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

Some vacations are about the sights you ache to see, the wonders of the world, the foreign landmarks that transform you. Others are much more prosaic, filling a need to slow down, immerse in simple pleasures, and feel human. (Both have their joys, but it is hard to have both at the same time.) Iceland for me was the former. And Ireland is the latter.

I blithely ignored all the must-see lists on this one. Every person who started a sentence with, “But you can’t go to Ireland without going to–” was met with a firm Diana Ross hand gesture. I wasn’t after transcendence. I was after a simple, quiet, textural haven. An oasis in which to hear myself think.

I set as my mission for the holiday (and yes, I had a mission – Type A is Type A, no matter we we are) to say yes to all things lovely, and no to all things taxing. So it’s lucky I ended up at Ballyvollane House, a family-owned inn where there are so many lovely things to say yes to. Yes to a homemade ham sandwich and a pot of tea in the sunny back garden. Yes to reading by the fire in the drawing room. Yes to a soak in the claw-foot tub. Yes to a walk around the grounds accompanied by Dumpling, a hedonistic terrier, who knows all the good spots and can’t resist a splash in the muddy ponds. Yes to orange-yolked eggs freshly laid by the hens out back, yes to rocket and fennel salad that tastes like it just came out of the ground, yes to subtly sweet vanilla-poached pears and cinnamon plums. Yes yes yes to homemade blackberry cordial, afternoon bellinis, and chocolate cookies that appear each night in your room in a mason jar. Yes to magnolias and birdsong and a tutorial in daffodils by Fleur, the youngest of the proprietors’ well-mannered children. (“When they’re new they’re nice and yellow, but then they get soggy.” So true.) In short, yes to the good life, experienced in thoughtful little moments, with no pretension or pressure whatsoever.

As someone who lacks the talent for moderation and has a tendency to forget to step away from the laptop, sleep eight full hours, and engage in activities in the real world, you must know that this place is truly my definition of heaven. There doesn’t seem to be any choice but to go with the flow. Justin and Jenny Green, the owners of Ballyvolane, do everything they can to make the place feel welcoming and intimate, without any of the kitsch of a typical B&B. It makes sense that it was Justin’s childhood home; it feels like a family place, a place with roots. (As a side note, they also do parties, meaning mostly weddings, and you can imagine a pretty magazine-worthy shindig happening here.)

In these days of devices and always-on lifestyles, a good oasis is a valuable find. Many places claim to help you relax, and they can force you to detach from the things that are stressing you out, but few can do the harder thing, which is to softly connect you back to the things that will renew your zeal for making meaning in the world. It’s worth remembering that a place can transform you. Not just in big ways, as when you’re standing at the base of a canyon or under a desert-sky full of stars. But in little ways that create beautiful immediacy. Go towards the beauty, or create it, and it will repay you far more than the cost of your travels.

Images, mine. And thanks to Designtripper for the recommendation that inspired the trip.

The painter of Ireland works with a green brush – this is nothing new. But I was unprepared for the extravagance of it all. On arriving in the Southeast, near Cork, my jet-lagged eyes had to recalibrate to process all the shades of green, all the textures. It is a kind of vegetal madness here, a raucous glut of sun-soaked growth. It is a cliché illustrated in hyperbole.

No surface is uncovered by moss or grass or lichen, no branch left unbowed by a corolla of leaves. The plant kingdom sorts itself messily into layers. Ferns spring out of tufts of olive-hued moss, on tree trunks filmed with algae. Grasses race skyward, indecorously. Duckweed forgets its place; it traces a lacy path up drains onto driveways, a cheery, swampy carpet. Frills of perennials pour out of crevices in walls. Spring got the memo here: It. Is. On.

I walk until I hit a fence, trace it until I find a gate and walk on. My footsteps compress the grass, scenting the air with chlorophyll. A rabbit skitters nervously across the field. Flora own this place; the fauna are just tenants here. And we modern, house-dwelling humans are only visitors – guests if we behave ourselves, interlopers if we misstep.

With fresh memories of winter, it is a joy to be in this landscape of renewal, immersed in such giddy reanimation. Liberated from ice and hard ground, the yellow-green fronds thrum with audible energy. Something in our souls is listening. This verdant quickening is our reveille, a call to slough off winter’s slowness and participate in regeneration. In temperate climates, it’s a profound inflection point in our relationship with our surroundings, marking the moment where the landscape begins to feel alive to us, and to be a source of energy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after listening to a wonderful interview with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (on a recommendation from my dear friend Mara). O’Donohue brims with wisdom about the relevance of beauty to meaning in life, and speaking of landscapes, he observes:

I think it makes a huge difference when you wake in the morning and come out of your house whether you believe your are walking into a dead geographical location which is used to get to a destination or whether you are emerging into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you but in a totally different form. And if you go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

(Before I go on, I must urge you to listen to the interview because reading the quote cannot give you the feeling you get from hearing O’Donohue’s placid, lyrical voice. I hope you will.)

