aesthetics of joy

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.

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.

It’s been a hot summer (today was no exception) and since the first taste of this ebbing-and-flowing heat wave, I’ve been thinking about swimming pools. There is no greater luxury or greater joy in a midsummer city than a swimming pool, a cool watery oasis in a desert of hot reeking concrete. Last summer there was the frenzy of the Gowanus dumpster pools, now converted into a public attraction by the Bloomberg administration for Summer Streets. Before that, the most talked-about New York pool was the floating pool lady, a barge converted to a pool by the city that debuted in 2007 in Brooklyn, and that docks in a different borough each summer. I haven’t managed to swim in either, but this summer I’ve been the benefactor of the generosity of a friend with a private pool, a backyard gem in the East Village that is all the more tantalizing for its secrecy.

After a couple of years living in Sydney, it’s hard to be without a pool. There, private pools are rare, but the public ones are ubiquitous and stunning. There’s the Andrew Boy Charleton pool, a 50m beauty that makes you feel like you’re literally swimming in the harbor. There’s also the North Sydney pool, right in the shadow of the Harbor Bridge. And there are the ocean pools, so beloved by Australians that they have their own culture, a culture robust enough to be the subject of a documentary: Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, teased in the video above. Bondi Icebergs, shown in the teaser, is particularly amazing; fed by crashing waves, it is briny and bracing all year round. Membership requires that you swim every weekend, regardless of the weather. Do that for five years, and you’re a member for life. It is the ultimate pool-lover’s pool club.

A frigid pool on a hot day is a delight; on a cold day, it is a trial. This may be an illustration of the difference between joy and happiness. Joy is immediate, momentary. It reacts to stimuli that accompanied the satisfaction of needs over the many generations of our evolution. A hot body in a cold pool is one step closer to homeostasis, and the aesthetics of the swimming pool (cool, shimmering blueness) are all designed to advertise that temperature-regulating function. Hot and cold in tension, moving towards balance: there is a certain kind of harmony there. A cold body in a cold pool, on the other hand, stands in defiance of emotional logic. The winter swimmer must see something beyond the immediate, because the proximate experience is discomfort, possibly even pain. Past the trial must be something: the satisfaction of completing a goal, the strength of physicality inured, the delight of an invitation to a company of like minds. It’s the pre-frontal cortex that envisions and plans this, that looks past disharmony towards a greater future pleasure. Joy, arising unconsciously from the limbic brain, revels in a more immediate gratification.

Along with the harmony of the pool, there is also freedom. Buoyant, liberated from gravity, we float in effortless space. We glide on the edge of another world, one in which the usual rules of movement are relaxed and transformed. I’m reminded of a moment in the John Cheever story The Swimmer:

To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project.*

The waterborne lightness of swimming does feel natural, even in the truly unnatural setting of the swimming pool. And it feels freeing, even though the pool is a fixed, bounded area. The pool becomes an oasis, a space where the rules, both natural and cultural, are different. Not only are we free to move differently, but we are free to act differently: We do spontaneous headstands, splash around in silly patterns, lounge indolently. We are a bit more childlike, and perhaps more like our real selves. Childlike pleasure is often a breadcrumb on the route to joy, and the child’s love of the swimming pool is a clue to a delight buried within most of us.

Do we grow out of the joy of the pool? Ellen Meloy writes in her ode to the pool, a chapter called “Swimming the Mojave” from her memoir, The Anthropology of Turquoise:

The human body needs the embrace of water. The fifties boom in California swimming pools, and the attachment of pools to the culture of a mobilized America, announced affluence, comfort, and good climate, and it made the embrace available in controlled circumstances: big recreational bathtubs gone outdoors, with no worry about what might lurk in their depths. For everyone but children, for whom it is a baptism of sheer joy, a pool holds more chlorine than wonder.

It’s true that a pool can be fake, and chemical, and wasteful. In a backyard, it can be mundane. In a desert, absurd. But I still think there’s always a glimmer of joy in the swimming pool, regardless of your age. It’s in the faces and movements of those in the video above—a visceral pleasure, a reawakening of body, a liberation of spirit. A pool may be an artificial experience, but the joy is all real.

