issue magazine suggests that they bring joy to many cultures around the world as well. The quiz asks you to match the patterns above with the nationalities that created them, showing the diversity and distinctiveness of the ways we express ourselves in non-linguistic 2d terms. The differences interest me less than the fact that all cultures seem driven to create in this way; to abstract, in varying degrees, our essential experiences into color, line, shape, and repetition.

Take the full quiz here.
Via Joyful Delight

Where do I begin with describing the joy of Polaroids? There’s the magic of the technology, which unlike many high-tech innovations manages to be enchanting long past the point of newness. There’s the delight of instant gratification coupled with a delicious (almost torturous) anticipation. And then there’s the experience itself, the sheer pleasure of the image emerging, first a ghostly impression, then full color, out of a sort of muddy brown nothingness.

Digital cameras bring joy too, of course. Our first encounters with that technology were certainly magical, though its proliferation has made them less so. You can relive that initial joy and remind yourself how wondrous digital photography is by traveling to the most remote places with a digital camera. In 2006, my then-boyfriend and I were admiring a donkey in rural Kyrgyzstan when its owner came along and invited me to give it whirl. The man joined me in a photo and I’ll never forget how his eyes lit up at seeing the photo displayed on that tiny screen. We rarely have the opportunity to feel that way anymore, but digital photography still has its joys — they just come from other attributes. For example, the scale of digital technology is such that we can carry it with us everywhere, so we never miss a joyful moment. And because we can take zillions of shots for free, without even thinking about it, digital photography lends itself to more spontaneous, unexpected results.

But Polaroid has a few joyful features that the weensy camera in my iPhone can’t hope to match. First, the Polaroid is a real thing, an artifact. The Polaroid spits out a real picture (and does so with that exciting ejector noise). The picture is a real, tangible thing. It has weight and texture, smell and sheen. It interacts with light, reflecting it off its glossy surface. It interacts with the hands, showing fingerprints and odd effects if you touch the surface during the developing process. A digital photo feels ethereal; it’s an image, but not a picture. It engages just our vision, while a Polaroid engages all our senses. (Well, except taste. I hope.)

The Polaroid does the instant gratification of digital one better by incorporating a tiny interval, a delay that allows our anticipation to build. Studies have shown that interruptions or delays preceding a desired event make the event more pleasurable when it occurs. So while that wait for the image to come through tries our patience, it actually makes for a more joyful rush when the image actually appears.

The interval suggests another joyful feature of Polaroid, to me the most important one. Polaroid is not just a product, but a process. This is essential to the notion of joy. People don’t derive joy from products; they derive joy from experiences. A product is static. It can only create joy through its contribution to an experience — the experience of using it (hula hoop), wearing it (pair of shoes), doing something fun with it (golf clubs), interacting with others through it (phone), contemplating it (art), and so on. Objects that suggest or prescribe an experience are more likely to be joyful than others. But objects can also incorporate experience into their very essence, their matter, and this is transcendent. Polaroid is one of those rare products that embodies an experience. Every Polaroid picture is a unique show, a one-act play of light and color whose action unfolds silently in front of the user. That process reflects the experience you just had when you took the photo, when the moment crystallized in front of you as photo-worthy, when the players assumed just the right poses, when you depressed the shutter and made it permanent. The image emerges, a transformed vision of 3-5 minutes ago, as the most beautiful kind of déjà vu.

Which is all to say that I’m very pleased about the renaissance of the Polaroid that seems to be happening these days. Urban Outfitters is now selling Polaroid film, and I just founded these gorgeous Polaroid notecards (above) on the always charming Jars of Cute (available at Fred Flare). To me it’s less a manifestation of retro nostalgia than a craving for tangible, joyful experiences, something I think we all can use a little more of in our lives.

