aesthetics of joy

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

It’s a good thing on this blog when something like consensus emerges, and so many of you have sent this my way that it seems we all agree: This is joyful!

An interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by the self-described “obsessive artist” Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room offers a whitewashed home interior as a blank canvas for children visiting the museum to cover with colorful dots. It’s a joyful exercise in participatory art, in abundance, in layering and accretion. Visitors leave their traces on the space. Their experience of the exhibit becomes manifest in the exhibit. And through the innocent randomness of children’s choices, a pleasurable kind of order emerges. The impulses to cover and to cluster — to cover and conquer a new white space or to cluster around a social crowd of others — make the distribution playful and human.

You wonder about the title: obliteration room. Obliteration feels like a word of violence, of emptiness and destruction. How does this jibe with the impetus towards joy? I believe what Kusama is after here is a kind of transcendence. Though the dot has always been a motif in her work (a childhood portrait of her mother shows it covered with polka dots), these vast fields started to become most prominent in her “happenings,” public events designed as protests to the Vietnam War, where people would gather naked to be painted with dots. As Kusama writes in her autobiography Infinity Nets:

Polka dots, the trademark of “Kusama Happening.” Red, green and yellow polka dots can be the circles representing the earth, the sun, or the moon. Their shapes and what they signify do not really matter. I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.

The polka dots are unifying; they transform individuals and bodies into a larger being. In that process, the self is “obliterated,” so that this sublime feeling of unity can be obtained. You know it if you’ve been part of a synchronized dance, sung in a choir, or participated in another kind of expression of collective joy — for some moments, you cease to be you-in-the-world, and you become an element in a larger organism, a symbiotic cell in a web that sustains and is sustained by you. In this process, pattern and repetition are intensely powerful mechanisms of transcendence (more on this here).

What about the dot itself? Kusama says the shapes do not really matter, but I don’t believe her. The shape of the dot is the cell; it’s the module upon which the whole system is built. A brick of a charcoal is not a block of ice because the atoms of their essence are different. The dot is the atom of the pattern, and it matters. Kusama describes the significance of the dots in her book Manhattan Suicide Addict:

…a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity.

There’s an elemental quality to the circle, a primal symmetry that makes it naturally joyful. Roundness connotes safety, invites touch and play. (More on the joy of circles here.) Which brings us back to The obliteration room, which is at its heart deeply playful. Kusama is a heady woman, and there’s a darkness at the root of much of her work (she suffers from hallucinations and lives by choice in a mental institution near her studio in Tokyo), but what I love is that play and joy rise up through these struggles to become the overriding impression of her work. What Kusama achieves in her work is perhaps the greatest transcendence of all: the transformation of pain into joy.

Part of a larger exhibit of Kusama’s work (much of it joyful) called Look Now, See Forever, The obliteration room is on view until March 2012. Thank you to @benbob2u, @jacobyryan, and Liz McCarty for the tips.

For more kids and Kusama, check out this joyful video of a child’s delight at discovering one of her dot rooms.

Via: This is Colossal.
Images: the first four from Queensland Art Gallery and photographer Mark Sherwood, others from Stuart Addelsee, and heybubbles.

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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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.

I’ve taken many plane rides before, but never seen a landscape quite like this. I recently stumbled upon this article showing Holland’s tulip fields from above. Can you believe there’s a landscape that actually looks like this? It’s like agricultural earth art. I had to dig up some more images for inspiration. Let’s hope all these April showers will bring us some, well, you know…

Images: livetowander, Daily Mail, powerfocusfotografie, Daily Mail, Samuel_Leo, _Darek, heavenuphere.

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.

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.

Today I’m mesmerized by these photographs by the Taiwanese brother and sister photographers John&Fish. More on their photostream.

In last weekend’s T Magazine, Chandler Burr wrote about the smell of the recession. The recession smells empty, he writes; it’s the smell of “the absence of people, of circulated air, of the layers of plastic, fiberboard and carpeting with which we surround ourselves.”

In fragrance, we find a replacement. He writes:

Jean Patou created Joy in 1930, at the start of the Depression — it was allegedly the most expensive perfume in the world — and I swear I smelled it on Fifth Avenue a few weeks ago. In plush times, it came off as an outdated French floral, a 100-carat diamond. Too much. In the summer of 2009, it smelled resolute, determined and weirdly appropriate. You wanted to applaud.