*The Swimmer tells the story of a man who decides to swim home from a party, dipping into all the pools along the way.

Sea Pool: A Life in the Ocean, by Jason Wingrove
More teasers here and here

{Thanks, Sarah, for the link to the video above, and the swims!}

Several things have conspired to get me thinking about the joy of spinning these last few weeks. First there were Kate Spade’s joyful pinwheels, free for the taking and adorning the outsides of their New York shop windows. If any brand out there has embraced the aesthetics of joy and run with it, it has to be Kate Spade. Recent campaigns and store visuals have included cheery colors, hula hoops, polka dots, and artist Rebecca Ward’s colorful striped tape installations — whether by intent or intuition, they have a feel for visual elements of whimsy and delight.

The pinwheel idea seemed particularly clever to me because of its interactive component. Because they were offered up free to passers by, they tended to pop up in all kinds of places. I have one on my desk from the Soho store, which is a few blocks from my office. I have another at home (below), brought to my birthday party by a coworker (photo adorned by late night graffitoists).

In fact, Kate Spade had a contest encouraging people to send in pinwheel sightings, which were then tweeted, resulting in sweetly surprising images like this:

And this:

And then, in the subway recently, among a bag ladies prized possessions, I spied:

There’s a nice visual for me in the idea that the pinwheels are like seeds blown off a dandelion, scattered to the wind. And in fact, they do resemble the seeds with their long stems and wind-philic tops. The wind is of course the critical element in the pinwheel, a form of negative space (or force) that completes the design. A still pinwheel is an elegant thing, maybe even delightful, but it’s the almost-magical spinning movement that brings out the joy.

As I was pondering this, I received an email from a reader about a piece I’d missed in the NYT arts section, entitled, “Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills.” A delicious headline if ever one existed, and the piece did not disappoint. The “junkyard poet” in question is Vollis Simpson, an accidental artist who at 91 is still making extraordinary sculptures from fan blades, propellers, and other scrap metal.

Originally a farm equipment repairman, Simpson began making things from scrap as a hobby, but has lived to see his work become highly regarded in the art world. This quote, in particular, struck me because it notes the universality of the emotion triggered by the spinning movement:

…he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms…

…In Ms. [Rebecca Alban] Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.

“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.

I have to give the NYT a little bit of a tough time here for not including a video slide show with this. Fortunately, we have YouTube to let us get a sense of these things the way they were meant to be experienced (minus the wind in your hair feel and the grassy aroma).

Lots of joyful things spin — Ferris wheels, Merry-go-rounds, tops, dogs chasing their tails. When it’s experienced physically, there’s something about the movement, the way it disrupts our balance and creates a transient loss of control, that triggers an unconscious sense of freedom. When it’s experienced visually, it becomes a display of unseen forces (centripetal, mostly), that is enchanting — I’m thinking here of tops and gyroscopes, spinning children and the undulating skirts of dervishes. I wonder, too, if there isn’t something happening with our mirror neurons that makes this a vicarious pleasure, that as we watch there is a part of our brains that feels it is spinning too, which leads to that visceral soaring feeling and Duchenne smile.

The wind adds another layer, another unseen force to the mix that makes pinwheels and whirligigs feel delightful. As humans we are used to power being emitted by things we can see — a hand or a motor — but the mercurial fluctuations of an invisible wind make things seem to be moving by themselves. Depending on the  other elements of the design (color, form, texture) and its context, this can be spooky (Hitchcock-esque) or, as in these examples, it can feel magical and joyful.

Images: policeman image and girls with pinwheels, via @katespadeny. Vollis Simpson images, Jeremy Lange for NYT.

NYT: Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills

Yes, that is Desmond Tutu in the midst of all those children jumping on a bed! For a project called Play Jump Eat, Kelly Wainwright of Messy Monkey Arts managed to coax not just the Reverend Archbishop, but also fishermen, surfers, schoolkids, and others to let go of their inhibitions and be photographed in odd situations, bed-jumping.

