aesthetics of joy

It’s Sunday and it is too hot. Time to slow things down, people. I don’t know about you, but my feet did not touch the pavement this week. I was all over this city — eastside, westside, uptown, downtown, high line, subway, ferry, rooftop, sidewalk, garden. I’m putting on the afterburners today: yoga, worn-in clothes, air-dry hair, peanut butter out of the jar, counter-ripened peaches, herbal tea, naps (yes, plural), magazines (just the pictures), crossword puzzle, daydreams. And this video, in which it is very easy to simply get lost. A half-mad man blowing lovely, giant bubbles, about as slow and airy as my thoughts today.

I hope you’re finding some time to slow down and be joyful today. Tomorrow’s for running. Sit still while you can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xx Ingrid

Awhile back, the website Science and Religion Today asked me to write a short piece on the topic of aesthetics of places of worship, and I thought about some of the ideas in that piece when I saw these amazing images of vaulted ceilings from the book Heavenly Vaults, by David Stephenson. I realized I never posted the piece in full here, so I thought I share these ideas from the archives:

People seek many different things in a spiritual experience, a fact attested to by the variety of religions and rituals practiced around the world today. But if there’s one motivation that all faiths seem to share, it’s a desire for transcendence — a wish to rise above mundane concerns and commune with a higher or more complete entity. When we worship, we look to shift our perspective away from the trivial towards the big picture, to put ourselves in context of a larger whole. Can design help us do this?

In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation — a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.

Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upwards naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.

Turning the gaze upwards has another effect: it allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.

Surely there are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements — scale, height, and light — seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, undergound cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.

Images: DesignBoom
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Virginia sent me this a couple of weeks ago with the note: “This little guy is in the Bargello in Florence and always seems like the epitome of joy.” I couldn’t agree more.

Baby fat, sweet little wings, and the upswept gesture all give him an infectious kind of aura. It is always interesting to me when sculptures manage to achieve such lightness in heavy materials like bronze and stone. But my favorite part about the statue is the way he balances on a scallop shell. It makes the proportions odd and surprising, and sets a foundation for the composition that is just a little bit magical.

Wrapping up the post-game fashion week joyfinding, it’s time to let the inner child out. The Barbie-loving, Bubble-Yum chewing, magenta tutu-wearing little girl inside of me danced around the apartment when she saw these light, confected pinks, and then ran off to eat pashmak for breakfast.

The cotton candy vibe extended weirdly even to the hair at some shows, where technicolor riffs on afros (almost none of them black) sweetly framed the traditional model death-stares. Vuitton took the cake for volume, but it was Rei Kawakubo’s stiff, fuzzy ponytails that managed the fine balance between kawaii and cool, and really captured the irrepressible joy of spring.

L to R, Top: Paul Smith, Lanvin, Carlos Miele. Bottom: Luella, Louis Vuitton (I almost wrote Vuitoon – Freudian slip?), and Commes des Garcons. There were candy colors (not just pinks) at tons of other shows — Giles, V+R, etc. Also, Tavi made a rainbow of Lanvin dresses that is worth a peek.

I’m lying low this weekend to work on the book (the rainclouds above have thoroughly endorsed this plan) so you may see a few atypical weekend posts. Happy Friday!

I love these light, feathery dresses that look like they’re just about to float away.

L to R: Chado Ralph Rucci, Oscar de la Renta, Valentino.

Video and computer games are not really my cup of tea. Yes, as a kid I played my fair share of Mario Brothers on my old first generation gray Nintendo box, but the games these days have gotten so elaborate, photorealistic, and violent that they’ve lost all joy for me. But a few years ago I did discover one exception. Orisinal, the “personal playground” of flash game designer Ferry Halim, is an oasis of innocence and charm in the increasingly intense world of computer gaming.

