A woodcut depicting a step in the process of ancient Chinese papermaking. (1637)

There has been much doom and gloom recently about generative AI, especially by workers that will be affected (or replaced entirely) by the proliferation of these tools.

While this is no doubt a serious problem for creative professionals, it’s also worth looking at these developments from the perspective of the amateur creator. That is, from the perspective of someone who is creating art for personal enjoyment, as a semi-monetized hobby, or simply as a person without industry connections or funding for creating a “professional” product.

From this perspective, generative AI tools are extremely compelling, as they promise to allow someone with a limited skillset and small budget to create works that previously would have been impossible to create.

To put it simply, the cost of creating art is going down, big time.

The Cost of Art Materials: A History

This might seem like a modern phenomenon, but in fact it’s quite typical for new technologies to commoditize existing ones and make previously expensive tasks cheap or even free. Consider these historical examples:

Writing Paper

The material cost of writing a novel, poetry, screenplay, or other written work today is functionally zero: a notebook and a pack of pencils costs $5 or $10 total, at most. And if you look hard enough, these materials can be found for free.

This is a significant change from a few thousand years ago, when the predecessors to paper (papyrus or parchment) were difficult to make. It was even expensive a few hundred years ago. It’s difficult to find accurate information on how much writing materials cost in prior eras, but this essay suggests that, in England during the late 1500s, “…the average laborer making 6-12 pence a day could purchase up to 75 sheets of paper with a day’s wages.”

Assuming that a modern notebook is 75 pages and the US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, times 8 hours for a day’s wages, that means a single notebook would cost, at minimum, approximately $58. Not exactly cheap.

Portrait Painters and Photographers

Prior to the invention of photography, if you wanted an image of yourself, you had essentially two options: draw it yourself or commission a portrait. Portraits were quite expensive and mostly only available to the upper classes – at least until the late Renaissance, when they became slightly more accessible to the growing middle classes.

A daguerreotype, an early form of photography (1844)

After photography’s popularization in the mid 1800s, the cost of having a personal image went down to about $100-$200, adjusted for 2023. Still expensive, but an order of magnitude lower than portraits. Today, of course, any inexpensive cell phone can take an unlimited number of photographs for free.

• Film production. Video/film production is another related example. 70 or 80 years ago, film cameras and related equipment were too expensive to own for anyone other than large film studios or news corporations.
  
  Today, feature films have been shot entirely on a cell phone. As with photography, the cost of actual production is nearly zero, even if other costs (actors, props, location permits, etc.) aren’t necessarily inexpensive.

These are only a few examples, but I can’t think of any individual art object that is more expensive to create today than in the past. The only counterexamples may be large-scale architectural structures, which were less expensive in the past – probably because of cheaper labor and less worker protections.

Enter: Generative AI

How does generative AI fit into this narrative? Well, it’s simply the next step in the same process: creating artistic assets that previously required a certain skillset or lots of money are now becoming accessible and affordable. In concrete terms, generative AI tools can be used to:

• create graphics, NPC dialogue, background images, and other assets for video games

• create logos, ad images, posters, postcards, fliers, and other marketing materials for films, games, or anything else

• create background music, themes, and other soundtracks for films or video games

• generate patterns and designs for fashion designers

…and so on.

At the moment, most of these tools are still in their infancy and the results aren’t overly impressive. These issues will no doubt be fixed in the future.

A few years ago, however, doing most of these steps required hiring someone or learning the skills yourself. A few years from now, it will be easy for a budding filmmaker to bring their vision into being without needing to hire a half-dozen professionals. This means that the budgetary requirements for creating a film will drop considerably.

Is that ultimately a good or bad thing? It depends.

From the perspective of the consumer, the lack of barriers to entry could overwhelm the market, making it impossible to navigate through millions of pieces of AI-generated content, most of which is of low quality.

From the perspective of the creator, however, this same lack of barriers promises to make previously expensive art forms like film considerably more accessible. For the filmmaker, video game designer, or other creator on a budget, the future of art-making seems increasingly affordable.

The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning (1897) by Camille Pissarro

It’s nearly the end of the year, making it a good time to reflect on the content I’ve published since launching On the Arts in late May.

Below is a list of every article published on the site, organized chronologically. In terms of popularity, the three most viewed posts were What is the Demoscene?, Istanbul’s Blue Tile Paradise, and How Wittgenstein Watched Movies.

1. Winter as Reading Season – David Foster Wallace on the necessity of quiet time in order to read. Winter is a quiet time, making it ideal for getting through that stack of books.

2. The Meaning of Melancholy – An interview with Hans Maes on the varied meanings of the ancient concept.

3. How to Write a Proper Haiku – Haiku is a deceptively simple form of poetry. Learn what a “proper” haiku is and how to start writing one yourself.

4. Do biographies need to start at the beginning? – Brainstorming alternative forms to the predictably linear narratives of most biographies.

5. What is the Demoscene? – An interview with Filipe Cruz on the influential but still obscure art form, which has influenced computer art, video games, cinema, and more.

6. Link List: 20 Articles + Websites About the Arts – A wide-ranging collection of links on ballet, ugly architecture, Soviet Control rooms, Hokusai, and nifty CSS tools.

7. The Vertical Beauty of Hong Kong – An interview with photographer Romain Jacquet Lagrèze, a French photographer based in Hong Kong.

8. How do you actually create AI art? – How does AI art creation actually work in practice? A guide to the process of actually using an AI art generator, for anyone that hasn’t already done so.

9. What are liminal spaces? And why are they so popular? – “Liminal spaces” have become trendy in recent years, especially on TikTok, Tumblr, and YouTube. But what makes a space liminal? And why are they so popular lately?

10. Plastic palm trees and inflatable pineapples – Just where did all those gimmicky plastic bananas and piña coladas come from? An interview with Max Ryynänen on the “tropical kitsch.”

11. Gore Vidal Was Everywhere and Now He Is Nowhere – When he was alive, Gore Vidal was one of the best-known writers in America. Today, a mere decade after his death, most have forgotten his work. What happened?

12. Modern Culture is Too Escapist: Part 1 – In this first part of a three-part series, I argue that the arts today are too focused on escaping the world, rather than enhancing it.

