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.
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.
I love this new ad from Canon Pixma, which is the result of an unexpected combination of paint, sound, and a macro lens. It almost feels like peering into a magical world: The slow speed and tight focus allow us to see transient sculptures that would just be a mess of splatters to the unaided eye. It’s also an intriguingly experimental approach. I feel like there is a rising trend lately towards experimentation in ads, events, and art pieces; people set up systems of conditions and allow unpredictable variation to determine the results. Mother’s ad for IKEA is a recent example, where cats, with all their mercurial whims, were released into the store to see what interactions might occur. As in this case, the “making of” video is as significant as the final result — the process is as joyful as the outcome. The work of design shifts from creating a beautiful thing to orchestrating a beautiful system, from controlling variability to modulating it.
The ad first caught my eye as a possible example of joywashing. I did an interview the other day during which I was asked to talk a bit about the concept, so it’s been top of mind. I said that joywashing itself isn’t harmful — more aesthetics of joy in the world is hardly a bad thing — but that it bothers me to see advertising that puts a chipper veneer on an ordinary product and claims it will make you happy. I’d rather see the design of the product reflect the emotional claim. If the product fails to deliver on the joyful promise, then it’s joywashing. But seeing this ad makes me want to refine that statement a bit.
I have no idea if the Pixma printer is a good one or not, whether it produces dazzling color or only so-so color, whether a print it makes is any more likely to cause delight than a print from any other printer. So on those grounds this ad would be suspect in my book. But I think this marketing effort transcends joywashing because the ad itself is truly joyful. In contrast to most ads, which say their brand is joyful (usually they shout it at you), this ad instead offers a brief experience of joy. Through an artful experiment full of delightful aesthetics, it creates a minute-long immersion into a surreal, uplifting world. I found myself spellbound by the ethereal forms and celebratory movements — it’s a great illustration of just how emotionally evocative abstraction can be.
I hope the product delivers on the tagline: Bring color to life. But even if it doesn’t, the ad doesn’t feel like joywashing because it can be appreciated and enjoyed all on its own. If the product doesn’t live up to the promise, I’ll buy something else, but at least I can appreciate the fact that the company has invested in creativity, and has chosen to put something inspiring out there, instead of insincerity, hoodwinking, and self-congratulation. I’d love to see the creativity and joyful spirit of the ad spark user’s creativity in similarly delightful ways. Even better would be if Canon had an events program up its sleeve, like Levi’s Workshops, for example, that will teach people ways to “bring color to life.” In this case, the ad, events, and products would all be parts of the Pixma experience, and the brand’s delivery against the promise of delight.
A few months ago I wrote about the architecture of worship — about how elements like elevation, light, and scale create a sense of awe that supports transcendent, spiritual joy. These elements are common to holy places: churches, temples, and mosques, as well as many spiritually significant natural spaces.
This morning, as I was reading The Architecture of Happiness (this is inspiring a lot of thinking at the moment), I came across a discussion of another aesthetic element that might stimulate that wonderful perspective shift we associate with religious joy: pattern at scale. Alain de Botton writes:
Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.
In prior posts, I’ve talked about pattern’s ability to create a sense of abundance, through a visual illusion that uses surface to mimic volume and quantity. This matters because we are innately drawn to abundance, and the aesthetic abundance of patterns such as dots and stripes seems to satisfy a vestigial hunger in our primal mind. Trained to the cycles of glut and privation, we crave quantity as a bulwark against an uncertain future.
But what about the type of pattern that de Botton is talking about — pattern so vast and so staggering, it creates an abundance almost incomprehensible to the human mind? At these orders of magnitude, dazzled by a supernatural abundance, our minds struggle to reconcile the scale of what we’re witnessing with the boundaries of our experience. We measure this new experience against the possible, the normal, and the likely; in each case, our existing mental models are challenged and stretched, causing us to wonder about how this experience came to be. We also face this conflict, between a new experience and our mental models, at encounters with great scale (Grand Canyon), great force (a thunderstorm), great talent (a passionate aria), or great good fortune (“miracles”). For the spiritually inclined, religious belief becomes a way to accommodate an amazing new experience, to explain it and the feeling it triggers within us. For non-believers, though the explanation may be different, the aesthetic awe and resulting joy is there too. It is joy at its mysterious best.
There is also, as de Botton observes, a transporting effect played by pattern at scale. The patterns that line the insides of mosques, like the colored light from stained glass windows, create a world apart. They are immersive and enveloping, jolting the mind away from mundane concerns and holding them at attention. In this way, they function not just as context for worship but a tool of it. Like a zen Buddhist koan, the endlessness of pattern dazzles and contains our restless minds, leaving them primed and open for transcendence.
Recently, the website Science and Religion Today invited me to answer an intriguing question: what architecture or design works best for places of worship? I shared a few thoughts with them on aesthetic elements that tend to put people in a spiritual frame of mood, regardless of religion. Read my answer here.
What is your favorite place for spiritual communion? Why? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Image: Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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.
