aesthetics of joy

I am a big fan of snow. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it piles up in big drifts that make it hard to get around. I know you have to shovel it within 4 hours in Brooklyn or you’ll get a ticket. I know it looks pristine for about 30 seconds in the city and then it turns poo-brown and ugly. I know all this but there’s really nothing you could say that would make me love snow any less.

My first reaction to snow is always a visceral call to memories of childhood joy: “Snowday!” Just the barest snippet of a winter weather forecast or a “storm warning” brings a rush of delight. As a child, a forecast of snow meant I immediately put down the books and pencils and stopped doing my homework, and started dreaming of sledding and hot chocolate and the general indolence of a holiday in the middle of the week. Occasionally the snow failed to materialize, and I was on my way to school with a pack full of unlearned knowledge and bad excuses. But usually the comforting voice of the local radio announcer would announce my school closed along with my best friend’s, and we would grab our matching orange plastic sleds and head for the hills. As an adult, I see snow, and I turn right back into this little girl (in the red, on the left):

There’s a personal joy for me in those memories — in having them and sharing them. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound joy to be found here, one that is more universal because it derives from the aesthetic experience of snow. There’s something magical about snow, the way it drops from the sky with the lightness of cotton, and yet rests so heavy on the earth. There’s a sense of awe created too, by the extent of its scale, both macro and micro: snow covers everything, quickly and indiscriminately, and yet miraculously, because the scale of each flake is so diminutive.

These are common joyful elements that I have written about before, but looking at the commonalities illuminates the many facets of snow’s delight. With its lightness, snow is like bubbles, feathers, dandelion seeds, marshmallows, and meringue — transcendent things that are made of and at home in the air. With its scale, snow can be like the ocean, the redwoods, or the Grand Canyon — awe-inspiring in its vastness. And yet, as tiny things, snowflakes are like jewels, like haikus, and like hobbyist’s miniatures — joyful things made precious by the intricacy they possess in such small scale. Snow’s magic is the magic of invisible sources, of something from nothing. A snowfall is a slow-unfolding abracadabra moment of a rabbit being pulled from a hat, an extended display of the tangible emerging from the intangible as it blows and accumulates into drifts.

Underlying all of this, for me, is a kind of joy of transformation. Snow is itself a shapeshifter, first light, then heavy; small, then large. It is moldable, a substrate for transient sculpture, be it snowman or snowangel, or merely a snowweapon in the form of an icicle or a ball. But more significant is what snow does to what’s around it. In this sense, snow is an intrusion, a new element that transforms its context by its presence. Snow’s intrusion into a city is all-encompassing. Snow’s color and texture redefine the setting. Its volume and density redefine the action. It blankets, it bleaches, and it slows. Snow changes our behavior; it gives us permission to be more playful. And snow changes the feeling of even indoor spaces, making them more intimate and cozy.

The pleasure of this transformation is heightened because we know it won’t last. Days, sometimes weeks, after the first magic act of its appearance, snow performs a second one, disappearing into what seems like nothing. We revel in it because we know it’s an evanescent joy. And we’re not sorry to see it go because we know that like all true delights, it will come again.

{Thanks to Rachel for inspiring this post!}

Happy new year, everyone. I love the first day of a new year! It’s like freshly fallen snow — pristine and beautiful and no one’s had a chance to muddy it up yet. It’s full of freedom and possibility. I have to say I have a good feeling about 2010. Personally, I have some exciting things on the agenda, like turning 30, for one, and another piece of news which I’ll announce later this month. I’m also excited to keep AoJ going and growing this year. In the last few months of ‘09, my masters thesis took priority and there are a bunch of developments I’ve wanted to make to the site that I had to put on hold. January will see a nicer sidebar with a better “joyful linklist,” tighter categories and tags, and a “recent comments” section. I also want to add some “similar posts” links and generally make navigating the site a simpler, more enjoyable experience. In addition, I have a few resolutions for Aesthetics of Joy in 2010:

Praxis
In the last year I’ve concentrated on identifying and explaining joy from a scientific and an aesthetic perspective. Over the next year I really want to focus on ways of designing and expressing joy — applying all this theory to the myriad design problems out there in the world. In the end, the only way that these ideas will have any value is if we do something with them. Praxis is about putting theory into practice, finding ways to help designers of all different kinds bring joy into their work, and helping people bring joy into their lives, through aesthetics. In the beginning of this year I want to do some trial-and-error on a few ways of bringing AoJ to life, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think of them.

Interviews and guests
In 2009, I focused mostly on my own ideas of joy, synthesized from various readings and discussions. I did many interviews with a wide range of experts on different topics, but I rarely posted much about these interviews on the blog. This year, I’d really like to explore other people’s perspectives on joy, and present some interviews and guest posts on different subjects.