Jumping on the bed is an example of a joyful pleasure at its most democratic: an activity that is accessible to nearly everyone. It’s a childish pleasure, one we associate with being small in the expanse of our parents’ beds, but it can be rediscovered at any time. (Confession: I sometimes can’t resist a jump or two in a hotel room.) There’s just something so totally liberating about jumping; it’s a slightly transgressive, freeing feeling that brings laughter and optimism up to the surface. Even just looking at these photos evokes a vicarious burst of delight!

I hope the full series will eventually be posted online. Read more about the project here.

{Via @vpostrel}

Update: Kelly pointed out to me that prints are available here and that a portion of the proceeds benefit the Tertia Kindo Arts Project, a children’s dance school. The comments also made me realize that I failed to credit Inge Prins, the photographer on the project. Lovely work!

On Sunday night I finally saw Avatar. I think I was one of the last people in New York City to do so. I saw it on the Imax at Lincoln Square. I can’t imagine what it would be like on a regular screen or without the 3D, but I’m sure it pales in comparison — just the sheer scale and immersiveness of the experience were dazzling.

There’s so much to say about the joy of this experience, (and also where it fell short), but the most compelling aspect for me is the world James Cameron has created in Pandora. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt a little bummed to be back in the real world after the film was over, and found the transition from sacred trees to streets a little jarring. It’s a transition from a joyful world to a mundane one, from a place filled with magic and wonder to a city that feels dull and sublunary by comparison. And the difference is all in the aesthetics.

Cameron takes a seemingly ordinary rainforest (already a lush, joyful environment) and imbues it with light, movement, and magic. Everything native to Pandora glows: the trees, the seeds, the mosses, the waters — even the animals. The peculiar luminosity is celestial; the lichens become like a carpet of stars, the tree of life like a cluster of comets. (It kills me, by the way, that I can’t get still images to illustrate these things — evidently the Avatar PR machine is more interested in gunships and battles than the beauty of the setting. Did I miss something? Or wasn’t that just the whole point of the movie?)

Anyway, bioluminescence has long been a source of wonder here on Earth, whether in fireflies or glowworm caves or tropical bays of phosphorescent plankton. But in our world, it’s a rare pleasure, one that many people never experience firsthand. Cameron has taken this joy and scaled it up, creating a world ablaze with ethereal light. Pandora’s light is magical because of its inexplicable beauty — like the earthly bioluminescence it emulates, it operates through chemical light-making processes that seem mystical in contrast to the logical workings of electricity — like a hidden flow of energy.

“A hidden flow of energy” is Cameron’s actual explanation for the bioluminescence in the film. The scientists in the film state that the organisms function like a neural network, all connected to each other symbiotically. This connectedness is another joyful theme, since joy is very much about unity, coming together, and inclusiveness. The aesthetic illustration of this is the bond formed when the Na’vi encounter certain other organisms — the animals they ride to hunt, their mates, or the tree of life. The fusion of the illuminated tendrils calls to mind a kind of neural embrace, where disparate elements craving contact find each other and communicate wordlessly.

These energy flows are magical, and they manifest in other ways besides communication and light. The mountains of Pandora float in midair, like karst formations reflected in still water, and are described to be constantly moving. Creatures float as well. The seeds of the tree of life drift like glowing white-violet jellyfish, giving the impression that Pandora’s atmosphere is rich with this energy, changing its density at will from the thinness of air to the thickness of water. And of course, in the end, (spoiler alert) it’s a mysterious energy flow from the tree of life that saves our hero and Pandora itself.