13. The Necrologs of Bulgaria – What is the best way to remember the dead? In Bulgaria, they put up small posters called “necrologs.”

14. The Paradox of the Garden of Eden – The Garden of Eden is, paradoxically, not actually a garden. An interview with Professor David Fenner.

15. The Sea Has Always Looked the Same – Stand on an empty beach and cover your entire vision with the water. The image you’ll see is almost exactly what people saw thousands of years ago.

16. Istanbul’s Blue Tile Paradise – Discussing the hidden mosque of Rüstem Pasha, which is covered in thousands of hand-painted tiles.

17. What Does Wabi-Sabi Really Mean? – Explaining an over-used and often misunderstood idea in Japanese culture.

18. From Gothic Invaders to Mall Goths – How an ancient Germanic tribe gave its name to a modern subculture.

19. How to Start Learning About Aesthetics – A guide to learning about aesthetics, the philosophical study of art, beauty, and the senses.

20. Are wind turbines ugly? Could they be beautiful? – How to make ugly things appear less ugly – or appear like something else entirely.

21. How Wittgenstein Watched Movies – After lectures, the philosopher would ask a friend, “Could you go to a flick?”

22. The “Scenic Route” in Google Maps – Taking the most beautiful path from A to B, not merely the quickest one.

23. Art Nouveau vs. Art Deco: What's the Difference? – Art Nouveau and Art Deco are often confused with each other. Learn how to tell the difference between the two.

See you next year!

The Chasseur in the Forest (1814) by Caspar David Friedrich

I have never been a huge fan of winter, especially here in Central Europe, where the sun comes up around 7:30 and goes down around 15:30. Weeks or even months can go by without seeing the sun.

One thing I do appreciate about the winter, though, is how quiet it can be, especially in nature. The experience of walking in a quiet, snow-covered forest is a unique one and not something that is possible in warmer environments. It is a particular feeling of apartness, of feeling cut off from the wider world and more present in your local surroundings.

Winter is also isolating in the sense that it forces us to spend more time indoors. For most people, that means more screen time. But it doesn’t have to: it can also mean more quiet time for reading.

Mindlessly scrolling TikTok recently, I came across a short clip of David Foster Wallace talking about the importance of having quiet spaces in order to read – and the lack of it in the modern world.

The full quote is below and the full 1.5 hour interview is here. The text has been lightly edited and bold emphasis is mine.

… there's a difference, though, I think, between being mildly bored and but then there's another kind of boredom that I think you're talking about which is…reading, reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room.

I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read because they get – it's not just bored – there's an almost dread that comes up here about having to be alone and having to be quiet.

When you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore; they pipe music through. And the music's easy to make fun of 'cause it's usually really horrible music.

But it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. To me, I don't know that I can defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that's…almost hungry for silence and quiet, and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of thirty seconds, that doesn't get fed at all.

It makes itself felt in the body in a kind of dread, in here. And I don't know whether that makes a whole lot of sense. But I think it's true that here in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile – and I don't mean hostile like angry – just, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen, to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand, because – particularly now in the computer and Internet culture – everything's so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation.

If you find yourself despising winter and wishing that the cold and dark would end, try a slight change of perspective. Treat winter as a “hibernation” period of rest and slowing down. Look at a piece of art for an hour or watch an entire opera on YouTube. And make some progress on that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read. Enjoy the quiet.

Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer, 1514

Dr Hans Maes is senior lecturer in history and philosophy of art at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He has authored and edited a number of books including: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration (Routledge 2021); Portraits and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020); Conversations on Art and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2017); Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); and Art & Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2012).

In the interview below, we discuss the history and meaning of melancholy, a rich but often under-appreciated concept. You can read Maes’ full paper, Aesthetic Melancholy (2023), at Contemporary Aesthetics.

On the Arts: How do you define melancholy, exactly?

Hans Maes: Melancholy, as I understand it, arises when we grasp a profound but painful truth about the world, such as the transience of all things, the judgmental nature of human beings, or the indifference of the universe. These existential insights can make us feel anxious, hopeless, or lonely, but they can also make us appreciate more deeply the things that we value or love.

For example, realizing that our life is finite and fragile can make us cherish the moments we spend with our loved ones, or the beauty that surrounds us. In this way, negative feelings can co-occur or alternate with positive emotions, such as joy, gratitude, or wonder, resulting in a bittersweet melancholy.

OTA: It’s a term with a long history, used by Galen, Freud, and others. In what way is their understanding different from yours?

HM: Galen believed that people’s personality and behaviour was determined by an excess (or lack) of four bodily fluids, called "humours": blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Based on this he made an influential distinction between four fundamental personality types: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic (from melas, ‘dark’, and kholē, ‘bile’). The melancholic condition was believed to be linked to despondency, persistent fears, sleeplessness, and delusions.

Freud – and now we’re skipping almost two millennia – famously thought of ‘melancholia’ as a pathological response to loss. It happens when the recognition of loss is withdrawn from consciousness in such a way that the ego cannot detach from it. Instead, the ego identifies with the lost object and turns the aggression against itself, resulting in a lowering of self-esteem, a loss of the capacity to love, a loss of interest in the outside world.

Freud’s view is certainly distinct from Galen’s, but what both have in common is that melancholia is seen as a fundamentally undesirable and unpleasant state. And that’s where the main difference lies between their theories and my account of melancholy. I am interested in a particular state or experience that is usually valued and even positively cherished. It’s characterized by its bittersweet nature and one may have it in response to art works or to certain poignant circumstances.

For example, a walk in the countryside during autumn, when leaves are falling and the first chill is in the air, can evoke this feeling. Similarly, listening to a song like Judee Sill's ‘The Kiss' can leave one with a powerful sense of bittersweetness. This feeling is something that one can savor, and there doesn’t seem to be anything pathological about it. That’s why I felt the need to develop a new account of melancholy, one that is distinct from Freud and other clinical accounts.

OTA: You reference Emily Brady and Arto Haapala’s essay, “Melancholy as an Aesthetic Emotion" in your paper. Could you briefly tell us about their view?

HM: Yes, Brady and Haapala are one of the few authors to conceive of melancholy as a valuable experience with a distinctive aesthetic character. They put forward two necessary conditions for melancholy. One is that melancholy is always reflective in nature, the other is that it always involves a combination of pleasure and displeasure.