Playing an Orisinal game is like being in the best children’s book you ever opened. It’s a world filled with leaping frogs, quacking ducklings, sliding monkeys, exuberant puppies, flowers, bubbles, and balloons. The enemies in the games are snails, puffer fish, bouncing bunnies, ladybugs, “cranky” crabs, or falling acorns. The premises are simple, based around natural or childhood themes, yet the situations are novel and sometimes comical. In the game Bugs, you’re a little girl trying to blow a bubble and keep the ladybugs from popping it. In High Delivery, you use a fan to blow a bottle hanging from a upward-floating balloon towards magically-suspended roses, which appear in the bottle when caught. And in Chicken Wings Are Not For Flying you throw umbrellas to chicks jumping out of their nest so that they can have a soft landing on the ground.

The soft palette and charming style of the animation, plus the original situations and sweet music, make the Orisinal games a great example of joyful aesthetics that are approachable to both children and adults. You may find the games don’t reward serious playing — I confess I just open them to check out the illustrations but don’t really make an effort to play them — but they’re still very enjoyable and inspiring just to look at for a little while.

I love the contrast between these two mobiles, illustrating different aesthetics of joy. The one on the left is celebratory — vibrant and effusive, a cloud of color. The one on the right layers two aesthetics in one: lightness and surprise — the floating, elevated feeling created by the spacing in the pure white linear structure, coupled with the whimsical burst of texture at the bottom.

And yet there are also commonalities: curvilinear, symmetrical forms, based at root in the circle; harmony and balance inherent in the idea of mobile; light, dancing movements; and of course, intense bursts of color. It continues to amaze me, as I work through this project, how consistent and yet how diverse the elements are that give rise to the aesthetics of joy.

Mobiles by Frazier & Wing
Via Daily Candy

How’s this for a joyful pizza delivery experience? Place an order with Pink Flamingo Pizza near the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and they give you a pink helium balloon. You take the balloon with you to your chosen picnic spot by the canal and their bike delivery uses it as a floating beacon to find you.

It’s a simple, joyful way to create a magical experience for customers, a gesture that costs very little but pays dividends in the way it makes people feel about your service and your business. Aesthetically, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than those vibrating hockey pucks, both for the user and the surrounding environment. A bobbing balloon gives everyone a little lift.

It costs no more to make something joyful than to make something dull, but it can mean the difference between a ho-hum neighborhood joint and an international destination.

Via Frugal Traveler. Thank you flickr user Antonia Hayes for the image.

It’s magic month in the world of Aesthetics of Joy. I’m currently working on the chapter about magic and joy, which is all about the transcendence of natural law and human limits. One of the greatest constraints we face as humans is gravity, so it’s no surprise that a lot of joyful things happen to defy it. Unable to fly naturally ourselves, we derive a lot of joy from assisted flight (planes, hanggliders, hot air balloons) and from surrogates (kites, bubbles, birds).

The magic of kites lies partly in this defiance of gravity, but also in the way it plays with another human limit: visibility. As our dominant sense, vision is something we trust without question, but human vision actually operates within a pretty narrow range. We have trouble seeing anything smaller than 1/20th of a millimeter with the naked eye. So even though we know that air is not actually “empty” but rather filled with invisible particles that are constantly being moved around by wind and convection currents, we can’t see these in action. There is, then, a magic in anything that manages to make these invisible forces visible.

The unpredictable dance of a kite reveals these hidden forces in a beautiful, joyful way. And the design of kites, while deeply functional, is also geared towards aesthetically enhancing this emotional experience. Kite designers design for the wind, for the spectacle created by the kite’s movements, adding loose tails or wings that magnify the gyrations of the form. Color, usually bright and saturated, is used to draw maximum attention. And though there is poetry in a simple diamond kite, kite designers are going ever bigger and more intricate in their quest to provide a joyful spectacle.

These features are clearly in evidence among the kites exhibited last night at the FlyNY kite auction. Founded by a trio of architects, FlyNY is a kite-making competition and kite-flying festival aimed at bridging the gap between the design community and everyday New Yorkers, and bringing joy through the pleasure of kite-flying. The non-profit held their inaugural festival earlier this month in Riverside park, and hundreds of families showed up to make simple paper kites, while the more hardcore brought their own finely crafted designs. Yesterday, the kites were exhibited and auctioned off at the Knoll showroom to benefit Architecture for Humanity.

I’ll be interviewing FlyNY founder Victoria Walsh next week, so look for more kite thoughts then! You can see images from the kites and the festival here.