Arresting Reality

Experiencing a Rothko in person is profoundly different from seeing his work in a book or on a screen. The sheer scale and depth of colour in his works create an immersive experience that can evoke a profound emotional response. Standing before a Rothko, one feels the weight of the colour and the subtle interplay of light, and the canvas overwhelms.

A Rothko painting towers above the viewer, a monolithic slab of textures and hues that seem to vibrate. It is not possible to grasp the boundaries whilst focused on the minutia, as it is likewise a waste of time to try to understand the full work without respecting the details. The viewer must scale in and out without ever being able to find a receptive equilibrium.

A similar experience can be encountered in works by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Olafur Eliasson. In physical proportions such works astonish, and pieces like ‘The Weather Project’, Eliason’s iconic 2003 installation at the Tate Modern, conjure a sense of the sublime. Such emotive responses, as suggested by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), reflect “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it”.

A peculiar thing happens when we experience phenomena in the natural world that escape or break the bounds of scales we can comfortably comprehend. Affectively speaking, I find Burke’s sense of ‘horror’ a little melodramatic, although it's in the right ballpark. My impression tends to be one of submissiveness or deference; I cannot quite comprehend and yet cannot look away, recognising that no matter how long I look I will never fully comprehend. Such tension compels, somewhere between desire and horror, comfort and fear.

I experienced such a sense of the sublime on a recent trip to Hong Kong. Like a photo of a Rothko, no description can truly capture what it feels like to levitate thirty stories up whilst your feet are on the ground, only to turn around and see the bases of further towers piercing the skies. The city invokes a persistent sense of vertigo, your head relentlessly tugged backwards in an attempt to absorb the barrage of verticality. I was made acutely aware of my corporeality and its insignificance, triumphed over by concrete and glass, in much the same was as I have by Icelandic Fjords, or Tyrolean Alps, that have left me breathless.

Now who’s being melodramatic?

When we consider the sublime, proportion and scale are what principally come to mind, but this experience of being dwarfed by scale isn’t limited to the visual. In music, live performances similarly impress upon the audience a sensation that there is something greater than themselves. Where cathedrals tower above the congregation, the vaulted heavens reminding them of God’s magnificence, the towering amp stacks of the metal band thunder away, overwhelming. It is not height or mass that we collectively submit to, but volume.

When we consider the sublime, proportion and scale are what principally come to mind, but this experience of being dwarfed by scale isn’t limited to the visual. In music, live performances similarly impress upon the audience a sensation that there is something greater than themselves.

I’m not alone. According to Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei’s reading of Kant’s writing on imagination and aesthetics, “Although the judgement of the beautiful is subjective, Kant claims that it is also universal, and so connects us with our common humanity” (p60). As a (regularly disillusioned) humanist, I find such an idea rather sweet.

Although beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, it appears that beauty is both partially subjective and partially universal.

The scale of silence

Style and taste vary, inflected by vernacular visual grammars, cultural histories, ideological values, and media. As such, no aesthetic universal holds. We should be thankful for that, otherwise the world would be a far less interesting place. However, a rose is a rose is a rose and a sunset is a sunset and glaciers, skyscrapers, symphonies, and Shakespeare all continue to give us pause, encouraging us to suspend for a moment our reality.

As Gosetti-Ferencei explains, when encountering beauty, “we are affected by an object in the phenomenal world the effect of which cannot be wholly explained in mechanical or deterministic terms” (p59). Is this a uniquely human proclivity? A landscape is a human concept, after all. The ‘land’ doesn’t care how it appears to us (or any other non-human nature, for that matter). To paraphrase David Foster Wallace, what the hell is water to a fish?

To what extent is the capacity to feel an affective response to such phenomena a consequence of human cognition or intelligence? Will AI ever be able to feel an ad-hoc, genuine reaction to a sunset? If to non-human nature the land is the land, does reverence of its beauty equal respect? Judging by human treatment of nature, clearly not.

If the sublime overpowers us, the beauty in the everyday delights us in subtler ways—the silky texture of a quality sweater, the passing scent of an alluring perfume, or that first sip of a steaming bowl of spicy, fatty ramen. The sweet trill of birdsong. And what of the scale of silence? The boundlessness of practised meditation? Are these not also aesthetic experiences? Composers like John Cage and Pauline Oliveros have demonstrated the music in the absence of music, the volume of soundlessness. To subtract is often to add.

Consider that in software terms. User experience and product design have coalesced around the credo that less is more, that form does not necessarily follow function—at least not blindly. Software must be feature-rich yet focused, value-packed yet clutter-free. Reduce cognitive load, scent information, relish white space, and blow raspberries at the myth of the ‘fold’.

Contemporary software aesthetics are pared down to minimize visual noise and maximise clarity. Done well, information and affordances are communicated with precision. Moments of user ‘delight’ offer a glimpse of the sublime—though calling a quirky illustration or smooth transition sublime would be indulgent.

How about ‘tasteful’?

Designers may (like to) be considered arbiters of taste (I have written before about the shrinking of the taste gap). We are more than happy to document and dictate that which is tasteful and deride that which is tasteless. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little snobbery—I’d argue we need it now more than ever! But to assert that my sense of taste is superior to your (lack of) taste is not only arrogant, but it is unproductive. Taste is an ambiguous concept, and not innately possessed. As artist Grayson Perry explains, taste “comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it’s a melange of all those things”.

Irrespective of Perry’s sociocultural building blocks of individual taste, what we may call a ‘refined’ sense of taste is usually that which demonstrates a cultivated judgement about how to achieve a coherent and well-balanced whole. Good taste requires a confident point of view, and an educated grasp of the sensory vocabulary and grammar required in order to successfully articulate it. Whether it is how one dresses themself or their home, tastes differ, but the fundamental principles of good taste hold.