Well, I’m back! And I must say, I have really missed my daily posts. On Friday, I presented the masters thesis portion of Aesthetics of Joy — the theory as well as ten furniture concepts and a designer’s toolkit for creating joy. Over the coming weeks I want to share some of these ideas, as well as revel in some of the holiday joy I’ve missed while I’ve been in thesis isolation.
This video shows one of my furniture concepts. It’s a stool based on the idea of a firefly lantern. I could imagine a bunch of these scattered around a garden restaurant or bar, gently lighting up the night. The lights are LEDs driven by an Arduino board, programmed to pulse randomly using a sine wave function. Getting the lights to look like fireflies was no mean feat, and required a lot of fine tuning of the code. Fortunately, my electronics professor Liubo Borissov was extremely generous with his time in helping me get this going.
The inspiration for the stool is the magic aesthetic, which has to do with joy from things that seem uncanny, implausible, or impossible. Magic is about the apparent defiance of ordinary laws of nature, and for me bioluminescence has always been a conduit to that strange and wonderful magic.
What I am trying to express in my work are moments of everything.
Landscapes, Formations, Light, Smell, Taste…
But they are not just a reflection of a current feeling or a sudden urge.
My paintings are about particles, about the whole or arrangements, they are related, disrupted or intractable, they are left and right, above and below –
they are everything —
For me, Möller’s paintings conflate macro and micro beautifully, reminding us how similar everything looks at extremes of scale. It’s akin to the Eames’s classic film Powers of 10, which transports us through scale shifts of extraordinary proportions. I love how the forms in these paintings could be sea creatures or land masses or sub-cellular structures, but whatever they are they feel vibrant and alive. A wonderful example of how a piece does not need to be riotously colored to invoke joy.
I’ve written about tilt-shift (where real-life scenes are photographed or photoshopped to look like tiny models) before, but I’ve never seen anything like this before: a stop-motion tilt-shift video of a day at Disney. The scale shift is so charming and really captures the magic!
It’s Wednesday, so that must mean it’s time for some joyful art to get us over the hump, and make us forget all about the apocalypse down under.
Kimberly Hennessey makes sweet, crazy installations out of things like party hats and insulation foam. She also does gorgeous drawings that look like the sketch-filled notebook cover of the coolest, artsiest kid in school.
A brief departure from the aesthetics of joy to consider a very different kind of aesthetic…. I’ve never seen anything like these Sydney dust storms and I must say they freak me out. A world gone red is an eerie aesthetic, like something out of a sci-fi film. Out of curiosity I’d love to be there to witness it, but at the same time I think I’d find it really unsettling.
I write a lot here about the pleasure of oddity, when something defies our expectations of what it should be like. In this case, the sky is defying our color expectations, being red instead of blue, but it’s frightening, not joyous. A rainbow changes the color of the sky too, but our reaction is the opposite. I think magnitude must be an issue here. A red sky surrounds us ominously, its origins vague, its duration uncertain. A rainbow is distant, comparatively small, and fleeting. Color is one of the most powerful and immediate aesthetic signals, but its meaning is inscribed in scale and context.
Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.
Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.
Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.
Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.
Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.
Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!
See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!
Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.
I’m glad Stéphanie Kilgast mentions that these delicious-looking treats are 1:12 scale on her Flickr page, because otherwise I would be calling to ask how she could FedEx over some of those macaroons from Paris. Unfortunately you can’t eat these tiny cakes, but you can buy them on her Etsy page, or gaze admiringly at the many others on her photostream.
I’ve written about miniaturization before on the site, and why we seem to love tiny things. It’s a phenomenon I trace back to childhood and the downscaling of all the elements of real life into toys. As adults, tiny things give us an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of perspective shift. They make us aware of our scale, and allow us to see things in a new way. (They’re also just pretty darn cute.)
This is the 6th of my 14-photo series reliving joyful moments from my recent trip to the Galapagos. It’s part of an attempt to keep the vacation spirit alive a little longer, and I hope you enjoy them.
Lava lizards are underfoot on many Galapagos islands, perfectly camouflaged except for the bright spot of color under their necks. I love that peek of color. If you look closely, you can see rust red, mint green, sunny yellow and a kind of apricot color too, all overlaid with chocolate chip-like spots. It reminds me of the joy I first felt in drawing, when I was forced to look at things really closely, and I realized how much there is at small scale in the world. If yesterday’s post was about big experiences that cause us to zoom out on the world, this one is about zooming in.
The lava lizard is among the smallest of the attractions in the Galapagos islands, and therefore often overlooked. But it’s a reminder to me that nature has way of cramming extraordinary beauty and wonder into incredibly tiny spaces.
One of the things that has struck me in all the interviews I’ve done on the subject of joy over the past 6 months or so is that many people have talked about moments of joy as moments where they felt “small.” At first I found this perplexing — it doesn’t fit with the expansive, larger-than-life, abundant nature of joy — so I dug deeper.
