aesthetics of joy

About a month ago I promised more rainbows, and here they are. This rainbow, produced by the artist Michael Jones McKean for the Bemis Center in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, is a kind of controlled magic. Like Berndnaut Smilde’s indoor clouds, which I wrote about back in April, McKean’s rainbow attempts to bring something elusive and ephemeral into our grasp. I love these lines from the artist’s statement:

Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.

It’s an interesting thing, this space between real and representation. Is McKean’s rainbow (or Smilde’s cloud) as joyful as a real rainbow? It takes advantage of the same physical phenomena. It is materially identical to a natural rainbow. And yet, part of the joy of real rainbows is that they can’t be summoned — they are by definition elusive, serendipitous. And actually, this is part of what makes them, in McKean’s words, “an egalitarian visual experience.” No one owns the means of rainbow production. We are equally entitled to its mercurial visitations.

More from McKean:

Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. Whether perceived immediately as an artwork or not, the experience holds the power to connect diverse publics through an intangible, shared encounter.

McKean isn’t the first artist to attempt to manufacture rainbows. In fact, while researching my last post on Andy Goldsworthy, I discovered this:

Rainbow splash
hit water with heavy stick
bright, sunny, windy
River Wharfe, Yorkshire
22 [23?] December 1980

Perhaps it is only human to try to extend and expand the joys we observe in the wild, to conjure it in whatever ways we are able. And you know, I’m not sure I’d want to be human if we didn’t.

Images: photos of McKean’s piece, certain principles of light and shapes between forms, courtesy of the artist. The last image of Goldsworthy is from the Goldsworthy archive.

Via: Designboom, with thanks to Maggie

PS: For those worried about wasted water in McKean’s rainbow project, read below. And cheer up!

The artwork will solely utilize captured rainwater and will be powered with renewable sources. Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center’s five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place — creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured stormwater will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks.

certain principles of light and shapes between forms

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.

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

These arresting photos of ants come via the Daily Mail. The photographer, Mohammed Babu, set up this experiment after his wife noticed that some ants had turned white from eating spilled milk. By setting up colored drops of sugar water on sheets of paraffin in his garden, Babu was able to create a palette of rainbow ants, their transparent abdomens revealing their latest meal.

There’s an interesting tension here. We’re not used to seeing insects as joyful, and usually regard them with disgust. (Though this may be a cultural response here in the West, as many other cultures do not have this response and in fact view insects as a perfectly acceptable food source.) But in this case, color seems to override our disgust, and the magic of the ants’ transparent bodies revealing the color opposes our instinct towards disgust with wonder.

When you think about it this way, there’s a powerful design principle in here. Aesthetics can create a kind of fascination that overrides our intrinsic responses, even ones as physical and intense as disgust. It would be interesting to see how this fascination could be developed to help us change behavior based on such instinctual responses – not just disgust, but also perhaps anxiety and fear. If we can design something so that it produces a conflicting response to the brain’s natural alarm bells, this tension can trigger a need for accommodation – a need to fit this new occurrence into the person’s worldview. And that need for accommodation, accompanied by delight, wonder, or curiosity, is often the first step towards a changed mind.

Photos: Mohammed Babu
Daily Mail:  ”Tasting the Rainbow”

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

This clever little rainbow by Dutch artist Helmut Smits made me smile. Not quite the reaction of the “double rainbow” guy, but still, there’s something joyful about rainbows…

I love the opportunistic quality of this incredibly simple piece, the way it takes advantage of an existing motion to create something beautiful. For people who regularly sit behind the wheel of a car, the movement of windshield wipers is almost invisible — of course, it’s designed to be that way. Like a kite exposing the movement of the wind, or these speed blend tires embellishing the motion of bike wheels, it’s amazing how a little color can expose the hidden beauty of an ordinary arc.