OTA: This is what, according to Brady and Haapala, differentiates melancholy from simply "being sad"?

HM: That’s right. Sadness is a negative emotion, whereas melancholy has negative and positive aspects. And sadness, they argue, is an immediate response to loss, whereas melancholy is more of a delayed or lingering response. It will involve reflection on or contemplation of a person, place or event. They give the example of being in desolate place where you start to ruminate on the past. You feel some pleasure in recollecting good times, but equally some loneliness or feelings of emptiness.

OTA: Your paper makes a few critiques of the account of melancholy presented by Brady and Haapala.

HM: I give a number of reasons in my paper, but one important objection is that their account does not adequately distinguish melancholy from certain other emotional states. For instance, melancholy is supposed to lack the immediacy and brevity of sadness. But is sadness necessarily brief and immediate? I’m not so sure.

Likewise, Brady and Haapala suggest that melancholy is more ‘refined’ than sadness because of its reflective nature. But oftentimes sadness will be equally conducive of a reflective state. So, I don’t think the distinction is as clear cut as they want it to be.

Consider also the way they define melancholy as a complex emotion, with aspects of both pain and pleasure, which draws on a range of feelings such as love, loneliness and longing, all of which are bound with a reflective state of mind. That definition also seems to apply to nostalgia, which I think is distinct from melancholy. It even applies to emotions that are very different from melancholy, such as a brooding jealousy – a state in which painful suspicions of unfaithfulness alternate with gratifying fantasies of retribution.

OTA: What makes nostalgia distinct from melancholy?

HM: It’s quite common to use these terms interchangeably. After all, both are bittersweet emotions, and the realization of transience, which is key to nostalgia, can also bring about melancholy. Still, I think it’s better to keep the two apart. Nostalgia is usually defined as a backward-looking longing where one has positive feelings about the imagined past and negative feelings about the gap between that imagined past and the actual present.

Melancholy, by contrast, is not always or necessarily backward-looking. In fact, melancholy is often triggered by forward-looking deliberations about, say, one’s own mortality or the oblivion that awaits us all. Also, nostalgia typically comes with bitter feelings towards the present. Melancholy does not. Melancholy is often accompanied by an attitude of acceptance and appreciation towards the present.

"Melancholy", an engraving by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.

OTA: Melancholy is typically perceived as a negative, or at least undesirable, thing. But as the Brady and Haapala essay mentioned, it is "something we even desire from time to time." Why do you think that is? Why is it a state that we sometimes seek out? Is it just because of the pleasurable, nice feeling - or is there something more to it?

HM: There’s more to it, I think. It’s never just the ‘sweet’ aspect of melancholy that we value. We value the bittersweet experience as a whole, and we tend to rank it above many experiences that are unambiguously pleasurable. Why that is becomes less of a mystery if we consider the two components of the account I have proposed. When a person experiences melancholy, they come to grasp an important truth about human existence that is not normally at the front of their minds and that they sometimes even choose to ignore.

Hence, the sense of profundity that seems inherent to melancholy. These existential insights then produce a clearer view of what really matters and prompt a deeper appreciation for someone or something they care about. Hence, the transformative and the aesthetic potential of melancholy. When viewed in this light, it is easier to understand why people seek out and savour such bittersweet moments. Much more than pleasure, it is about insight, appreciation, receptiveness, and even transformation.

OTA: You mention a few other similar concepts in other cultures, notably fago on the South Pacific Island of Ifaluk, saudade in Portuguese, or samvega in Pali. Could you elaborate on those?

HM: Sure, but I should preface this by saying that I have no real expertise in this area. I just thought it was important to underline the historical and cultural specificity of the notion of melancholy. To do so, I referred to some concepts in other cultures that seem to denote similar experiences and that might help to enrich the account I presented.

For instance, on the South Pacific Island of Ifaluk, there is the term ‘fago’, which may be glossed as ‘sad love’. It refers to the love that a person may feel for the less fortunate. ‘Fago’ compels you to care for someone in need but is also haunted by a strong sense that one day you will lose them.

The Portuguese notion of ‘saudade’, that people might know from Fado music, is another example. The Pali word ‘samvega’ I encountered in an interesting article published long ago by A.K. Coomaraswamy. The term is used to denote a poignant realization of the transience of natural beauty but can also refer to certain deeply felt encounters with works of art, when painful themes are offset by the gladdening recollection of the Buddha.

Saudade (1899), by Almeida Júnior

OTA: Chekhov and Tolstoy used melancholy quite often in their works and you return to them throughout the paper. Could you elaborate on that?

HM: This was actually one of the reasons for writing my paper. I have a deep and longstanding admiration for the work of Chekhov and Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels in particular have had a tremendous impact on me. But it was only two or three years ago that I asked myself why it is that his work speaks to me so much. The answer, of course, is complicated. But the fact that his work evokes and expresses melancholy in so many ways, and so lucidly, is no doubt one of the reasons why I have been so moved and shaped by his writing.

OTA: I wrote an article on the Gothic a few months ago. While I was reading your paper, it reminded me of Gothic architecture, which does seem to inspire a melancholic mood. Do you think the Gothic has a relationship to the melancholic? 

HM: I think my account offers a decent explanation of why some places, more than others, put one in a melancholic frame of mind. As I mention in the paper, sites with a melancholic air are those that easily trigger existential musings on, for instance, the transience of human life or the ultimate insignificance of all our endeavors. The architecture that we often associate with Gothic literature – ruins of castles, old cemeteries – likely belongs to that category. So do Gothic cathedrals, such as the one in Canterbury where I teach. There’s an exquisitely melancholic passage in David Copperfield where Charles Dickens ruminates about the many who have lived and loved and died in the shadows of Canterbury Cathedral.

OTA: I also wrote a piece on the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which covers similar feelings -- especially to your proposed definition of melancholy, which includes "the transience of all things" – a key part of the wabi-sabi ideal. You also mention "mono no aware" in your paper, which is often discussed with wabi-sabi. Do you think there is a very close connection between melancholy and mono no aware?