I love the idea that aesthetics of joy can be like aromatic stimulus package. We inject money into the economy to jumpstart growth; we also need to inject emotion into ourselves to find the energy and motivation to create and survive. As I wrote in my last post, joy is valuable not just as an end in itself but also for what it might lead to. Scent is so deeply connected to memory and emotion; who knows where the chance inspiration of a vibrant scent might lead?

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.

Well, I’m back! And as hard as it was to say goodbye to my family and those magical, remote islands, I must say I did feel a rush of joy walking into my apartment late last night. I was exhausted from dawn-to-midnight travel, but it sure felt good to be home.

The Galapagos are everything people say and more. Their relative isolation for thousands of years means that you can observe at very close range all kinds of animals that anywhere else would flee in fear. It’s a little like scuba diving, that way, and it creates opportunities for all sorts of joyful encounters.

Take these sea lions, for example — our welcoming crew at the port on Baltra island. Most animals used to human presence become opportunistic; trained by handouts of food intentional or accidental, they are reduced to beggars. But the Galapagos sea lions greeted us with a disinterested sigh and the occasional snort. Napping on the benches and the steps of the pier, they made evident that this was their home and that we were free to come and go as we pleased but they were not going to trouble themselves about it one way or another. They let us get so close to them, closer even than one could get in a zoo, and with that physical proximity came a sense of almost spiritual closeness, because there was mutual trust and respect, so rare among man and wild animals.

The sea lions are the hedonists of the Galapagos, lolling around in the sand, napping for hours on sun-baked rocks, their eyes nearly always drowsily half-open. They cuddle, these sea lions, in twos or threes or eights or tens, their smooth fat bodies massed together, an occasional fin draped over one’s neighbor. You see so many sleeping sea lions in the Galapagos, you might wonder if they ever do anything else. But then you see them in the water, utterly transformed.

As indolent and awkward as they are on land, they are exuberant and agile in the sea. I was lucky enough to get to play with one while snorkeling, entirely on her terms, which left me equal parts terrified and delighted. The game she plays is this: she swims full speed from ten or so yards away, her snout aimed straight at my mask, looking with full determination like she’s headed for a collision. At the last second, she ducks under me, turning, swimming away for half a minute or so, leaving me a few breathless moments to get ready for the next round.

Over and over this happened, and I felt what I have so often tried to describe on this site — the repeatable rush of true joy. Each pass the sea lion made gave the same rush of delight, over and over again, and I know that were I to zip on a wetsuit and get back in the water tomorrow or twenty years from now, I would still feel that same wonderful feeling.

More photos and stories to come. I took over 500 pictures, so I have a lot of work to do before I put them up! Stay tuned….

xx Ingrid

Recently I’ve come across a lot of projects related to the idea of seeding joy and hope by just putting some positive energy out there. The good vibes aren’t directed at anyone in particular — they’re public, designed to touch strangers, people you’ve never met and may never actually meet.

One of these projects is You Are Beautiful. As part of the project, stickers like the ones above are distributed free of charge for anyone to place in whatever public places they choose. As the statement on their website says:

You Are Beautiful uses the medium of advertising and commercialization to spread a positive message. Projects like these make a difference in the world by catching us in the midst of daily life and creating moments of positive self realization.

The two key joyful elements here are surprise and transcendence. The surprise of seeing a positive, anonymous message catches our attention and interrupts whatever frame of mind we were in. That interruption, in turn, leads to a moment of transcendence, where the beauty of the sentiment is absorbed in what You Are Beautiful calls a “moment of positive self realization.” Ideally, it causes a shifting of perspective that makes us feel, if not beautiful, then at least connected to something beautiful.

Another variation on this theme is the yarnbombing movement, which is documented beautifully by Leanne Prain and Mandy Moore on their blog and forthcoming book of the same name. Yarnbombing, also known as guerrilla knitting, is an affectionate term for a kind of soft grafitti, where artists attach knit or crocheted “tags” of brightly colored yarn to elements of the landscape. Often found in urban settings, these tags brighten the environment and invite people to consider their surroundings in a new way. Sometimes just the sight of a knitted sleeve around a bus stop sign post will make people smile and share a laugh, connecting in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. I did an interview with Leanne earlier this summer, and she had so many wonderful insights that I’ll definitely be posting more on this topic (after I’ve finished chs 1 and 2…).