It’s not just the behavior of organisms, but also their forms that display joyful aesthetics. Cameron uses the lushness of the rainforest, amplified in scale and density, to create a sense of vitality and renewal. He uses lots of spiral and circular forms, such as the small creature that spins on its fan-like wing (a living whirlygig), or the giant spiral-shaped plant that retreats into itself when exposed to touch (no doubt inspired in behavior by the real-world touch-sensitive mimosa). Swooping curves rule in Pandora, whether it’s chalice-like flowers, dangling curls of vines, or the delicate tendrils of the Eywa seeds. Cameron’s artists also play with scale, making some things giant, like the beautiful broad leaves the break the Na’vi’s fall as the leap from the sky, and other things tiny, like the seeds or the spinning creature. All of these are recurring aesthetic motifs in joyful things, both natural and manmade.

Ultimately, it’s these aesthetics of joy that make the Na’vi’s world so mesmerizing, and make us feel that this place is valuable and desperately worth saving. The aesthetics of magic and renewal give an impression that there is salvation for us in this place, not in the (clumsily-named) mineral unobtainium, but in the mystical goodness that underpins such manifest joy. For me, these aesthetics of delight in Pandora’s design do far more than the clunky dialogue and heavy-handed plot to suggest the moral. All of these wonders were inspired by things in our own world. Cameron has said he was inspired to create a bioluminscent Pandora by his experiences night-diving. The rainforest, though perhaps not as fantastical, is still a lush world rich with undiscovered species. Many of the animals on Pandora are hybrids of familiar organisms, like fearsome land-mammal with the rhino body and the hammerhead shark face, which call out these remarkable features — no less remarkable for the fact they occur separately in our world. And science lately is filled with new discoveries about the ways that flora and fauna communicate with each other chemically, much like Pandora’s hidden energy flow.

The more I think about Pandora, the more I think about the beauty of the world that inspired it, which is really the point here. Yes, the technology is a great leap forward, and yes, the 3D experience is revolutionary. But in 5 years this will be common, in 15 it will be primitive. I think the artistic achievement is much greater than the technical one, and more lasting, in the way it abstracts our world away from us, and filters it through a joyful lens, allowing us to discover its rare pleasures anew. Though at first it seems our world is at a disconnect from the magic of Pandora, actually, our world is filled with Pandoran moments, (or Pandora is just an amplification of earthly moments). What is joyful in Pandora is what makes it worth saving, and a good illustration of what makes our own world worth saving too.

My studiomate Rikki sent me a link to these joyful spinners months ago and I’m just now getting to post them. The installation is Les Danseuses by Swiss design group Atelier Oï, and it was displayed in the Vitra showroom in Zurich. (It looks particularly gorgeous in these photos.) They remind me of flamenco dancers or whirling dervishes, and they make me wonder what other wonderful things you could create with a bare ceiling fan mount as a starting point.

Something about the display reminded me of these striking images from Prada’s “Waist Down” exhibit from a few years ago.

The displays are delightful acts of transformation. Arranged this way, the pieces cease to be skirts — they are visual metaphors: a cabbage leaf, a tutu, a circular painting, a textile doughnut. Then, while digging up the images, I found that the Prada exhibit, designed by OMA, used an identical spinning device to the one in the video above to show some of the skirts, right down to the mirrors on the floor reflecting upwards.

Which came first? The Prada exhibit occurred in the mid-2000s, while the Les Danseuses is dated 2009. Is it a creative homage or just a case of “great minds think alike”? I dunno, but for me the edge goes to OMA for execution. I guess when your raw material is Prada, it’s pretty tough to make it look anything but beautiful.

What else could you put on a spinner? And what else spins? I’m envisioning some kick-ass joyful store displays using record turntables, toy tops, and a merry-go-round…

It’s been three years since I last let myself read fiction. In these years of study and transformation, there have always been factual gaps that needed filling, lacunes in knowledge, crevasses into which curiosity swelled, all-consuming. Narrative felt like an impermissible indulgence, empty calories, dangerously unproductive. Countless times in the last year I browsed the tables at bookstores only to demur, to put myself off with a quiet promise of “December,” as if that month would be the break fast of fiction, a buffet of stories with world enough and time to read them.