HM: The short answer is ‘yes’. As you point out in your article, wabi-sabi is an idea in Japanese aesthetics that focuses on impermanence and the inevitable imperfection of human existence. Those are, if you want, important existential truths and so they will be key ingredients of what I call aesthetic melancholy. Similarly, ‘mono no aware’, which is sometimes translated as the ‘pathos of things’, refers to the wistful feeling one has when contemplating the transient beauty of life. Again, I am no expert in cross-cultural aesthetics, but it seems clear to me that there are many interesting points of overlap here that are worth further investigation.

You mention a few films in the paper, including Ikiru and Late Spring. Do you have any thoughts on the film Melancholia? Or recommend any other films, books, or other works of art related to melancholy?

I have many thoughts on the Melancholia, which I consider Lars von Trier’s best film, along with Dogville. But it would probably take us too long to go into detail, all the more because von Trier’s conception of melancholia is much closer to Freud’s than it is to my view on the matter. But I’m happy to give other recommendations for readers who are interested in the particular bittersweet feeling as I have described it.

The film Barry Lyndon, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is soaked in delightful colour and yet also bleak to its core. It never fails to instill me with a deep sense of melancholy. The same goes for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid or Marco Tullio Giordana’s La Meglio Gioventù.

Some of the photobooks I cherish the most, such as For Brigitte by Titus Simoens and Anonymous Men and Women by Issei Suda, have a distinctive melancholic beauty to them. For people who like dance, I can recommend Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s amazing Laid in Earth (interpreted for screen by Thomas James).

In contemporary visual art there’s the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and, more recently, Ellen Harvey’s The Disappointed Tourist series. Needless to say, music offers a treasure trove of melancholic works. But I’m pretty confident that people can think of good musical examples without my help.

Bashō's Hermitage from Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

When it comes to poetry, haiku seems to be more popular than almost any other form.

Partly, I think, because of its visual flavor, which can almost be described as painterly or cinematic; and partly because of haiku’s short-but-strict set of rules. As the old rule goes, constraints breed creativity.

So, you want to write a haiku? Here is a brief guide to getting started.

First Understand the Form

What is a haiku, exactly? It depends on whom you’re asking – and how authentic you want to be.

When used in English, the label of “haiku” is a fairly broad one and essentially includes everything that has been inspired by the traditional Japanese form, even if it doesn’t quite follow the same strict set of rules.

This is why you’ll often see books like Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus – nearly all of which don’t follow the strict definition of a traditional Japanese haiku.

In English, the most basic type of haiku is simple: a three line poem, like this:

If you’re entirely new to writing poetry, I recommend beginning with this simple form. While it isn’t exactly “authentic,” it’s much easier as a starting point and it gets you into the mindset of writing haiku. You can always add more rules later.

5-7-5

More typically, however, a haiku in English follows an additional rule: that syllables must follow a 5-7-5 pattern. This means that the first line should have 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables again. If you struggle with determining how many syllables a poem has, this neat little tool can help.

Here is an English haiku that follows the 5-7-5 pattern:

Looking at the Kerouac haiku again, we can see that it doesn’t follow the 5-7-5 pattern:

Does that make it not a haiku? It depends. If we’re aiming to follow the strict 5-7-5 rule, then it clearly doesn’t. But…it’s not quite that simple.

Why? For starters, because syllables aren’t a concept in the Japanese language, which uses something called on instead. On are counted differently than syllables in English…which makes the 5-7-5 rule a little suspect.

On

The words in traditional Japanese haiku don’t follow a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, but instead (usually, but not always) follow a 5-7-5 on pattern. So that’s where the 5-7-5 format originated.

But what is an on?

I won’t delve into Japanese grammar too much, but in short, it basically works like this:

• a short syllable counts as one on

• an elongated vowel counts as two on

• a double consonant counts as two on

• an “n” at the end of a syllable adds an additional on

The word haibun (俳文) – a type of literary form that combines haiku with prose – is a useful example to illustrate how this works. In English, this word has two syllables: hai-bun.

In Japanese, however, it has four: ha-i-bu-n, as ai is an elongated vowel (giving it two on) and the word ends with an “n” (adding one on).

As a consequence, Japanese haiku tend to be shorter than English haiku – which throws into question the validity of the 5-7-5 rule when writing haiku in English.

This is easy to observe when comparing the original Japanese words with their English translations. Below, we have perhaps the single most famous Japanese haiku, by the poet Bashō. Note that in Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single line.

古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
    ふるいけやかわずとびこむみずのおと
        furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

Divided into on, we can see how it follows the 5-7-5 pattern:

fu-ru-i-ke ya (5)
ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu (7)
mi-zu-no-o-to (5)

But if we look at one English translation – of which there are many – it doesn’t conform to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern:

an ancient pond– (4)

a frog jumps in (4)

water’s sound! (2)

Translated by D.T. Suzuki

Subsequently, some English-language haiku poets disregard the 5-7-5 rule and aim to make their haiku shorter, in an attempt to match the original Japanese form. Others consider Japanese on to be the equivalent of English syllables, and thus insist on the 5-7-5 form. The history of haiku in non-Japanese languages is thus a rather diverse one, without a single “correct” approach.

Poet Bashō and Moon Festival (1891) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Another somewhat novel approach is to focus on the rhythm of the poem and the stress placed on words, rather than the strict number of syllables or on. This paper and this video explain it in far greater detail than I can get into here. For those seeking to truly translate the traditional Japanese “fixed form” (teikei, 定型) into English, this seems like a promising route.

Kigo and Kireji

Now you (hopefully) understand more about the form of a haiku. But what about the content? Traditionally, in Japan, there are two key elements that most haiku contain:

• kigo, which is a word symbolizing or referencing the season or time of year. The kigo should come from a designated list of seasonal words and “set the mood” for the poem.
  
  Many of these words can be difficult to spot without a deep knowledge of Japanese culture. For example, in the Bashō poem above, frog is a symbol of the Spring season.

• kireji, or “cutting word”, which serves as an abrupt turning point or change of subject from one part of the poem to the next. The kireji almost always appears at the end of one of the lines. Because there is no direct equivalent to kireji (cutting words) in English, they are often marked with a dash or ellipsis in translation.
  
  Interestingly, this concept of a “cut” is not unique to haiku poetry and has a long and influential role in Japanese aesthetics, particularly on ikebana flower art, Nō theatre, film cuts, and Zen rock gardens. Ultimately, the concept can be traced back to Buddhist notions of impermanence.