Now, coming back to the topic at hand, the frenzy of unfurling and blossoming, the green, the growth – these aesthetics of renewal, the reminders of the simmering life in our surroundings. Why should we care about these artifacts of the landscape? Why, as O’Donohue says, should we be bothered with what they might reveal to us? Or rather, in an age where foraging is a hobby rather than a subsistence strategy, why should these inedible, unsellable displays matter to us at all?

Our emotions are often vestigial imprints of our ancestors’ rhythms, and without conscious explanation our neurotransmitters soak our brains with pleasure chemicals in these same cycles. No matter how detached from the earth we are in our workaday existence, our bodies vibrate to its frequencies. The return of greenness feels like a return to life. It’s why we hold festivals to celebrate cherry blossoms. It’s why we freak out about ramps. Spring is our stirring. It rises into us from the ground up.

(Also, a lush environment signals other things that might be beneficial. Clean air. Unpolluted rainwater. Sunshine. Good property values. This practical lens can’t be underestimated.)

Of course, the greenness is just the surface. That lush field is all cell division, pollen, and spores – plants grasping for one another like freshman at a frat party. All this wild greening is nature’s adolescence, and those allergies are testament to a large-scale seduction. These aesthetics of vibrance are also aesthetics of sex. And plant sex brings about all kinds of things we like, such as those that might be baked in a pie, or those that taste best with a sprinkling of sea salt and some Tuscan olive oil.

It’s strange to say from this vantage that I had no particular interest in Ireland before I ended up here. Soul-starved by a winter that dragged despite its mildness, I had a craving for verdure. But despite the platitudes of an emerald isle, sold to us Americans by cereal box leprechauns and intensely scented soap, I hadn’t thought about the greenness in the planning. It was almost an accident that I ended up here: a workshop that never happened, a scrambled plan, an affordable airfare. And suddenly I was here, submerged in it, and grateful.

Landscapes can wake us up, recall us to ourselves, stir us out of apathy, heal pains. They absorb tremendous anxiety and radiate energy. We are just starting to understand the emotional impacts of nature, but they seem to parallel the physical effects of plants, which complement our physiology, breathing in our effluent carbon dioxide, and exhaling oxygen. In seeing some rare, wild landscapes this week, I’m reminded of the destruction we are bringing to so many of these sacred places. I hope through a deeper understanding of what they give us, we might feel inspired to take better care of them.

A sampling of joyful birthday gifts I received last weekend. How lucky am I? From top left, counterclockwise: Pantone book from Maggie, gorgeous agave from Ali and Jennie, rainbow-handled Laguiole knives from Lauren and Doug, and a close-up of the amazing, Japanese-inflected packaging from a special edition of rosé Veuve Cliquot from Mimi and Brenda.

And there were others! A game from Robert, an edelweiss from Annette (Hackley girls, doesn’t this just take you back to 3rd grade and Mrs. Ericson singing “Edelweiss, edelweiss, every morning you greeeeeeet me!”), and these delicious cupcakes baked by Annie and lovingly shaped into the likeness of my favorite of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings. And all the friends who gave me the best gift of all – calling, writing, or being there to celebrate with me.

It was a sweet birthday. It couldn’t not be, surrounded as I am by such wonderful, kind, inspiring friends. Each birthday I find myself more grateful; each age seems better than the last, and I am better able to savor it.

The enemy of joy is coolness.

So says Jim Cooper in an excellent post on his blog, Jim and His Camera. The post talks about witnessing the dancing and revelry of Shanghainese people of all ages in Fuxing Park, and ponders why in the West we don’t embrace such joyful behavior. The conclusion Jim comes to is that rather than embracing our impulses toward joy, we worship cool, a tendency that acts like a “joy police” to tamp down uninhibited displays and enforces this restraint with humiliation and ridicule. Jim writes:

Our lowest level of hell is embarrassment from being deemed uncool. When did we begin to worship this false god: the God of Cool?  The God of Cool forbids spontaneity, silliness and innocence. He encourages snickering not belly laughter, he allows crotch grinding, and ass-shaking but not the smooth arm extended glide of romance – romance is patronized, smiles must be condescending and arrogance is encouraged.

