Tag: aesthetics

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Art and Design Culture Places

Carcinization of the built and visual environment

Bookmarked The age of average by Written By Alex Murrell (alexmurrell.co.uk)

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Like so many body forms converge on the shape of the crab, under the selective pressures of capitalism and efficiency, so too do buildings become the same, cars become the same, movies become the same.

When independent actors are all operating under the same selective pressures — aerodynamics and regulations and manufacturing constraints for cars, zoning and building codes for architecture, attracting a certain demographic for AirBnBs — convergence seems nearly assured. When a formula works, whether that’s the design of a coffee shop or the makeup techniques for a particular look, there’s little incentive to expand beyond that assurance of at least mediocrity.

Familiarity is another selective pressure. It’s as if there are a handful of uber-“brand” aesthetics that companies merely need to hitch themselves to — mimicking existing successful design becomes a shortcut to tie that business into the entire ecosystem marketing to that demographic. From that perspective, standing out could be bad.

See also:

What do Places give us?

The Homogeneity of Millenial Design

Categories
Culture Technology

The aesthetics of the imaginary

Bookmarked Worshipping At The Altar of Artificial Intelligence by Jessica DeFino (The Unpublishable)

Lensa AI portraits are a modern iteration of an ancient drive: emulating our God(s) through beauty.

The immediate thing that came to mind is … this idea that modern “beauty” means being as divorced from your humanity as possible. Like, a complete separation from all that is human about you.

Beauty standards have always been about pursuing an impossible look by doing terrible things to our bodies.

My issue is this: As virtual avatars become blueprints for physical beauty … many people feel pressured to partake in physically and psychologically damaging products and procedures in order to adhere to that blueprint…

“Beauty” — in the standardized sense — is always a fantasy; it’s a fantasy of the future.

While AI art is popular, impossible, fantastical smoothness will be desirable, like HDR photos were hot shit for a while. Then it’ll overwhelm the market, and the look will be considered too fake and cheap, and we’ll have a resurgence of analog art (or at least the look of it). I already find art that’s too perfect unmoving. I like a touch of humanity visible in the work.

Read an article recently about how photography sparked the rise of abstract art, using Turner as an example, evolving from hyper realistic to emotive landscapes — but must’ve closed that tab 🤷‍♀️

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Society

“Upsketch”: the veneered life of performance

Replied to Sarah Taber (@sarahtaber@mastodon.online) (Mastodon)

@theproski@infosec.exchange It’s wild bc they put a lot of effort into making the apartment *look* upscale- granite countertops, very up-to-date style of flooring, etc.

But the actual construction was crazy cheap- flooring was a thin laminate & the floor itself was wavy, closet doors couldn’t close, plus the tub was the cherry on the sundae.

I hereby dub this construction style “upsketch”

This approach — it doesn’t matter if it’s shackled together with zip ties as long as it looks good — is symptomatic of so many aspects of our society, not just construction. We’re constantly selling our lives too, on social media and in person.

Looking good trumps feeling good. Performing for the camera on family holidays and excursions shows off what a perfect family you have, never mind whether you’re actually happy. Performing toxic masculinity means you don’t have to admit to the weaknesses of insecurity and uncertainty.

And we even pretend to ourselves as a survival mechanism for capitalism. Buying a cute zippy car makes the soul-sucking commute in bumper to bumper traffic feel not so bad. Looking like the best mom or coolest weekend jet-setter on Instagram masks self-doubt and dissatisfaction. We invest ourselves in the symbolic status we can achieve through performance, because we can’t fix the underlying problems.

Categories
Art and Design House Technology

Neutralizing reality to sell

Liked this house may or may not be real (Tumblr)

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I’ve increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn’t real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It’s cheap, it’s easy. But something about it feels like a violation.

If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality – at all – can only be seen as a detriment.

So who’s doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it’s the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment’s interiority to the point where we’ve ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Emphasis mine.

Categories
Art and Design

Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design

Bookmarked Brutalist Web Design (brutalist-web.design)
Categories
Art and Design Culture Society

Article pairing: the monotony of modern culture

Why Culture Sucks by John Ganz

There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it… It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food.

In place of art, we have “content,” which in its very conception makes cultural products totally interchangeable, just stuff to fill up space.