Ikebana, the Japanese art form of flower arrangement. According to Nishitani Keiji, a 20th century Japanese philosopher, cutting a flower from its roots reveals its “true nature” as an impermanent object in an impermanent world – a key concept in Zen Buddhism.

Thankfully, these two concepts are a bit easier to translate into English. To include a kigo equivalent, try to make your haiku about nature. Indeed, most of the best-known historical haiku are about natural subjects.

Seeing as it is autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, this list of autumn-related haiku is a good place to look for inspiration.

The kireji is a little trickier. The easiest way to think about it, in my opinion, is to imagine a film scene where the director quickly cuts from one location or subject to another, apparently unrelated one. Or, when a film cuts from one angle to an entirely different angle, bringing about a different view on the subject.

The main objective is not to merely continue the same line of thought from line one to line three, but to introduce a new perspective or subject matter that nonetheless still relates to the overall topic.

The poem by Bashō below illustrates this well:

Final Notes

As I’ve hopefully conveyed, haiku is both simple and extremely complex at the same time.

If you’re beginning to write haiku, you may wonder, “Do I need to include a kigo and kireji? Does my poem need to follow a 5-7-5 syllable pattern? If I don’t do these things, is my haiku improper or wrong?”

My recommendation? Don’t stress too much about it, at least at first. What makes haiku aesthetically intriguing to me is its short length, adherence to some form of creative restriction, and cinematic quality – and not an over-obsession with following difficult-to-translate rules. Even Bashō and other great haiku masters didn’t always follow them.

Just start with a simple three line poem…and see what happens. You can always introduce additional creative restrictions later.

As a final note: if you’re looking for some haiku inspiration, check out this Instagram account. Its author, Takahiro Dunn, posts short video clips of his life in Japan – a haiku poem with each one.

I read a lot of biographies. As you might expect, nearly all of them start with the subject’s birth, continue on through their childhood, teenage years, and so on, until they “become someone important,” and eventually die.

The problem I have with this format is that even the most interesting people tend to have rather mundane early lives. Early chapters of most biographies cover the subject’s parents, grandparents, education, and so on, and while this is no doubt a comprehensive approach to a subject’s life, I think it puts the cart before the horse.

Most readers, I think, care about the subject’s childhood in relation to who they became as adults. A childhood anecdote illuminates an event in adulthood. As such, it makes more sense to jump back to the subject’s childhood when events in adulthood show a relation to them – and not cover them beforehand. By the time you make it to the key events in the subject’s (adult) life, the childhood sections are chapters ago, and you’ve most likely forgotten the specific details.

So, maybe the issue isn’t so much that biographies cover the mundane aspects of life, but rather that the biography format itself is often too linear and predictable. Whether the subject is Gandhi or Napoleon, the narrative form is almost always essentially the same: a person was born, grew up, did important things, and died.

If you read a lot of biographies, this linear format becomes tiring after awhile, so much so that it makes you want to stop reading biographies, which is not a good thing!

This is one reason why I enjoyed the format of the film Steve Jobs (2015). Rather than start at the beginning of Steve Jobs’ life and plod through until the end, it instead focuses on three key Apple product launches and then fills in the story via flashbacks.

This all led me to wonder; what innovation has been done in the biography genre? Should there be innovation? What would an innovative biographical form look like?

I’ve come across a few examples of different approaches, but not as many as you’d probably expect for a genre of literature that is thousands of years old. Nonlinear narratives are not uncommon in fiction, but it was difficult to find more than a handful of biographical works that strayed far from the traditional model. Starting in medias res, that is, “in the midst of things”, is an ancient tradition going all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and yet it doesn’t seem to have had much influence on contemporary biographies. In researching this topic, I did find an interesting paper about postmodernism and biography, which explores similar questions.

Two Simple Proposals

I have at least two ideas for making the standard biographical form a little more compelling.

The first is akin to the Steve Jobs film mentioned above: a focus on key events in the subject’s life that are peppered with relevant flashbacks. Rather than tell the subject’s story from start to end, focus on a few key events and jump back in time to show how the past led to the present.

Let’s use Napoleon as an example, as a new film about his life is set to release next month. The traditional narrative of Napoleon’s life is something like this – and I am dramatically summarizing here:

Napoleon, the son of minor Italian nobles, was born on the island of Corsica. As a teenager, Napoleon was enrolled in a military academy in continental France, and his outsider status as a provincial shaped his personality into an obsessive and ambitious military man. He rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and maneuvered himself into becoming the consul and then emperor of France. His armies conquered much of Europe, fought off numerous coalitions of British, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces, before finally losing and being exiled to Elba, an island off the coast of Italy. Less than a year later, he escaped, marched back to Paris and promptly reclaimed power, only to lose again, this time at Waterloo. Finally, he was exiled to St. Helena, a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America. He died there about five years later at the age of 51.

Comprehensive, but a little boring. How could we make this more interesting and less linear?

Notice that three islands played a key role in Napoleon’s life: Corsica, Elba, and St. Helena. These seem like a good theme to wrap a story around, similar to the three Apple product launches in Steve Jobs.

Napoleon on Saint Helena by Franz Josef Sandmann, c. 1820

So, instead of a traditional linear narrative, an “innovative” biography of Napoleon could center on these three islands as flashpoints in Napoleon’s life:

Napoleon was born on one island, exiled to another island after nearly conquering the world, performed a dramatic escape from that island – only to be exiled to a third island, where he would ruminate on his past glory for five lonely years before dying in middle age.

A Collection of Impressions

A second idea is to make biographies more impressionistic and anecdotal. Rather than a linear narrative that goes from birth to death, such a biography could instead divide the subject’s life into relevant periods and then offer details, anecdotes, and other short episodes that occurred during that time. This would allow for some sense of a linear narrative while also being less predictable.

This approach is also closer to how we actually process our own memories, i.e., as isolated stories that aren’t remembered in any particular order. While you may have various memories of your childhood, teenage years, twenties, and so on, they are not remembered as sequential, but rather as separate, largely independent episodes.

Demoscene has influenced everything from video games to digital art – and yet, it’s still something of an obscure art form. Unless you’re a computer programmer or engineer, you probably haven’t even heard of it.

