Aesthetics Are Rooted in Lack
Why are the iOS 7 icons like local produce? The answer is a limiting factor for human progress.
Rustic, heirloom, organic, eco. Are these marketing buzzwords or real human values? Today, both. As society fetishizes mechanical keyboards, craft microbrews, and all things local, I ponder the essence of taste.
My younger self believed taste to be rooted in familiarity. People like what they’ve grown to know, that which they associate themselves with, right?
Apparently not any more. Today people want, most of all, that which they do not know. In a 2018 Washington Post article one urban chicken farmer explains the existence of $350 hens by pointing out that “we’re typical Bay-area people, we’ll spend anything if it’s labeled ‘heirloom’ or ‘heritage.”
When we buy heirloom, we buy into a vision of a life we’ve never known. A life in which objects were so valuable, they were passed down for generations. A life where leaving your wife your second best bed isn’t an insult, but a complement. An heirloom life we seldom experience in a world decorated by Ikea, Costco, and Amazon. We reach towards heirloom to fill the awkward absence of something long ago departed. Aesthetics are rooted in lack.
This explains why we don’t live in the modernist utopia envisioned in the middle of the 20th century. A perfectly clean world where all words are set in the most readable, geometrically beautiful typeface (perhaps Univers). The idealized, sleek technological future of the IBM advert will never arrive. We are too enamored with exposed brick and reclaimed wood. Aesthetics are rooted in lack.
We hurdle forward through technological time in denial. City dwellers long to be close to the earth, the sit in Santa Monica and dine on local, organic, farm to table fare. Permanently ensconced in either buildings or vehicles, they fantasize about soil. The peasant fantasy.
We crave the local in a world ever stretched wide by globalization. Boutique products are a grounded, relatable anchor in a sea of mass production. Our farm to table dream lacks the pigshit, bugs, and blisters of real farm life. Sometimes what we lack is an imagination, a figment of the collective past that we aim to recover.
Screen Design and Lack
Technology is no stranger to lack. Stylistically, we regress as we advance. Gradient icons — which emerged in the early 2000s to show off the smooth colors that screen technology had once lacked — by 2010 saturated the digital eye. Gradients no longer lacked, they had reached a level of great complexity. The move to wire aesthetics led by iOS7 dispensed with the gradient to emphasize a new technological feature: ultra fine linework. A style which emphasizes the retina resolution that, up until this point, digital screens had lacked.
Is the glass half full or half empty? Are these technological innovations the arrival of new features: smooth colors, resolution? Or are they the removal of past limitations: 256 color palettes, pixelization? Limitations which had not existed with print for quite a while.
In a world of 218 pixels per inch we still make pixel art. Will we ever abandon the pixel? Pixel art is becoming more refined than it ever was in the 1980s, driven by a new generation raised on the high fidelity graphics of Playstation 2, not Atari 2600.
In a world of 218 pixels per inch we still make pixel art. Will we ever abandon the pixel? In 1996’s Mario 64, a 3d version of the famous plumber jumped into a painting, and out of the 2d world seemingly for good. Today, pixel-art side scrollers like Dead Cells are becoming hugely popular mainstream games. The force behind this new wave in gaming? Gamers raised on the high fidelity graphics of Playstation 2, not Atari 2600.
This new generation of gamemakers, tired of hyperreal 3d games, today uses pixels to pull at heartstrings with nostalgia, in a feverish quest to participate in a past they never knew. The patterns of digital taste match the larger global culture: aesthetics are rooted in lack.
Why “Visionary” Computer Interfaces are Actually Regressive
Today people attempt to use computers as surrogates for what they lack in life. We pursue virtual reality to regain the feeling of being somewhere: a beach vacation, music concert, spending time with friends face-to-face.
The voice mesmerizes us. Is this due to efficiency, or absence? Today, we communicate more frequently with machines than people. When we do communicate with people, we are likely to engage over a snippet of text or video than face-to-face. The drive to make a machine behave like a person, when it is not a person, is strong. We are lacking the human touch, today more than ever.
Those who pursue anthropocentric dreams, of artificial reality and humanoid robots, do so out of aesthetic drive. A quest for beauty that is hidden in the fear of loss. If we are to advance we must look not to what we’ve lost but what we’ve gained. We have to acknowledge the quickness of the type, the swipe, the search bar, the emoji.
As a digital creator, I am interlocked with workers around the globe in a system of messaging. I am interrupted. I funnel my dreams and visions through small snippets of specification. I respond to others in turn. The achievement of digitality is this grand efficient symphony. Future gains are waiting in further optimization of micro-communication, at the cost of our humanity.
The quest to replicate reality, chased with reckless abandon by many an “avant-garde” technologist, in fact slows our progression. We limit our future as we chase the past, forever haunted by what we lack.
The Danger of Lack
Our predictable desires for what is absent, real and imagined, psychologically limit the future of technology and design. Nostalgia dogs us. The futures we dream will arrive late and with a whimper, retarded by our desire to claw backwards, ever-filling the gaping absence left behind by innovation’s wake.
When we get it we want we no longer it. I fully desire what I already have is a statement few can make in sincerity with frequency.
The art of the selfie emerges in an age of narcissism. We live as lone faces in an ever-expanding crowd. Relationships are transient, and our science tells us that even our planet is but a speck of dust. We miss a definite, permanent identity that, like heirloom, we’ve never truly known. The great achievement of our century: the global collective consciousness of many minds, human and machine, operating in concert, is continually battered by this regressive, doomed attempt to re-assert the self.
This maxim, “aesthetics are rooted in lack”, explains so much of our cultural behavior. The human tendency to long for the grass on the other side of the fence explains why the technological future has yet to arrive, and may never arrive. What we dream it seems we will never redeem, as our addiction to the past violently throttles the path of future.