Testing the limits of AoJ
2009 was all about defining the essence of joy. Now I want to push the boundaries and understand the margins. I want to look at things that start out joyful but become less so over time, or things that seem unpleasant on the surface but turn out to be delightful. I want to hear counterarguments and examine outliers and puzzle over things that challenge the theories behind AoJ. What are joy’s limitations? Can joy be restrained? Can it be silent? Can it be colorless? Can it be mean, wasteful, or selfish? What is joy good for and what is it not good for? I want to understand how far we can take joy, and where joy can take us, to get a better idea of what AoJ’s role should be in people’s lives.

Practice / preach
And finally, I want to do more practicing what I preach. I’ve always had a fairly healthy inner child, but this year I’m ready to do a little experimenting on myself. First up: my quest to find a joyful form of exercise to liven up my routine. Any suggestions? Let me know.

Now that you know my new year’s resolutions, what are yours? Any joyful ones? What are you most hopeful about for 2010?

Image: pamhule (CC)

With all the holiday festivities upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about joy’s celebratory side. (Please forgive if these thoughts are a little rough, as I’m also simultaneously editing my thesis document and my attention is a little divided.) It’s interesting to think about what kind of adaptive value celebration has in human life. Why do we celebrate? Or rather, why do we need to celebrate?

We know that cultures all over the world celebrate, and though we celebrate in different ways, we often celebrate similar things: lifestage transitions, marriages, births, harvests, seasonal shifts, and good fortune. And though celebrations of foreign cultures may seem filled with alien customs, aesthetically there are many common elements. Sweets, such as cakes or candies, are common, as is alcohol in cultures that consume it. Bright color, music, and dancing are typical in celebrations around the world. Light is a particularly important element, as in the Christmas tree, the menorah, and the fireworks displays that commemorate a range of festive occasions. And exuberant bursting gestures — like those of fireworks, but also the breaking of a piñata, the throwing of confetti, and the open-armed jump for joy — seem to originate from the very nexus of joy within the human soul.

It seems clear to me that celebration is a universal human drive that like curiosity or lust is hardwired into us by evolution. That the aesthetics of celebration also have universal elements suggests that perhaps these elements have had a long association with events to be celebrated (sweetness, for example, would be a natural correlate with fruit harvests, and light a natural relationship to seasonal celebrations). The question is, is celebration itself adaptive — does it have a function that aids in the survival of humans and the propagation of the species? Or is it a byproduct of evolution, having evolved in the company of other traits that enhanced gene dispersal? I haven’t read any definitive treatment on the subject, but I believe there must be at least some adaptive value. In his book The Art Instinct, evolutionary theorist Denis Dutton references the importance of social cooperation in the evolution that got Homo sapiens where we are today. I think celebration is like a social form of reward that motivates cooperation and helps maintain social harmony. It also strengthens bonds that may be needed in tougher times. (Perhaps companies who eliminate holiday parties in an effort to save costs might be well-advised to reconsider, given these insights.)

I hope you have a wonderful holiday this season, whatever you are celebrating! And if you have any thoughts on this topic, please share them: How else could celebration be adaptive? What are celebration’s benefits? How is celebration good for us?

Image: Michael™. Poor dog!

These joyful Christmas cones in Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Catarina square are bike powered! Passersby can hop on for a few minutes to keep the LEDs going. Now if only they could find a way to get the Rockefeller Center skaters to fire up NYC’s big tree…

See more bike-powered holiday installations on Vanessa’s joyful blog for the love of bikes.

Riaz has these great photos of Pakistani cargo trucks on his site. He says:

What’s amazing about this is that these are just regular cargo trucks. The truck drivers put in this much effort into almost every single vehicle you see.

In Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, there is a tendency towards embellishment of buses and the like, but I have never seen anything like this! They may strike a Western eye as a little gaudy, but you can’t deny there is so much love in these designs. I’m especially struck by the contrast between the plain attire of the drivers and their over-the-top vehicles. I wonder if this somehow became a sanctioned form of self-expression, and so, in the face of sumptuary convention, all creative energy gets channeled here.

See the full set here: Truckistani

Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

{via Wired}

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

I’d consider leaving the country to get to use these on my mail, if only they weren’t fictitious!

From A Field Guide to the Stamps of the World by Gavin Potenza, available in poster form here.

Along the lines of the You Are Beautiful and Operation Nice projects I wrote about last month, HopeRevo aims to produce a “hope revolution” through the leaving of positive affirmations in notes around cities. The element of surprise is key here; messages we might tune out in expected places have a way of striking us differently when they come at us out of context.

A similar initiative, which strives to create a more personal, hopeful connection is Hope Is In The Cards, which asks every American to send just one message of hope to someone else.