In this interview, we talk to Filipe Cruz, who uses the handle ps (@psenough on Twitter, etc. – as ps is too short of a username). Cruz is a long-time demoscener who runs a YouTube channel about demoscene.

On the Arts: What is the demoscene, anyway? And what is a demo?

Filipe Cruz: The demoscene is a sub-culture of digital art, a community of people who focus on showcasing what their machine can do with audiovisual presentations, the so called demos. It has its roots in the game piracy scene that boomed in the late 80s with the proliferation of the early personal computers (Apple II, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari, Amiga, etc.), where people, mostly teenagers, would trade floppy disks with software and games and sometimes add small intros that would play in the beginning, communicating who had been responsible for breaking the copy protection or fixed/enhanced the game in some way, or how to get in touch for more trading.

Rupture by ASD / Andromeda Software Development (2009)

These folks would gather regularly at physical events to trade disks and learn from each other how to use the machine to draw pixelart, produce music, code your own graphical routines, etc. When game trading became more dangerous, the groups became more focused on the artistic side of things and by extension, those LAN copy parties became known as demoparties, holding competitions for best new demos, music, and graphics.

The advent of the Bulletin Board Systems and then later the internet made the culture more international and there is still to this day an active community of people around the world who regularly release new demoscene productions and organize demoscene events.

It's very focused on Central and Northern Europe, with Revision during Easter in Germany being the biggest pure demoscene event. Assembly Summer in Finland during the summer being one of the events with the longest running tradition, despite also catering to other computer culture related scenes.

But it's worth mentioning the demoscene is also active outside Europe, in places like the United States, Argentina, Australia, Japan, etc. Some countries with a bit more tradition than others. For example here in Portugal, where I'm from, we only have a single demoscene event per year, the Inércia Demoparty that I help organize with some friends. It's quite small compared to other parties, but we are always looking for new blood to come learn about the culture and  participate in the community.

Incyber by Satori (SK) & Aural Planet (PL) (2000)

OTA: Any favorites or recommendations for cool demos?

FC: Oh yes, I have a lot of favorites for a lot of different reasons. From the late 90s, releases from the Orange demogroup "Deesbab" and "Megablast" have a special place in my heart. Then from early 2000s "Incyber" from Satori, "Gerbera" by Moppi, "Barn" from TDA.

Also some of my own productions that I collaborated with in the past and am particularly proud of like "Your Song is Quiet pt 2" with Russian friends from CPU, "Anoxia Redux" with Greece-based ASD, "fr-045: life after with Finnish section of Farbrausch, "The Lost Religion of Light" with my Serbian friends of Kosmoplovci.

In more recent years, I’ve actually started recording a series of demoscene highlights videos, which covers the best demoscene releases by year. You can see them on my YouTube channel.

OTA: Why do demosceners create demos? Is it purely for artistic reasons, or more about pushing the limitations of computer hardware?

FC: A little bit of both. In the late 80s and early 90s the technical aspect was definitely a driving force behind the culture. It was easier to compare things when everyone had the same machine, so it was down to the programming skills and artistic talent to get the most out of the platform. When the IBM PC clones became highly adopted by the masses, some of the active demoscene lost a bit of its charm in that regard, but people kept making demos and gathering at demoparties.

Back in the 90s, it was still relatively possible for small groups of people to develop technology for a demo that was superior to what you would see in most games released in the market, which was a strong contribution to the popularity of the demoscene in the computer culture of the 90s. Nowdays it's much harder to compete as a hobby with the professional research and artists from AAA studios and commercial engines. Even though a lot of those companies carry demosceners in their ranks.

kosmoplovci & minimalartifact - the lost religion of light (2007)

There are still plenty of demos being regularly released though, both for vintage machines and more recent platforms. The Meteoriks awards tries to highlight some of the best releases of the year and their website is a good place to start if you're looking for recent demos. The more impressive demos tend to have a mix of interesting technology with a focus on style / direction / message / artistic expression.

Also worth mentioning is that during the last couple of decades, the demoscene seems to have become more known in the mainstream computer media outlets for its achievements in procedural programming and size-limited productions. Releases where your entire program executable must fit within a certain ridiculously small size. The more popular categories being 4 kilobytes and 64 kilobytes, but there is also a very active tiny size intro community in even smaller categories like 128 bytes, 256 bytes, 512 bytes, etc. The Lovebyte Demoparty online event that started during the pandemic being one of the major factors for that particular boom of popularity. Nano Gems is a website / online gallery that highlights demoscene tiny size coding productions.

For me personally, demomaking is mostly about artistic expression, I try to use the technology I have available instead of focusing on developing new tech. But for a lot of other demosceners, exploring new technology to make something impressive is still the main driving force. And then there is a large aspect of demomaking that is also just about having fun doing something creative with your friends, sharing it, and talking about it with other friends in the demoscene.

OTA: Demos are usually created by teams, but are there individual artists too?

FC: There are individual artists too, they are more rare because you typically need a broader range of skillsets to fulfill your vision when you're doing things alone but they do exist in the demoscene.

Doing things in teams is a bit more common. In a team you can typically focus on what you are more naturally inclined to do and then ask your friends to help you out for the other aspects of making the demo that they are more comfortable with. Sometimes you have to relinquish your vision or spend a lot of time and energy debating things that were already locked in your head though, but at the same time you can also end up with something interesting beyond your expectations. So there are pros and cons to both ways of doing things.

OTA: Demoscene seems very much driven by the “scene” (hence the name) of events, called demoparties. How does that work? Do teams typically work on a demo together and only share it at events? And is it a competition, with winners, or just a place to show work? Do creators have portfolios of their work, or is it mostly an event-based art form?

FC: Yes, most social aspect happens at the demoparties. There are typically competitions for many different categories where you submit your latest work. The competition format is a bit of a cultural thing. A lot of the participants don't really care about the position their entry gets and they just enter it to the competition to have it shared on the big screen / livestream for others to see.

After the event the party organizers typically upload all the releases and results online, usually to scene.org. There are people actively trying to preserve all of this demoscene metadata and keep it publicly available, with demozoo.org as the most generalist complete demoscene website, where you can find all the releases, results and history. For example, here is my scener page, listing all the events I’ve helped organize, all the productions I’ve ever released, the demogroups that I am or was a part of in the past, etc.