Peter Feld has the original Woodstock poster designed by Arnold Skolnick on his blog today, and it struck me as wonderful example of aesthetics of joy: celebration, music, and inclusiveness all so cleanly expressed with the bright colors, friendly type, and big, rounded, hand-made imagery. Truly iconic, joyful design that captured the spirit of a transformative cultural moment.

Skolnick is releasing a limited edition 40th anniversary version, though unfortunately I can’t find images of it, so I can’t tell if he’s altered it significantly. The article does give a bit of interesting history on the design of the poster, though, in case you’re interested in knowing more.

Recently I’ve come across a lot of projects related to the idea of seeding joy and hope by just putting some positive energy out there. The good vibes aren’t directed at anyone in particular — they’re public, designed to touch strangers, people you’ve never met and may never actually meet.

One of these projects is You Are Beautiful. As part of the project, stickers like the ones above are distributed free of charge for anyone to place in whatever public places they choose. As the statement on their website says:

You Are Beautiful uses the medium of advertising and commercialization to spread a positive message. Projects like these make a difference in the world by catching us in the midst of daily life and creating moments of positive self realization.

The two key joyful elements here are surprise and transcendence. The surprise of seeing a positive, anonymous message catches our attention and interrupts whatever frame of mind we were in. That interruption, in turn, leads to a moment of transcendence, where the beauty of the sentiment is absorbed in what You Are Beautiful calls a “moment of positive self realization.” Ideally, it causes a shifting of perspective that makes us feel, if not beautiful, then at least connected to something beautiful.

Another variation on this theme is the yarnbombing movement, which is documented beautifully by Leanne Prain and Mandy Moore on their blog and forthcoming book of the same name. Yarnbombing, also known as guerrilla knitting, is an affectionate term for a kind of soft grafitti, where artists attach knit or crocheted “tags” of brightly colored yarn to elements of the landscape. Often found in urban settings, these tags brighten the environment and invite people to consider their surroundings in a new way. Sometimes just the sight of a knitted sleeve around a bus stop sign post will make people smile and share a laugh, connecting in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. I did an interview with Leanne earlier this summer, and she had so many wonderful insights that I’ll definitely be posting more on this topic (after I’ve finished chs 1 and 2…).

One more example is Operation Nice, a project designed to add a little positive energy to the world through gestures. A variant on the theme of random acts of kindness, Operation Nice posts examples of extraordinary niceness to inspire others to do the same. Reading the stories, you can’t help but feel good, and motivated to pass the positive energy along.

This positive energy is all the more powerful for being undirected. The joy of those who create it is purely in the giving, without even the satisfaction of seeing the results of their efforts. Once released, these positive vibes are free to ricochet around and recombine, creating unexpected combinations that compound the joy they bring. Recipients of kind acts may in turn spread more kindness, and those who witness an interjection of joy into their environment may be inspired to transform their world in their own way.

Image: temp13rec.

Today I have a post on DeepGlamour about the history of lapdog glamour, investigating how tiny pups became associated with Hollywood and high fashion. But the whole idea for the post started because while I see that Paris Hilton and her many imitators tote around their Chihuahuas in their designer bags like status symbols, I just don’t get it. Those little dogs are so impish and funny that they’re like a living parody of the whole idea of glamour. For me, little dogs are not about status or sophistication but about joy.

Small dogs are pure personality coated with fur. I see them on the city streets and everything they do just makes me laugh. They’re the anti-trophy, the anti-status symbol. They love unconditionally, indiscriminately, energetically, and with abundance. Their values are the opposite of the scarcity and exclusivity that define status. Unlike the affected aloofness of the high-class, small dogs (actually, all dogs) are interested in everything and everyone. They trample joyously over the carefully constructed distance that celebrities create for themselves, romping over to sniff a potential buddy, oblivious to the fact that they might expose their owner to unwanted conversation.

Perhaps this is the allure. Perhaps the little dog becomes the way to break down barriers for those of a certain social strata. Even socialites and starlets need joy, especially when it can be disguised as a posh Chihuahua in an in-season purse.

Image: Nutloaf