{via @etsy}

I’ve been wanting to do a post on illusions for a while now. There’s something interesting to me in the way illusions create a sense of wonder, revealing magic in seemingly ordinary images and forms. Illusions can also be somewhat unsettling, forcing us to accept that our usual standard for proof — “I’ll believe it when I see it” — is not always so reliable. This tension, between wonder at the impossible and subsequent distrust of our faculties makes illusions a fascinating area of exploration for aesthetics of joy. What determines whether an illusion brings joy or anxiety? And why are we so transfixed by illusions in the first place?

I started thinking about a piece on illusions after receiving an email about a new public installation (above) by the artist Felice Varini in New Haven, presented by Site Projects. The name was familiar, but I didn’t know his work; after a bit of exploration, I discovered that Varini specializes in the creation of a particular variety of trompe l’oeil illusion. The artist paints a large-scale graphic shape on three-dimensional surfaces so that when viewed from one particular spot, there is an illusion of a two-dimensional graphic superimposed on the scene. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand if you look at these images or watch this video.

Trompe l’oeil (meaning “trick the eye”) illusions  like this can be particularly satisfying because they involve the demonstration of artistic skill. Usually this skill is used to create depth where none exists; Varini flips the convention on its head and creates an illusion of impossible flatness. To watch how he does this is extraordinary (see this video) because it is just so simple. Using projected light, he is able to identify and fill in the essential surfaces for his enormous illusions.

As often happens when you get an idea in your head, you start seeing instances of it everywhere, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by illusions. I attended a wedding in Santa Fe and found this installation on a wall in that city’s history museum. (The second photo shows how it works.)

Then Scientific American Mind magazine released a special issue on illusions, featuring over a hundred different examples, noting, “Illusions push the mysterious and wondrous brain into revealing its secrets.” And shortly thereafter I ended up at a SciCafe event at the Natural History museum here in New York only to hear astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson weigh in on the subject. As he waxed philosophical about the limits of human intelligence, he inquired, “Why do we call them optical illusions? We should call them brain failures!”

There’s an interesting tension in those last two views, both perspectives from science. Are the effects of illusions a demonstration of the brain’s wondrous workings, or are they evidence of its foibles and failings? Perhaps both. As neuroscience researchers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik observe in SciAm Mind, “Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world.” We trust the inputs from our senses when faced with conflicting information about something in the world. If we see an elephant but someone tells us we’re looking at a giraffe, we trust our eyes more than our companion. But when information from our senses conflicts with understood laws of nature, such as in this illusion (below) where a printed graphic appears to be moving, we become aware of the limits of our brain and our senses. Illusions are like test cases at these outer limits of perception. They reveal the boundaries of our brain’s ability to interpret the world in our minds, but in doing so, they also reveal just how successful the brain is at that task of interpretation most of the time.

Am I off-topic here? What does any of this have to do with joy?

I think there is a strong connection between magic and joy: when the world presents us with an experience that is somehow impossible, implausible, or inexplicable by intuitive logic. Magic implies a contradiction inherent in the world. It brings joy when it’s non-threatening (otherwise it breeds anxiety) and when its secret is obscure enough that it can be re-experienced again and again. Optical illusions perform this kind of magic. Even when you know what kind of trick the illusion is playing with your brain, you cannot prevent yourself from experiencing it, which leads to a particular kind of rediscoverable wonder. Illusions are particularly fruitful for design because of this rediscoverability. They are more than visual jokes; they are satisfying even when you know the punchline.

The reality is that the magic of illusion is not evidence of a contradiction in the world. It’s a contradiction somewhere between the world and our own minds. They are lost-in-translation moments, “brain failures” in Dr. Tyson’s parlance. But our ability to find ways to play with these quirks at the margins of our perception has made them delightful failures — an accidental, yet beautiful sort of aesthetics of joy.

Felice Varini images courtesy of Site Projects. Installation will be up until June 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{Thanks to Rachel for inspiring this post!}

Spotted this installation near the corner of 33rd and Lex a few weeks ago. Despite the bitter cold, people kept stopping to play. Does anyone know whose work this is?