As soon as I heard the subject matter, my first choice to dip my toe back in was obvious: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. The book’s impetus is the famous 1974 tightrope walk by Philippe Petit between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one hundred and ten stories above the ground. A magical, subversive, absurd act of transcendence, arrogance, and grace — Petit’s walk has captivated me from the first moment I knew about it. Any work similarly inspired by this exquisite moment had to be my kind of book: joyful, at least in some measure.

In reality, the walk is only a minor player in the book, and Petit is effaced by his function and by characters far more emotionally grounded and present. Let the Great World Spin is really about their mundane poetry, their strange connections, their peculiar urban unity of grit and joy and loss. But the walk runs like a thread through the book, tugging a reader (sometimes reluctantly) into the repeated introductions of new narratives, cold loose ends that spark and warm as they loop back into familiar territory. I wish the walk itself was more powerfully entwined in the lives of the characters in each individual vignette. And I wish we did not know whether or not the walker would fall. But these are minor quibbles in an adept journey.

I won’t spoil the story for anyone who might like to read it. But I will say what I am most struck by is the twin impulse towards joy in both Petit and McCann. Petit’s motivation was transcendence, even as a consequence of transgression. From the moment he first encountered them, he saw the towers as an opportunity to create art, to give not just New York but the whole world a momentary gift of joy through the stretching of our concept of what is possible in the world. They were a joyful canvas, those towers, a base on which to layer joy upon joy, by taking a stroll in the sky and not falling out of it. I can only think of a handful of acts that are comparable in the way they transformed our emotional sense of possibility. First transits, such as the walk on the moon, or first discoveries, such as of electricity, telephony, and flight, come to mind. But the analogy is imperfect. Those discoveries were linear demarcations of befores and afters. They expanded possibility in a permanent way, heralding irrevocable change. Petit’s walk was transient because it was confined to one man’s extraordinary ability. It expanded the world of human potential, then contracted it again. It bore no actual relevance to anyone else’s daily lives, and yet, magical thinkers that we are, it captivates us, even those of us like me who were barely a germ of an idea in two strangers’ brains at the time of its occurrence.

This timeless magic makes it the ideal catalyst for McCann’s sort of joy, which is joy in redemption. Petit’s act of creation, though it predated 9/11 by 27 years, seems the ideal antidote to the towers’ destruction. Aesthetically, Petit’s climactic moment is one of rising, hovering, and dancing, of lightness, buoyancy, and air. The towers denouement is falling, crumbling, and burning, fire and ash, earth and bone. The image of Petit’s unlikely defiance of gravity burns in sharp contrast to the towers equally unlikely fall. Chronology is no matter, as aesthetics of joy can be permanent in our souls.

Of course, the real redemption is in the art that juxtaposes the two, that offers to replace this pitted hole in our world with a new image. This is McCann’s task, as he observes in the reader’s guide that accompanies the paperback edition:

But stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.

I love the confluence at the end of this statement — between instinct, humanity, redemption, and joy. A central premise of my thesis is that joy is fundamentally human, an instinctual gift of evolution that rewards our struggles and propels us forward with the promise of its rediscovery. By this logic joy is also directly related to the survival instinct. We exist to seek joy, and we strive to continue to exist so we can seek more of it. Joy is an essential motivator, not just for creation, but for life itself.

Petit’s walk was an affirmation of the possibility that joy could come of out nowhere, on clear dull day, and transform us. McCann’s book, for me, is a testament to the persistence of that joy and its relentless tendency towards renewal.

Get Let the Great World Spin on Amazon.
Read more about it on the author’s site.
See Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit’s 1974 walk.

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)

The Lomo story is one of joyful discovery. The Lomo experience is one of joyful freedom.

The Lomo is an incredibly highly light-sensitive Russian camera. For this reason, it was rumored to be used as a spy camera by the KGB, since it could take pictures without flash even at night. In the 90s, the camera was out of production, and was discovered by some Viennese students at an old camera shop. Upon developing the film, they realized that Lomo created intensely saturated colors with ordinary film — very unusual images they started calling Lomographs.