What we may call a ‘refined’ sense of taste is usually that which demonstrates a cultivated judgement about how to achieve a coherent and well-balanced whole.

This sense of a well-balanced whole is exemplified in what we call the natural world (as apparently opposed or other to the world of ‘culture’). Harmonious isn’t necessarily the word that comes to mind when we think of the non-human ‘wild’, but the confluence of billions of years of geological, chemical, and biological evolution has led to what—if it weren’t for the sickness inflicted by a small subset of humans—appears to be a successfully self-regulating and balanced planetary system.

Those are timescales your typical diverging and converging design thinking process can’t afford.

Seeking Eden

In the shadows of the Anthropocene, people seek Eden in the everyday. In small acts of creation. The crafting of objects of beauty and the telling of stories. Some hunt for it in the escapist creation of artificial worlds, augmenting reality as it appears to us or fabricating new, virtual realities entirely. And others believe that Artificial Intelligence may present the key that assists humans in the quest for ultimate harmony and balance—the discovery of a truly universal sense of taste.

As it stands (and yes, I know, I know, the technology is getting better all the time!), do Generative AI and algorithmic curation expand our aesthetic sensibilities or merely reinforce sameness? Almost all indications so far suggest that LLMs (Large Language Models) produce outputs that gravitate towards a homogeneous concretion of visual and verbal style. This seems unsurprising, given that capitalistic monopolisation tends towards repetition and monoculture, as Adorno explained in Dialectic of Enlightenment (p125) over eighty years ago:

“Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.”

The sameness that Adorno warned about regarding the culture industry can be seen today in the uniform look and feel of digital products. The visual landscape of the Internet most of us interface with on a daily basis is far more arid than it was ten years ago—a point of view regularly lamented by those who yearn for the pioneering (though overwhelmingly inaccessible) days of Flash sites and bulletin boards, Newgrounds, Geocities, Myspace and memes that hung around for weeks rather than hours. The world (wide web) before social media, essentially. Will handing over the reins to AI tools in the product design process continue to exacerbate or liberate us from this trend?

Algorithmic curation offers convenience and discovery, but always within the frame of a discursive window whose bounds we can never see, whilst Instagram and TikTok filters attempt to de-age our wrinkled, mottled, imperfect human skin. Shortcuts are handy, but by their very nature deprive of us the knowledge of what we may have missed. Perhaps the greatest fear is that the exponentially increasing speed and ease of access to answers and solutions that chatbots and agents trip over themselves to provide for us will gradually erode their users’ capacity for critical thought and the necessary engagement with ideas that aids innovation and the creation of new knowledge formations.

Artificial intelligence continues to infiltrate its way into both the domestic technologies that ease the frictions of daily life and the enigmatic technologies that govern and dictate global life, usurping human agency and responsibility. We are reminded daily of the utopian and dystopian futures AI could afford us and bombarded with the relentless, exhausting pace of change. Our reality is suffocated by such speed, reminiscent of Burke’s sublime ‘horror’ mentioned earlier, when “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it”.

Some techno-optimists and accelerationists are willing to supplant our reality entirely, as if that were necessary or inevitable. But we already inhabit more than a single plane of reality, co-existing and partially existing between the realms of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. They leak into and shape each other. People are better connected than ever, and yet loneliness is epidemic.

Returning to reality

According to Kant, aesthetic experience interrupts our usual cognitive behaviour: “When confronted with a beautiful object, the subject’s ordinary thinking processes are for a moment suspended in the experience of pleasure” (Gosetti-Ferencei, p58). The first bite of a truffle, the first sip of a cold beer on a warm day, the scent of flowers on a hike, the warmth of a loved one’s skin, the beat dropping to the screams of a thousand ravers in a dark, sweaty club.

Note in these experiences their sensory quality, the application of craft, and the physical presence of other humans. The output of generative AI continues to improve, but what is beauty to an algorithm? What is taste? Are we destined to live in a world whose visual landscape is peppered with the seven-fingered simulacra of the redundant human creativity gorged upon by sublime hectares of GPU farms?

It is through exercising our imagination that we come to better terms with the world and its possibilities. The cognitive interruptions that are, for Kant, induced by aesthetic experience enliven our minds, help us grow, and provide us with the tools and resources to play, empathise, unite, and shape a more dignified, more fun, more beautiful space to coexist in. It may be a cliché that reading is a form of travel, but Proust undertook an odyssey largely from the confines of his bed. Escapism in the experiences of beauty can be a form of discovery from which we return to reality better informed.

As I’ve written before, art is the most durable thing human hands can produce. Author Jeanette Winterson explains further:

“What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and toward the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force.”

It is not necessary to try to arrest or replace reality entirely—virtual worlds will not make us happier, and outsourcing our thinking will not make us smarter. It is our responsibility to live with our world and accept our role in shaping it, but it is critical that we welcome the interruptions.

It is not frivolous or hedonistic to seek aesthetic pleasures in the everyday. We do not need to pursue the sublime every morning (unless you’re adrenaline junky, in which case you do you). As Special Agent Dale Cooper sagely advises:

"Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it… just let it happen.”

Make, create, get your hands dirty, meditate and seek silence, or wash yourself in a bath of sound. Work to refine your taste and test the limits of your imagination and intellect, letting technology extend your abilities without replacing them. Drive out to enjoy a sunset without taking a picture and sharing it on social media—let the sublime beauty of our solar system, not your Instagram feed, interrupt your cognitive behaviour.

As Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel wrote: ‘No poetry, no reality’.