See also: The Homogeneity of Millenial Design

20th century modernist avant-garde movements implicitly understood the experience of world-loss and their projects were often about reinvesting the lifeworld with an aesthetic character. They built world-views as much as artworks, trying to come up with new entire styles of architecture, design, novels, poetry, painting, and sculpture.

(Emphasis mine)

 

Pop Culture has Become an Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni

In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all.

See also: Where did the long tail go? by Ted Gioia

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.

Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance.

A couple years back I had an art project that sold shirts, and posted for some advice in a t-shirt forum. The other sellers wished me luck selling original designs: the only thing people wanted to buy, in their experience, were IP that they liked. (I suspect that’s partly true, but also that discoverability is a problem. If you just want a cool t-shirt, it’s a lot of searching and browsing to find something totally new that you like versus looking for a Star Wars shirt.)

Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs…

We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us.

See also: Book industry insights from Penguin Random House merger trial

It’s like anti-entropy: culture converges when profit is the sole motivator, and efficiency is nirvana. Why take risks when the formula works?

Categories
Art and Design Society

Will “good enough” AI beat human artists?

Replied to

The problems of relying on AI art

AI leads towards visual convergence when trained on generic material not unique to different cultures or styles, always going to come up with the go-to visual and nothing unique unless instructed by a human. Will continue to allow the current visual paradigm to dominate. Sometimes the archetypical rendering is fine, the unique elements are somewhere else, but relying only on that will not create new visions of the future for sci-fi renderings.

The computer is limited by the input it receives, and cannot make estimations outside of 1) what it is given 2) what the scientist-academic nudges it to do 3) the scope of the project…

It cannot adequately have the dataset to make everything, because it’s limited to who can give it that data and how that data is acquired. So much of what artists are inspired by come from non-digital, non-archived sources: stories from our ancestors, inherited cultural modes, language (which affects our metaphors and perceptions of time and philosophies), animals wandering around, sensory experiences, memes, etc…

Basically, what I am saying is that just like humans, the AI is limited by its inability to access information it doesn’t have.

— Reimena Yee, The Rise of the Bots; The Ascension of the Human

Will good enough win when it comes to art? If it’s between free and paid, the free version may be good enough for a lot of commercial uses…

Is convergence enough to stop “good enough”?

In other creative fields, art is already converging to homogeneous looks and sounds:

To minimize risk, movie studios are sticking with tried and true IP, and simply adding onto or remaking existing works.

Will illustration and the visual arts follow the same trend? For some commercial art needs, the purpose is to fit a tight-fit visual niche — think romance book covers, or organic food packaging, where the goal is to communicate quickly what category of product it is.

But, some art — like magazine covers — does need to stand out. Distinctiveness is part of the goal. This is where creative work can persist despite “good enough” in other areas.

Will AI-created artwork achieve its goals?

Example: cover illustration

The art on these covers is pretty enough but the type is bad:

If you just need a placeholder cover these seem fine, but I’m curious whether these are enticing enough to sell books. Probably something you could use for a lead magnet, something you’re not selling but just want to have a cover in the Kindle library.

Example: comics

Some fine vibe-setting panels for a comic, but not super useful for storytelling, the panels are too similar, and how good will it be at action? I can’t imagine it will naturally generate unique poses and dynamic angles to keep scenes visually interesting. Just a few pages of this feels slow-paced.

If this is the only kind of art it can produce, it will only be useful for indie literary type comics. I think what’s going on is that grand vistas look impressive and are hard to draw, but the AI’s problems are also more apparent at closer scales, where it adds weird distortions or things don’t align we’ll. Our brains can ignore or fix the problems in a vista, but they’re impossible to ignore when they’re the focal point.

I would guess, like Ursula Vernon, AI will be a tool to reduce workload for artists needing to draw complex environment panels, and an asset library for rendering environments. In current state Vernon found it needed a lot of post processing.

This art style looks beautiful now, kinda Monstress – esque / movie concept art, but I suspect that the more people use it, the more generic it will feel and people will value art that’s clearly created by a human / has its own visual style.

Implications for the industry

This tech could push down editorial illustration prices so only newbies who live on starvation wages will be able to compete with AI, plus high end artists who can retain boutique clients that value uniqueness and want to signal that they are a luxury publication / brand, so the middle career folks will disappear. Or, will only high end creators with distinctive appeal be able to keep working and all junior creatives fade out?