What an evil god the God of Cool is.

I think Jim is right on here. The extent to which joy and coolness are opposed is striking, even if not really surprising. Joy is inclusive and embracing; coolness is detached and superior. Joy is energetic and abundant; coolness is muted and scarce. Joy is warm, and coolness is well, chilly. Coolness is a rigid code of self-control that thrives in a climate of judgment, while joy is at its purest before we learn to judge. At its root, coolness is a status-conscious system, while joy is non-hierarchical, oblivious to rank and prestige.

We’re certainly not without our joys here in the West, but this particular kind of quotidian freedom to move and play is something we accord to children, not ourselves. We think too much of the potential judgments of others, and not enough of the pleasure and companionship we might find in the behavior itself. We’ve made it taboo and risky to be silly, playful, and vulnerable. Why do we only dance in the streets at festivals and parades, at places and times where such activity is sanctioned and corralled?

There’s an evident tension between the freedoms enjoyed by Westerners and our abstention from many public joys, and the repressive constraints endured by most Chinese, and the way they give themselves to this kind of pleasure. Jim observes:

People in Fuxing Park have had lives harder than we in the West can ever imagine. They’ve survived revolution and cultural change beyond our comprehension. They twirl, jiggle, sing, fling and sometimes waltz with strangers – eyes closed, living in a perfect self-created moment. There’s a beautiful heartbreaking dignity to it: a dignity found in heroic uninhibited innocence.

Where do we find permission to recapture that joy? Because it is a kind of dignity, a much greater dignity than coolness’s hauteur, a dignity born of authenticity rather than condescension. It makes me wonder how design might better support the collective liberation of our playful tendencies. Where are the oases where we let the mask drop, where we risk awkwardness for joy? One place that occurs to me is amusement parks – but are there less extreme environments that break down our need to be seen a certain way, and allow us simply to enjoy ourselves together?

Images: Jim Cooper
Via: Paul Bennett 

Yesterday the team was searching for some video inspiration and we were reminded of this. One member of the team hadn’t seen it so we all had to stop and watch it together. Then I realized I hadn’t shared it with you all, and I couldn’t believe it. This ad for Sony Bravia, in which 170,000 bouncy balls are released down a hill in San Francisco, remains one of the most joyful pieces of advertising ever created. Pure color and exuberant energy. I smile every time I watch it.

Watch the “making of” video too. There’s a playful spirit that comes out from the director and the crew. It seems there was a real intention to make something joyful and beautiful, not just flog product. It’s a good reminder that you don’t always need to put the product front and center in the ad. If you believe in the value of what you’re offering, then a more emotional approach is not just more compelling, but also more lasting.

PS: Watch for the frog. It’s my favorite part!

Are any of you feeling like this year took off at a gallop and hasn’t quite given you time to find your seat in the saddle? You can blame my recent quietude on that and Downton Abbey. (I quit cable only to be seduced by Dame Maggie Smith and WWI drama on pbs.org. But I digress.)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about birdsong. It started with this TEDtalk, in which Julian Treasure talks about the psychological benefits of birdsong. You know birdsong feels uplifting intuitively, but do you know why? The explanation is so sensible you’ll smack your forehead when I tell you. It’s because birds chirp when things are safe, and go quiet when there’s danger. So for thousands of years birdsong has been a subtle background signal that tells us, unconsciously, that we’re safe. Just because we don’t typically rely on that cue any more doesn’t mean our brains aren’t still wired for it. Though it’s an anachronism for many city dwellers, it’s still relaxing. And if the birds’ tones are particularly pleasant, they might even spur a sense of joy.

This is just one example of biophilia, a theory developed by E.O. Wilson postulating that humans have a natural, evolved affinity for the natural world. According to the theory, all kinds of natural stimuli can have a positive effect on wellbeing. (More here.) There’s a spike in research on this topic, and birdsong is among the aesthetic elements being researched. In the UK, the Guardian reported on a new study that will study effects of birdsong on people over the next three years. Eleanor Ratcliffe, the researcher conducting the study believes birdsong could also have effects on productivity and creativity.

Another question up for exploration: Does birdsong have the same effect when recorded? Sample of one reporting here, but I think it could. Earlier this week I downloaded the free Birdsong app for iPhone and have been listening in the mornings while getting ready for work, and it definitely perked me up. (Soundtrack to this post provided by the birds in my Brooklyn backyard recorded last spring. Bonus for birdwatching readers who want to tell me what species are hanging out back there.)