I love that these initiatives rely on the old tradition of notes and letters. It’s often said that paper and ink seems more special than digital communications. Aside from the extra effort such a missive demands, there’s also the sensory impact: the experience and anticipation of opening an envelope, the texture of the paper, the scent and weight of it all. It’s a beautiful way to spread more joy in the world.

Thanks Matt for the tip!

Today I’m mesmerized by these photographs by the Taiwanese brother and sister photographers John&Fish. More on their photostream.

You know when you come back from a vacation so good you just wish you could relive it over and over again? Well, over the next 14 days I’m going to be reliving my most joyful encounters with wildlife in the Galapagos, one photo each day.

The waved albatross of the Galapagos mates for life. As adults, they spend most of their lives alone at sea, but each year they meet on the same island to mate and nest. Their period of reacquaintance includes a complex dance where male and female bow to each other and click their beaks together.

I know birds have famously small brains, and perhaps it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy to attribute emotion to a behavior that is so clearly coded as instinct. But, I can’t help but see joy and love in the eyes of these birds as they perform these rituals.

The full set of my Galapagos photos (about 60 or so) appears in my Flickr photostream, in case you want to check them out.

An attempt to bring “joyous vibrancy” to the city is how Renzo Piano describes his plan to cloak the facades of the new Central Saint Giles development with brightly colored ceramic cladding. He says:

The colour idea came from observing the sudden surprise given by brilliant colours in that part of the city. Cities should not be boring or repetitive. One of the reasons cities are so beautiful and a great idea, is that they are full of surprises, the idea of colour represents a joyful surprise.

Against the muted, often grey backdrop of the London cityscape, I think it would be a joy to walk around the corner and be surprised by the delicious glossiness of red or yellow glazed ceramic. They have the rich sensory appeal of the ripe-apple red double-decker buses or the mailboxes or the Beefeater uniforms. The yellow is like a bright umbrella or a pair of wellies in a storm. These oases of color are arguably more important in London life because of the climate. It will be interesting to see public response to these when they are up.

Thanks Maggie for the tip!

More info and images here.

Vanessa has a nice post on for the love of bikes about these beautiful colored tires. The stripes on the side walls blur together when in motion to create a “speed-blend” effect. What a wonderful example of joyful design! As a rider you wouldn’t even get to see them in action, but you would get to see the delighted reactions of people around you.

Via for the love of bikes (more photos there)

Today’s NYT has an interesting article by Ken Johnson on outdoor art, suggesting that there has been a thematic shift from grand, ideological monuments to works that are designed simply to “divert, amuse, and comfort.” But is there really anything wrong with that?

Johnson writes:

The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.

To me, this conflates two separate questions into one murky discussion. First, what is public art for? And second, is the art any good?

The first is a theoretical question about why we make and commission art and what we seek in the experience of art that inhabits public spaces. It opens the door to a worthwhile examination of cultural values and Johnson’s comparison of Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman monument with the adjacent colorful Franz West sculpture illustrates his point nicely. No doubt there’s been a values shift, but I wonder if it’s not so much the fact that multiplicity makes it hard to commemorate our heroes, but that outdoor art no longer is the primary way in which we achieve this end. Think of the Shepard Fairey Obama poster and you’ll know what I mean. In the olden days, people gathered in public squares, and statues were a way of keeping an image in the public consciousness. Now, people still gather in squares, but mostly for recreation; they do the bulk of their thinking and communicating and even rallying online, and images that stick in the public mind now are frequently discovered and recirculated there.

I’m not saying that a million YouTube hits has the commemorative value of a bronze monument; my point is rather to suggest that the way we use public space is mostly geared towards leisure, so it makes sense to me that enjoyment would be a driving factor in selecting work for this realm. When you leave your office building for your 10-minute “lunch hour,” what would you rather see: a fearsome general in smiting posture, or a bunch of children playing hide and seek around a colorful set of forms? Perhaps this is selfishness, to prefer to have art that brings us enjoyment over art that honors the sacrifices of others. But perhaps it’s just human.

Joy has an important place in urban outdoor art because our limited open space is vital to our mental and emotional wellbeing. I don’t think it’s always a conscious criterion of those that commission such works, but certainly many artists derive pleasure from creating works that inspire nothing more cerebral than delight. And yet, delightful can also be meaningful. There’s no law that says that only somber works have intellectual value. (If there were you might have to banish the Impressionist wing of the Met from school field trips.) Joy is a constant human craving, and much of the artistic experience is to celebrate and revel in this.

Agree or not that joyful art has an important role in the world of public sculpture, the question of quality is still a separate issue. Johnson’s veiled derision suggests he does not think many of these works are very good. Commenting on the Afterparty installation by MOS in the courtyard at PS1, Johnson writes with tepid enthusiasm, “it nicely exemplifies the inoffensive spirit of public art today.”

But inoffensive is not in and of itself bad. Not all art has to provoke, particularly in public spaces which are primarily for enjoyment. This does not forgive weak execution, but suggests artists and curators do better to make the reality as joyful as the intent.