If you’re a creator, you either have a style or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re simply a gig worker. And if you have a style, there’s a computer program that’s going to not only encourage people to copy your style, but expand it.

For some, this is going to lead to enormous opportunities in speed, creativity and possibility. For others, it’s a significant threat.

— Seth Godin, Unprepared as Always 

Not yet, but…

I’d say AI is not good enough *yet* for most use cases, but it will get better over time. In the long run there will be less work for creatives actually producing their own renderings (linework, painting, photoshoots) and more the art direction angle of knowing what prompts to give the AI to get what you want, plus correction of obvious rendering errors.

At the low end of the scale, a broader range of fields will be impacted (logo design, basic graphic design) — will enough small scale jobs be accessible to early career folks that the industry won’t collapse in 20 years, because no one was able to get the experience?

Categories
Art and Design Society

Taste

Liked Notes on “Taste” — Are.na (are.na)

I also believe taste is something we can and should try to cultivate. Not because taste itself is a virtue, per se, but because I’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.

I feel like there are two types of taste: generic societally approved “good taste” and a person’s unique, cultivated sense of personal taste. For example, I find “tasteful” home design to often be boring. Give me tacky instead. Instead of immaculate marble-clad minimalist interiors, show me cluttered maximalist ones filled with personality. Art too, give me the lowbrow, the outsider works following their own taste rather than the elite’s.

But I do put tasteful above thoughtless — it is usually aesthetically inoffensive at the least, whereas a hodgepodge can be straight up ugly. Anything done with intentionality reflects some form of taste.

Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity.

Moreover, it requires care: to believe it worthwhile to hold, and spend the time to develop, taste about something.

I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility.

Snobbery is where “societal good taste” brings in class judgments: aesthetic preferences associated with what the upper class can afford, often claimed without evidence to be morally superior as well. Think white bread versus whole wheat, kale versus salad, fresh versus frozen.  This is where I am working on catching my own biases, especially around food. This kind of taste is performative and self-righteous.

Via.

Categories
Art and Design Society The Internet

Want to read: Artificial Aesthetics

Bookmarked Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design (manovich.net)

Suppose you are a designer, an architect, a photographer, a video maker, a musician, a writer, an artist, or a professional or student in any other creative field. Or perhaps you are a digital creator making content in multiple media.You may be wondering how AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. This book does not aim to predict the future or tell you exactly what will happen. Instead, we want to offer you a set of intellectual tools to help you better navigate any changes that may come along.

Coming out one chapter a month – first chapter Nov 2021

Categories
Art and Design Society Websites

Personal Website Aesthetics

How do personal websites reflect social and aesthetic movements like lowbrow / outsider art, anti-capitalism/corporatism, minimalism?

Getting some quick thoughts on “paper”:

  • is DIY necessary for self-expression online? can templatized designs offer self-expression (e.g. wordpress templates)? or is that too reflective of the aesthetic zeitgeist?
  • does “slickness” and minimalist design inherently feel corporate now? how are corporate brands co-opting “humanity” through design choices? “imperfect / “more human” typography (e.g. type designed for print used online, exposing the bleed wells) becoming more popular recently in corporate design — have noticed it lately on Grist… will we see a rejection of minimalism and shift into maximalist design on personal websites? I feel like I see lots of minimalist personal websites
  • when personal websites are our personal brand how much risk are people willing to take with them? designers and artists want to show personality, but maybe not too much if they’re trying to attract corporate clients? is design staying safe in that realm? I suspect non-designers might be pushing the envelope more on aesthetics, more willing to experiment, though honestly don’t look around at folks’ portfolio websites the way I used to back in the Old Web — how would you do that these days, Smashing Magazine roundups?
  • what’s punk online today? what’s the website equivalent of a zine? the photocopy look or the ethic of throw this up fast and cheap?
  • connection between lowbrow / outsider art and rise of personal design — people have gained the power to design who didn’t have it before, and don’t have training, but want to have fun and express themselves… back in the day, Geocities websites and spinning gifs… did rise of unhindered “outsider” online creation coincide or interact in any way with rise of outsider art and lowbrow in the art world?
  • as anti-work / anti-corporate / anti-capitalist sentiment spreads, how will that change design aesthetics, online and off? will a more handmade look appeal? will craftsmanship return, and what would that look like in web form? (thinking of $$$ letterpress printed books I’ve seen lately)