The students managed to convince the factory to reopen production, and the popularity of the camera soared. They introduced a variety of new models, based on the premise that Lomography should be all about having fun. To that end, they created a society to promote their “no rules” approach to photography, hosting exhibitions and creating an international community. Their mantra is “Don’t Think, Just Shoot” and you can see that this irreverent approach produces a certain spontaneity in the images.

Lomo’s a great example of an ethos embodied in a product. Lomo designers use color, simplified operation, and retro styling to reinforce their whimsical approach. Many cameras advertise themselves as being for serious photographers. Lomo’s counterculture approach is liberating. You don’t worry about what setting your f-stop is on. And you don’t  feel like a dunce because you shoot automatic on a camera capable of millions of possible combinations of settings. You just shoot, knowing that whatever you’re capturing will be transformed into something entirely different by the Lomo’s serendipitous lens.

I had an LC-A (the original model) once, but sold it when I got tired of film. Now I’m hankering for one again, because the pictures have such a beautifully perspective-shifting effect on your view of the world. I’d get the photos back after waiting for them to be developed and  think, wow, was that day really that bright? Was the ocean that blue? In my lomo-ized memories, it always will be.

Don’t think, just shoot

Nick Olsen describes painter Sally Benedict as “Rothko meets Twombly with Tidewater-twilight coloration.” I just think her stuff is purdy, and the perfect pick-me-up for a cloudy Wednesday afternoon.

The hula hoop is back in full force this year, seen in everything from designer window displays (thank you, Kate Spade) to fitness classes (hello, Hoopilates!). People must be looking for a little cheap and cheerful fun in their lives, and personally I think it’s a not a bad idea. I took a hooping class recently with a friend and it was so much fun I think hooping could be prescribed as a credible (and recession-friendly) alternative to Prozac.

The hoop is brilliant because it is not only an object, but also a space and an experience. As an object, the hoop bears features of many of the different aesthetics I’ve talked about on this site: the circular form suggests harmony and completion, as well as renewal. The large scale (hard to miss a hula hoop) suggests the child aesthetic, while the bright colors and patterns (as on these beautiful bespoke hoops) suggest energy and exuberance. Even before it’s set in motion, the hula hoop is an appealing object.

The hula hoop is also a space. The hoop demarcates a zone in which you are free from certain rules that apply outside of it. Inside the hoop, you are allowed — no, expected — to move your body in a way that would be considered bizarre and socially unacceptable outside of it. This makes the hoop an oasis, a place that offers temporary freedom from conventions that apply in the spaces around it. We often forget that spaces can be portable, but many other oases function in this way, emerging from an object: an ipod, a costume, a few balloons and streamers. The hoop isn’t a very big space, which in a way makes it all the more remarkable — if you can define a space using just a plastic circle, think of all the ways you could create emotional spaces for people without erecting any screens or walls.

And finally, there’s the motion, that wobbling gyration that brings the hoop alive. It’s a ridiculous movement, so absurd that it’s impossible not to smile while spinning a hoop around your waist. You feel self-conscious, but only for a second, especially at one of these classes where you look around and realize that old men are doing it and 7 year-old girls are doing it and some guy who sits in a cube all day looking at spreadsheets is doing it. Then your inner child takes over and you feel amazed that something so wonderful is so easy and so free.

Fads over the hoop come and go, but I think one of the reasons it has endured more than so many other more complex movement toys is that its simplicity creates possibility. The hoop is accessible to a novice, and while it can be challenging, it doesn’t take long to get it going in a satisfying whirl. But watching dancers work with the hoop as a tool, it can be amazing to see how many different movements they come up with. Many of the best toys share this ability to be open-ended (contrast with many current toys that are so prescriptive they lose their appeal after the first 20 minutes) and I think this is a key reason the hoop has lasted so long.

And by “so long” I mean 3000 years! Most people think the hula hoop was invented in the 1950s, where it became so popular that 25 million were sold in just the first four months. But actually a hoop made of vines was used as a toy by Egyptians as far back as 1000 B.C. It’s funny to think that one day thousands of years into the future archeologists may uncover our iphones and laptops and wonder what on earth they were for, but won’t have to wonder about hula hoops because their children will still be playing with them.