Assembly 2004 – a combination of a demoparty and a LAN party

There are other demoscene websites doing similar work like pouet.net, csdb.dk, or janeway.exotica.org.uk. Some of them focus on specific platforms or just certain aspects of the demoscene. Demozoo tries to cover it all but is still an ongoing process, the database is not complete.

OTA: What do demo creators use to make demos? Are these graphics entirely made with code, or do people use programs like After Effects or Blender too?

FC: Depends on the person and the project. Some people develop their own tools and frameworks to work with or to help their group members collaborate making a production. Particularly if you're targetting size limited categories like 4kb or 64kb you need specialized tools which don't exist commercially. But there is a bit of a culture of sharing your tool and framework for others to reuse / learn from after you have released your production. For example, in4k gathers resources for creating productions of 4kb.

Others do all the code by hand, for example, there are executable graphics categories where you have to generate a single static image under 4kb within 30 seconds of precalculation time. This allows you to use rendering techniques that you wouldn't be able to do at 30 frames per second and can get quite impressive. Executable.graphics is a website / online gallery that showcases these kind of productions.

To create graphic assets or music, I would say it's culturally accepted in the demoscene to use commercial tools if you want. It's all about the end result. Same for doing video releases. Using commercial engines for realtime demos is still a bit frowned upon by the demoscene purists though, because it removes or blurs the line a lot of what actual coding is involved in the process making it hard/unfair to judge, but overall demos using commercial engines are still allowed to participate in the competitions, as long as it is properly credited so people can try to vote accordingly.

OTA: In general, are there any real “rules” to demoscene, other than making a cool demo?

FC: Each demoparty has its own set of competitions. And for each of these competitions there are usually rules lined down, to ensure the competition is fair for everyone participating. Those are the main constraints when releasing something on the demoscene. That being said, most demoparties typically have a wild competition category where anything goes: video, weird platforms, live performances, whatever you can think of.

And you can also release your demo outside of any competition or party. It will get less visibility though, which is why most active demosceners prefer to release at demoparties where they or their friends are attending.

There are some conventions and tropes from the four decades of culture that reoccur a lot, like for example most demos have credits and greetings scenes. But there is no committee that gets to decide what is or is not a real demo and it's culturally accepted that anyone is free to release whatever they enjoyed doing. If it becomes praised by the community or not that's another story. Also party organizers sometimes disqualify from the competition screening some things that are in bad taste, but you can still release them outside of a demoparty.

OTA: Demoscene has recently been labeled as intangible culture by UNESCO in some countries. What effect do you think this will have, good or bad?

FC: I been closely following that effort and am part of the discussion group of demosceners who have been actively pushing for that to happen across the globe. We call it "The Art of Coding" initiative. 

We are also trying to push for it in Portugal as one of the activities of our Associação Inércia, the nonprofit entity we have in place here in Portugal focused on promoting demoscene culture. 

I think it's good. It can open some doors when you are trying to get some support from local municipality to help you organize future demoscene events. It gives your proposal a bit more legitimacy when you are actively promoting something that has been recognized internationally as intangible cultural heritage.

Altair - Mara (2019)

OTA: How long have you been involved in the demoscene? And how does your YouTube channel relate to it?

FC: I been active in the demoscene since 1997 after a neighbor / classmate of mine showed me some demos and challenged me to learn graphics programming. I did many different types of releases since then, mostly for the MS-DOS and Windows platforms. I also dabbled in audio production, am known as an experimental  / noise artist of sorts in the demoscene for focusing on glitch audio aesthetics in many of my releases. But I also try other aesthetics now and again, depending on the project idea.

The demoscene was never that big in Portugal, so most of my early contact with it was by reading about it through diskmag articles. Diskmags are the equivalent of an independent news zine of sorts, but in an executable file format and fitting inside a single floppy disk, hence the name, a mag inside a disk. I became a bit obsessed with the medium, was even an amateur editor and co-editor of different number  of demoscene publications throughout the years. So it was common for me  to keep track of the active demoscene, what groups are active, the new  parties coming up, the best latest releases that just came out. Getting  to know all the different groups and platforms of activity and how they  correlated with each other, did a whole bunch of interviews with all  types of demosceners, etc.

Long story short, once the Internet became more prevalent the diskmag format kind of faded away, becoming replaced with online portals for news and forum discussions, blogs with specialized articles, event reports and interviews, etc. But it's kind of a bit all over the place and hard to follow if you don't know what you're looking for, so now with my YouTube channel, I try to do a continuation of what the diskmags used to bring to the table in that regard, consolidating the information into a single place that becomes a bit easier to keep up with the demoscene – with my monthly reports for example, or creating in depth discussion videos about specific demoscene topics, guides for new people getting into things, etc.

My channel is still a bit of a mess, in the sense that it's not strictly focused on just this one single demoscene promotion goal. It also caters to other things in my range of interest that might warrant the occasional video, such as games, technical help videos, book reviews, random things really. Which is a big no-no on all the "how to make your channel grow" tutorials out there, but it's been working for me so far, so I don't care.

BACK TO THE PET – shiru8bit (2022)

OTA: If someone wants to get involved with demoscene, where should they start? Your guidebook and related video on “Teach Yourself Demoscene in 14 Days” is a good place to start for sure. Any other recommendations? And where can they find demoscene events to attend?

FC: Definitely “Teach Yourself Demoscene in 14 Days”, it was prepared especially with that goal in mind and peer reviewed by other demosceners. There are other resources out there of course, but it largely depends on your area of interest:

• If you are more into learning the livecoding shaders culture in the demoscene you can go to Demozoo’s Livecode

• If you are interested in coding small things you can go to Size Coding

• If you are more interested in textart there is 16 colors

• The Zine podcast radioshow is also a good way to get to know more about the demoscene.

As for finding demoscene events to attend, Demoparty.net is the main resource, but the front page of Demozoo also lists upcoming events. I would also recommend to join some demoscene Discord servers and getting to know the active community depending on what you're most interested in.

Through that interaction it'll become clear what upcoming events people are looking forward to or preparing their releases for, and then just try to participate. If you can't attend physically, most events also welcome remote participation and usually have a livestream of the event available.