Delving deeper, research has shown that birdsong contains fractal patterns, suggesting some underlying symmetry in the sounds themselves that is pleasing to us. Fractals are intricate patterns that repeat themselves infinitely at different scales. Fractals can be found in coastlines, clouds, snowflakes, and blood vessels, as well as many works of art. (Jackson Pollock’s paintings have been analyzed and discovered to have fractal dimensions.) The authors of a paper on fractals and beauty, Alex Forsythe and Noel Sheehy, write:

It is thought that fractals tap into specialist cognitive modules that have developed to modulate information about living things, and that such modules are linked with emotional regulation… Hagerhall et al. reported that viewing fractal patterns elicited high alpha activity in the areas of the brain concerned with attention and visual spatial processing (the frontal lobes and parietal area).

Allow me to translate: Research suggests that our brains respond unconsciously to fractals, regarding them as information that gives us critical insight about our surroundings, and tell us how to feel them. We don’t need conscious knowledge that fractals are involved. Regardless of our awareness, we sense an intuitive order that gives us comfort. In fact, the authors note that studies have shown fractal patterns can reduce physiological stress. Another primal, comforting sound – the human heartbeat – also has a fractal dimension, and the more fractal it is, the healthier it is likely to be. So, perhaps birdsong actually has a kind of symmetrical microstructure that speaks to us through these hidden neural pathways. And perhaps tapping into its tones and rhythms could help create soundscapes that can counteract some of the stress of hectic, noisy modern lives.

As our favorite Portlandia crafters know, looking at images of birds doesn’t hurt either, and I love this series by photographer Paul Nelson, featured in an exhibit called Sky and Sea put on by Lux Archive at The Natural Wine Company in Brooklyn. It’s wonderful to see the birds set apart from the world, aloft. (Even better to know none were harmed in the shooting – Nelson uses a specialized rig to capture the ethereal images.) The exhibit runs until May 9.

*Correction: The original version of this post misidentified the site of the exhibit. The exhibit is at The Natural Wine Company, not the Lux Gallery (if such a place even exists!)

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.

Happy new year from Iceland!

Beginning a new year in this magical place has me brimming with energy and excitement for the year ahead. It’s been a beautiful and comforting trip, filled with new discoveries, friendships, and moments that simply took my breath away. I have thousands of photos to sort through, and stories aplenty to share with you in the coming days.

I feel restored in a way I haven’t felt in a long time, and this trip has afforded me many chances to reflect on what gives me inspiration and energy to compose and create. As I look back at 2011, I realize that at times I was guilty of living through my laptop, instead of placing myself in the circumstances of the joys I write about, and writing from the feeling. There are times for self-discipline, but that can have its own inertia, and it can lead to writing by brute force, rather than affection. Coming to Iceland, in search of light and magic, was an inspiring way to start a new habit. It will not always be international adventures (if only!), but in 2012 I’m resolved to spend lots more time outside the studio. I hope Aesthetics of Joy will be better for it.

Through the vicissitudes of work and life, across time zones and seasons and continents, I find myself ever grateful to have found such a solid source of happiness in writing this blog. I’ve met more kindred spirits through Aesthetics of Joy than I believed existed when I started. (New Year’s Eve was a perfect illustration of this, but more on that to come.) Thank you for the joy you’ve brought me in 2011, and here’s to even more joy for you all in 2012. Gleðilegt nýtt ár!

Wishing you and yours many joys, wherever and whatever you’re celebrating today. Whether it’s Christmas, another holiday, or just an ordinary weekend, I hope it’s filled with family, friends, food, and love. Have a beautiful day!

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}

In the busyness of the holidays, sometimes it’s hard to find time to stop, breathe, and take note of joyful moments. Slow down for a minute with some tiny things:

Artist Dalton Ghetti carved this amazing alphabet on pencils. Odd but lovely. {via Odd Stuff Magazine}

Many small pleasures beat a few larger ones. (More reason to indulge in tiny sweets!)

Bees have feelings, too. New research in Scientific American suggests these remarkable little insects have an emotional life.

Silly little art project, low-fi and delightful: Single Lane Superhighway. Go draw a car. It makes you feel a part of something. {via @alexandrapulver}

“It was like finding little gems.” Photographer David Liitschwager captured all the living creatures within a cubic foot in a variety of different climates to draw attention to the abundance of denizens of a swath of habitat that “could fit in your lap.” National Geographic. {via The Guardian}

Stay sane this pre-holiday week. Try not to rush through, but find the beauty in the craziness, and savor it!