Top image by Little Rosy Runabout
Beautiful hoops available from Circle Candy
Bottom image by Tony the Misfit

New technologies and creative attention have liberated online retail from the tyranny of the grid in recent years. Here’s a particularly whimsical example, which somehow brings that perfectly curated Grandma’s attic vibe to your computer screen, and makes you feel like whatever you choose is an undiscovered treasure.

Anyone out there have examples of favorite unconventional online store formats that make them smile?

via @swissmiss

This short snippet of conversation (2:34 mins — short and worth a watch) with architect Lars Spuybroek reverses the conventional paradigm around how we perceive space. Typically we think of space as static and ourselves as dynamic beings that move through it. But Spuybroek asserts that our sense of space is shaped by emotion, and is therefore much more fluid than we imagine.

When you’re happy, so to speak, or when you’re exhilirated your whole sense of space is totally different than when you’re moody or neutral or whatever. So there’s this whole idea of space being a byproduct of feeling instead of the other way around. That there is space and you just feel in there, no no, it’s feeling itself that actually creates space.

I think this is something we can all intuitvely relate to, and it has wonderful implications for design. If emotion can open up space, then inducing positive emotion can completely alter the way people experience a space. Aesthetics of joy, properly applied, could create a sense of expansion that could transform existing structures into spaces that feel good to inhabit. And as Spuybroek suggests, the aesthetics of joy that transform a space could even be portable, emanating from the people who occupy it.

Interview recorded by the Sputnik Observatory

Ponyo, the new film by Hayao Miyazaki, opens today nationwide, with rave reviews from NYT’s Manohla Dargis. She writes:

To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in “Ponyo” is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It’s a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom — the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature — one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence.

Good question she poses. Is she right? Is it true that the movies have lately been confined to exploring the a darker or more muted range of human experience? When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly joyful?

NYT: Forces of Nature, Including Children

Perhaps it’s a bit of an adolescent male’s vision of joy, but the bevy of bikini-clad models taking part in electronic musician Calvin Harris’s Humanthesizer (human + synthesizer) look like they’re having a pretty great time.

I love the use of technologies like conductive paint and Arduino to integrate a new level of play and freedom into the process of making music. You see a lot of these types of music and technology explorations at the twice-yearly ITP shows, but this is a level of human integration I haven’t seen before, and it strikes me as the beginning of a wonderful new genre of musical performance, involving beautiful collaborations between dancers, designers, artists, composers, and musicians.

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.

Nudity comes in all forms. There’s erotic nude, artful nude, lascivious nude, tawdry nude. There’s shocking nude and boring nude, fantasy nude and reality nude, and (as per Seinfeld) good nude and bad nude. But sometimes a birthday suit is just birthday suit, and being nude is just about the freedom of skin and air, and nothing else.

Another item from today’s NYT explores this kind of joyful nudity — kids just wanting to be kids, unencumbered by clothes — and all the subtle issues this juvenile naturism causes.

It’s an interesting, nuanced treatment. I’d love to know what people think about this. At what age does going nude cross the line from joyful to uncomfortable? And does that age then represent a certain kind of turning point in life, in our relationship to joy?

NYT: “When Do They Need a Fig Leaf?”

If you happen to be in Brooklyn or a subway ride away, add some joy to your weekend by celebrating Bastille Day two days early this Sunday on Smith St. As usual, the street will be covered with sand for the world’s largest petanque tournament, and the rosé and Ricard will be flowing.

I’m tempted to wax poetic about the various joyous elements of this event (celebration! freedom! the wonderful weirdness of sand between your toes in the middle of downtown Brooklyn!) but it’s 5:30 on a Friday so I’ll refrain. The event runs from 2pm-10pm, near Bar Tabac off the Bergen St. F stop.

Happy weekend, and hope to see you there!