When talking about joy, people often talk about time spent with families, vacations, successes, and simple pleasures. They also talk a lot about experiences with nature, and often these are experiences with nature’s enormity. People talk about wrapping their arms around a giant redwood and realizing that tree has seen a world their grandparents didn’t even see, and may outlive even their grandchildren. They talk about sitting on a beach and contemplating the far horizon. They talk about stargazing and wondering at the contrast between the marvelous stillness they feel and the knowledge that they are actually hurtling through space at great speed. They talk about witnessing migrations of birds or vast schools of fish or seeing a world under a microscope.
I realized that small is about feeling in context. It’s about a realignment of perspective, an understanding that your worries about the noise your car’s muffler is making or the extra cookie you had at lunch are inconsequential. It’s a scale shift — what were big problems are now small ones. They don’t go away, they just reassume proper proportion, and in their place is a joy that comes from the freedom from all that pressure. It’s the ultimate kind of transcendence — transcendence of the self, where we can step outside the identity we continually build and inhabit and be free for a moment.
The Galapagos made me feel this way, the enormity of the sea and sky all around. Driftwood is like an artifact of this enormity, its gnarled surfaces a text of the ocean’s power written in a language we all understand. Perhaps this is why driftwood is so often collected and brought home as a souvenir. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it makes us feel joyfully small.
The scene in the photo above has the precious quality of a carefully constructed scale model, the meticulously crafted miniature boats floating in an inch-deep bay. But in fact, this fakeness is fake, because this is no model — it’s a real scene made to look tiny and toylike with the use of a Photoshop technique known as faux tilt-shift photography.
You can see many more examples like this on Flickr, in pools like this one, where tilt-shift enthusiasts showcase their best work. It’s especially amusing when tilt-shifters use photos with people in them, as in the one below. The people look like toy figurines, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that those are real people with names and lives, and not molded pieces of polystyrene.
It’s also wonderful when you see a familiar scene, like this typical New York City block, transformed through tilt-shift. This transformation, from familiar to strange, is at the heart of what’s joyful about tilt-shift. It’s about more than just getting the joke. Yes, there’s a moment of revelation where you discover what you’re looking at is actually a new perspective on something you know well. But jokes get old, punchlines fail to have the same impact once you know what’s coming, and yet these photos make me smile whenever I see them. I think it’s because the apparent scale shift jars us out of our customary position in relationship to the world around us. Through these distortions, we’re given a moment in which we can realize how small we are, how tiny even our biggest structures can seem, and this momentary change in perspective is liberating.
It starts with babies. Tiny people with tiny ears, tiny noses, and tiny toes. Tiny hats and shoes follow, and for some reason these ordinary things, shrunken down to impossible proportions, give us a big swell of joy.
Kids get bigger, but the miniaturization continues. Toy cars, soldiers, and animals fill our days, all perfect scale models of the real things. Dollhouses — entire worlds in miniature — involve us in hours of joyful play. And I don’t know if it’s because tiny things remind us of these toys and the freedom of childhood, or whether we have a purely visceral reaction to their comical scale, but it does seem that many miniatures have a joyful quality to them and we often seek to miniaturize things even in the adult world.
Think about cupcakes, a craze you’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed. In recent years these small doses of sweetness have been in such high demand by adults, they seem to be capable of keeping entire blocks of the West Village economically afloat. Fruit is getting smaller too. Clementines and cherry tomatoes have been around awhile, but there’s been a growing prevalence of those tiny apples and pears, and now apricots (which already seemed pretty tiny to me) have shrunken into candycots, and watermelons have gotten “personal-sized.”
There’s a pragmatic rationale for small urban cars, but it doesn’t explain why drivers of the Mini Cooper and the Smart car always seem so smiley. We also find miniatures associated with special occasions known to be joyous, such as Christmas ornaments, souvenirs of famous places, and those bride-and-groom caketop miniatures without which any wedding would surely be incomplete. These “tiny worlds” designed and sold on Etsy by Amy Powers seem take a cue from these inspirations, trying to distill moments of joy into something small, pure, and permanent.
Miniatures are like suggestions of another world, a world of a different scale, but often also a world of a different time or place. Like these miniature tuk-tuks (which, even at life-size, are already miniatures) ensconced in the lighting fixtures of New York Thai restaurant (top photo), they bring distant memories or dreams into a concrete physicality. They also work on a purely visceral level, transforming the world around them in powerful ways. These lamps would look quite ordinary, but the mini tuk-tuks make them look enormous, like giant soap bubbles in comparison. Much the way our hands look giant when held palm-to-palm with a child’s, or a Great Dane looks like horse next to a toy poodle, our world reveals itself to us in new ways in the presence of an out-of-scale element. There’s a transcendence in that feeling that the world is larger than life, or in feeling like we’ve become kids again.
Flickrblog clearly has someone on staff who is as obsessed with aerial views as I am. I can’t resist this beautiful collage. Makes me want to get on a plane to somewhere far, far away.
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