And yet the fifty-year birthday of a good children’s book marks a real passage, since it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again. A book that has crossed that three-generation barrier has a good chance at permanence. So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an “Alice in Wonderland” of its own, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters.

The Phantom Tollbooth turned 50 a couple of months ago. I have a deep affection for this book. I will never fail to be moved by the image of the conductor who orchestrates the sunset, colors coming in at the flourish of a baton – it was my first understanding of synesthesia, and continues to be my reference point. It was the moment that art transcended medium for me – that I understood that to write was to compose was to paint – all equivalent creative processes, despite the differences in syntax.

The excerpt at the beginning of this post is from an excellent Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker about the impact of the book. There’s also a sweet documentary project that was just funded on Kickstarter. Read the book if you haven’t, or reread it if you have. It’s a treasure.

Throughout the life of Aesthetics of Joy, people have asked me whether analyzing joy the way I do has a tendency to mute my own experiences of joy. Like an impressionist painting or a Magic Eye graphic (remember those?), does getting too close to joy somehow obscure its holistic narrative? By trying to pin it down and understand it, do we threaten it?

It would be a very sad thing for me if so, and I can only imagine this project would’ve ended much sooner than it has. But in fact my experience has been exactly the opposite. My collection of joyful experiences serves as both a celebration of life’s highest peaks and a bulwark against tough times. Writing about joy helps me capture poignantly felt, but fleeting moments. Delving into delight’s minutia reveals new layers of joy, each bringing with it the potential for wonder. I draw on this rich catalogue in my work and life, using surprise heighten the pleasure of gifts, for example, or play in a design for a client, or abundance in my home to suffuse my space with good vibes. The design principles I embrace for joy are also the design principles of my life.

At low moments, this reserve of joyful stimuli becomes like stored-up solar energy. I soak it up, reminding myself of the healing powers of time, play, music, light, nature, color, and the company of others. To return to a primal ground, and to be able to trust in these human universals, is one of the great gifts of my work.

The memory of joy, and faith in its return, is an inconspicuous freedom. But what I have learned from the parallels between my work and my life is that joy is by definition cyclical, and therefore it will come again. And so I’ve become more patient with intervals, with the spaces between joys. Tough times will come, and because everything we feel is relative, they break our habituation, remind us to be grateful, and set the yardstick by which future happiness will be measured. So, in a seeming paradox, my devotion to joy has actually made me more patient with sorrow. A life well-lived is composed of a full range of emotions, honestly felt.

Despite this, there are tough times, and during these moments it can be difficult to find the energy to push to create, to immerse in the joyful world I’m usually so content to explore. If joy is cyclical, but work is constant, it’s inevitable that at some points I find myself out of sync, as has been the case recently. It hasn’t been easy to be away from you all this long, but I’m grateful for your patience. I’ve been saving up lots to talk about, and we are in the midst of a joyous time of giving and gathering! More soon…

Image: The image above is from Best Made’s FAQ page. If anything could make something as dry-sounding as an FAQ delightful, it’s those guys.

Every week my inbox is filled with more joyful images, events, and links than I can possibly write about. So I’m toying around with the idea of a weekly or semi-weekly collection of joyful links. Let me know what you think.

Rainbow shredder: wouldn’t it be amazing if all your bills came out like this? By Chrissie Macdonald, photograph by John Short, {via Birdwatching, a very cool site featuring the work of female graphic designers}

Slate: Why are car paint colors so boring? {via @mimiochun}

Guardian: Northern lights appearing much further south this year than usual – amazing photos. (I’ll be on the hunt for these in Iceland this new year’s eve…)

A team of researchers has developed a 360 degree panoramic ball camera. I love how this adds a playful gesture to a functional object. The camera takes a full panoramic photo when thrown up in the air – must be seen to be believed. {via @brainpicker}

And finally, AoJ was selected as a Weekly Best by the beautifully visual news reading app Flud last week!

I’m in Portland this weekend, and will be joyspotting here. What shouldn’t I miss?

Last week I was interviewed for this great piece on the trend towards “tiny sweets” by New York Times writer Julia Moskin. In the article I try to demystify why it is we’re attracted to mini-canolis or Baked by Melissa cupcakes (above) and talk about the “Alice in Wonderland effect,” where big changes in the scale of objects around us, either tiny or huge, make us reconsider our scale in relation to the world in a joyful way.

For more, check out past posts on tiny sweets, giant sweets, and the joy of miniaturization.

NYT: “Small Wonders”
Image: Tony Cenicola/New York Times

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.