One more example is Operation Nice, a project designed to add a little positive energy to the world through gestures. A variant on the theme of random acts of kindness, Operation Nice posts examples of extraordinary niceness to inspire others to do the same. Reading the stories, you can’t help but feel good, and motivated to pass the positive energy along.

This positive energy is all the more powerful for being undirected. The joy of those who create it is purely in the giving, without even the satisfaction of seeing the results of their efforts. Once released, these positive vibes are free to ricochet around and recombine, creating unexpected combinations that compound the joy they bring. Recipients of kind acts may in turn spread more kindness, and those who witness an interjection of joy into their environment may be inspired to transform their world in their own way.

Image: temp13rec.

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.

Photos, top to bottom: mellocakes, nurpax, agent j loves agent a

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.

Lately I’ve been researching the history of flight. I was particularly struck by this quote, by Jacques Alexandre César Charles, one of the first balloon fliers. This was also one of the the first manned flights above earth’s surface ever, as the balloon was the first craft capable of providing true lift (not the gliding action of manned kites).

Nothing can compare with the joy that filled me as I flew away from the surface of the earth. It was not a pleasure, it was blissful delight. . . . [A] majestic spectacle unfolded before our eyes. Wherever we turned our gaze, we saw the heads of people, above us a sky free from cloud and in the distance the most alluring view in the world.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like to see something that no one had ever seen before, except in dreams. I know how seeing the world from above feels to me, even after seeing it many, many times, but I can only imagine what a profound shift in consciousness it would be to be among the very first.

Those interested in the history of flight can find more info in this excellent book.

Photo: Melouw

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.

I have a post in draft form (that I hope, eventually, will see the light of day) about universal vs. individual aesthetics of joy. Of course everyone has different things that bring them joy, but they don’t necessarily conform to what would be defined culturally as joyful aesthetics.

My project generally focuses on the more general, more universal aesthetic patterns because it makes it easier to draw lessons that can be applied broadly to design. But occasionally I come across what I would call a “counter-aesthetic” of joy: an object or space that on the surface looks to be the very opposite of joy, yet someone has managed to wring delight from it.

The trigger nearly always has to do with personal experience, as is the case here, with these photographs of the Gowanus Canal by José Gaytan. Gaytan, a Brooklynite who grew up in Juarez, Mexico, was attracted to the canal by a familiar smell. “That aroma is embedded in my brain,” he says, “a mix of sewage, kerosene and oil.” Which doesn’t sound so appealing, except that it reminds Gaytan of his handyman grandfather, and the junkyards he used to play in while he was alongside him on jobs.

This illuminates one of the true marvels of emotions in the brain. Aromas, colors, textures, sounds — all of these things can become associated with positive or negative feelings through experience and memory. Especially aroma. Current research suggests that smell is processed differently in the brain from the other senses, and may therefore have a stronger link to long-term emotional memories. So a smell (stench?) that for most of us might connote filth in need of a Superfund cleanup, for someone else evokes the joy of childhood.

Where this gets interesting is art. To feel joy where others don’t is wonderful, yet limited. But to try to shine a light on your joy and share it with the world, especially when it involves overcoming preconceived notions, is a powerfully transformative act and deserves a place in the schema of aesthetics of joy. A success in this regard is to make us see a place with fresh eyes. As Barbara Wing, curator of the Brooklyn Public Library’s exhibit of Gaytan’s photographs, says, “He really looks at details we don’t notice. The colors are fantastic, almost painterly.” Just as long as they don’t come with the smells. . .

Thanks for the tip, Dad!

Exhibit, at the Brooklyn Public Library, now through August 29th
NYT story

Thank you to my friend Ben for these amazing rainbow pictures over the Sydney harbor (or, I should say, harbour!). Rainbows have a way of making the whole earth seem enchanted and surreal. I especially love how the light in the pic above makes everything under the rainbow seem brighter, like the world under the rainbow is charmed.

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.