NYT: “Well-Behaved Street Corner Sculpture”

PS: I have to add that I intensely dislike that installation at PS1. I know it’s trying to be all Bedouin-tent-y, but I find it kind of dank and Hobbit-like and totally in keeping with the cranky weather of this summer. It may be inoffensive to my dignity but it affronts my senses. I’m sorry, I like you PS1 but I don’t like that.

The city has caught the polka-dot bug, and it’s spreading like wildfire. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new crop of green dots in Herald Square, so new they were still surrounded by yellow caution tape. As I was poking around, I caught sight of a truck being loaded up with big green paint sprayers. I interrogated the gentleman in the photo below (who, despite the surly expression, was actually quite amiable) and he confirmed my suspicion that he and his companion are in fact the New York City green polka-dot painters!

Now that I had so serendipitously come face-to-face with these agents of aesthetic good cheer, I couldn’t let them go without another question. “Why are you out here doing this?”

The duo’s answer was satisfyingly, joyfully simple: “Why not?” And really, why not? I couldn’t think of one good reason.

Today I was interviewed about “joywashing” by Virginia Prescott live on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth, a show about trends and culture. The interview was great fun — I love talking about joy in its many forms, and especially its rise in popular culture.

You can hear the segment online here after 3pm today. And here are links to the ads from French’s, VW, Clorox, Trident, and BMW discussed.

Previous joywashing posts on this blog include one on Clorox and one on Trident, in case anyone’s looking for a more in-depth discussion of the phenomenon.

One point I didn’t have time to make in the interview that I want to add. . . Unlike greenwashing, joywashing doesn’t present a dangerous threat. I meant what I said when I indicated that an abundance of joy in marketing probably is a good thing, and certainly won’t hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. Not all products should be marketed as joyful products. And this glut of good vibes will definitely make it harder for any one brand to stand out.

Marketers run a very real danger of poisoning the well by jumping on the joy-wagon without backing up their advertising claims with product design or service gestures. Like any major cultural shift, the rising tide of optimism has the potential to be an opportunity or a threat. For those marketers that realize people are looking not just for sugar-coated messages but for uplifting products and services and experiences throughout their lives, the joy wave presents a good opportunity to leave a deep and powerful impression on their customers. Or it could be a fast-track to being perceived as inauthentic. It’s all in what you make of it.

Thank you to NHPR and Word of Mouth for inviting me on to share these thoughts with their listeners. Have a joyful afternoon!

This joyful Friday continues with this wonderful item from Inhabitat on DIY pools made from recycled dumpsters. You would never know that those glorious sparkling blue boxes used to hold demo’d drywall and rebars. I wonder if I can convince Lila and BD to put one of these in the garden downstairs. Maybe if it were circular…

Via Inhabitat

Thank you to my friend Ben for these amazing rainbow pictures over the Sydney harbor (or, I should say, harbour!). Rainbows have a way of making the whole earth seem enchanted and surreal. I especially love how the light in the pic above makes everything under the rainbow seem brighter, like the world under the rainbow is charmed.

I’ve been writing more than a little about the notion of the absurd as a route to joy lately, and as far as absurd flowers go, the allium pretty much takes the cake. Poofy, sparkly orbs, disproportionately large yet still light and airy atop impossibly tall, straight stems — the allium looks like something that would grow on a newly discovered planet. Its family heritage is no less comical: the cheery allium is actually a variant of the onion, presenting a globe above ground while its cousin hides one below.

The allium is one flower that never fails to make me smile. But of course there are many joyful flowers. Poppies, with their irrational exuberance — bright, fragile, and abundant. Peonies, which are perhaps more stately, but lavish with their fragrance and the endless layers of petals that unfurl implausibly from those tight, hard buds. Lilacs, which appear in an intoxicating fog of scent, offering a pure glut of sensation for only a few weeks. Tulips, too, with their early spring color and their way of opening themselves so wide as to practically turn inside out, offering all before going bare for another year.

The whole idea of the flower is joyful. It is an alluring spectacle, an unfurling of vibrant energy, both excessive and necessary. Color, pattern, scent, texture, intricacy of design — in the flower, nature spared no aesthetic expense. Surely she could have evolved other (more efficient) ways for plants to reproduce, but how lucky we are that flowers evolved to be the dominant means!

This is a great find by my friend Maggie. Two-thousand LED paving stones have been set in amongst the cobbles on the Place du Molard in Geneva. What a magical place!

These lit pavers disrupt our expectations in so many subtle ways. We are so used to light coming from above that lights from below seem to upend the world in a beautiful way. We also expect solidity and density from the stones under our feet, not translucency. And every day, there is the renewed joy of dusk — watching certain stones defy the graying landscape and come to life.