A collection of aesthetics from the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

I was organizing my browser bookmarks recently and as you might expect, I have a lot of links about the arts!

Rather than keep them to myself, I thought I’d share them with OTA readers. It’s important to push back on the obsession with constant novelty so widespread on the Internet, so some of the links are from the last ±year or so, while others are very old, but still worth reading.

If you enjoy this type of content, let me know – I might make it a monthly series.

1. How Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes Revolutionized Dance – The Ballets Russes were a ballet company active in the early 20th century, mostly in Paris – and ironically, never in Russia. Their productions were extremely influential on the arts and involved well-known names like Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Picasso, and Coco Chanel, to name but a few.

2. Why is Everything So Ugly? – A well-informed rant on the ugliness of modern architecture, IKEA furniture, Apple devices…and just about everything else.

3. Using Midjourney to imagine Jodorowsky’s Tron – We’re still in the early stages of AI art, but one very interesting potential use case is in imagining What if? scenarios. What if David Lynch directed Barbie? What if Werner Herzog worked with Orson Welles? And so forth. This link imagines the two Tron films in the aesthetic of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

4. Why I Left Tech to Pursue Art – A nice story about a programmer quitting his tech job to become an animator. Some insightful Hacker News comments too.

5. The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute – Not a new site by any means, but one that I love sharing. They catalog “consumer aesthetics,” which include everything from Acidgrafix to Zen-X.

6. AI and the Future of Pixel Art – A freelance pixel artist uses generative AI to create pixel art – and makes some interesting points about newcomers that “never experienced the trials of the prior era have no nostalgia or stockholm syndrome for less convenient methods.”

7. Building a video game with AI-generated assets – Echoes of Somewhere is a point-and-click adventure game, notable because its developers are using AI tools to create character models, voices, game locations, and more. This sort of thing is exciting, as it hints at a future where a small team can create games, films, and other artworks that currently require massive budgets and dozens of staff.

8. Mis.Steps – Pittsburgh has a lot of steps. More than any other city in America, in fact. This writer/photographer visited all 739 public stairways in the city and took a Polaroid + wrote a brief piece of creative non-fiction for each one.

9. The Print Shop Club – This fun tool simulates Apple’s 1984 software package that made it easy to create posters, greeting cards, and similar paper items. You can use it to create your own design, then download it as a PDF. Note that the application is a bit slow, so be patient.

10. Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner – Published only six months before his death, this article tracks McCarthy’s use of food across his novels. There’s something about food, especially grimy, cheap, diner food, that makes literature seem more real to me.

11. A Fresh Look at Flowers in Photography – A newish book, Flora Photographica, features some really beautiful photos of flowers, all taken in the last 30 years.

12. Miniature Calendar – Every day, this Japanese artist creates a miniature diorama of everyday life, using household objects like potato chips, keyboard keys, and medical masks. The creative choice of objects is the most impressive part.

13. An Analysis of The Backrooms—Also Known as the Internet's Horror Rooms – A guide to “The Backrooms” a famous photo that spawned (or reignited) the liminal space aesthetic.

14. The Inner Beauty of Basic Electronics… – Who knew that electronic components looked so cool?

15. …and Soviet Control Rooms. These spaces look so much cooler than their modern equivalents.

16. The contagious visual blandness of Netflix – Why does every Netflix show have that same hyper-polished, over-lighted look? The short answer: digital cameras, green screens, and lazy production techniques.

17. Inside the Business of Book Styling – Who buys and organizes those bookshelves in upscale apartments? There’s an entire industry for it, apparently.

18. Broider – A nifty tool for creating borders in CSS. Probably not useful for anyone that isn’t a web designer, but it’s fun to play around with nonetheless. The creator’s home page is really cool, too.

19. What is Literary Criticism For? – The answer is complicated. It’s definitely not for changing the world, according to John Guillory, a well-known literary scholar.

20. Four must-read books on Hokusai. You already know of The Wave. Maybe you’ve seen a few other ukiyo-e woodblock prints. But how much do you know about Hokusai, the man himself?

Enjoy!

HK Neon Signs #3, Hong Kong, 2014 – All images by Romain Jacquet Lagrèze

Romain Jacquet Lagrèze is a French photographer based in Hong Kong. Since 2010, he has been photographing unique aspects of the city, including its street culture, Cantonese street signs, vivid rooftop life, and abundance of trees sprouting from concrete buildings. Six of his photographic series have been published as photo books. His photographic work is currently represented by Blue Lotus Gallery.

In the interview below, we discuss his work, the aesthetic atmosphere of Hong Kong, the importance of making photography connected to the real world, and related topics. You can view his work at RomainJL.com or via his Instagram or Facebook pages.

On the Arts: Before getting into photography, your background was in design. How did you end up switching to photography full-time? And do you think your experience with design has affected the types of photographs you take?

Romain Jacquet Lagrèze: When I arrived in Hong Kong, I was a freelance web designer. This left me enough spare time to visit the city and get more deeply involved in the field of photography. Whenever I walked in the streets, I felt a constant and inexhaustible source of inspiration, so I simply kept recording it. After I had enough photos to make a series I had the chance to find the local publisher Asia One.

The Blue Moment #8, Hong Kong, 2015

In 2012 we released my first photo book 'Vertical Horizon' and it had a huge coverage in the press worldwide. This really helped me set up myself as a photographer as I found Blue Lotus Gallery to represent me and to sell my prints. Since then I have been releasing several new books and doing exhibitions with the gallery. I believe that having a trained designer eye helps me a lot for the composition of my photography. Finding a good balance is the key to a good design, and this is the same thing for photography.

OTA: It’s important for you to display real images without any major modifications. Could you elaborate on that?

RJL: In my point of view, a photo must be a reflection of reality. I really dislike it when I learn or I notice that an element was artificially added to a photo. Even staged photography is not my thing. Nowadays, especially with all the new tools to create artificial photos through AI, we start to be flooded by photos that look real but are not. I see it invading more and more of my social network feeds and it makes me convinced that the core value of photography is its bond with reality.

In regards to editing, I think that a photographer should just stick with contrast harmonization, removing lens distortion, adjusting the white balance and for sure cropping which I think is the most essential part of editing. But adding an element that was not in the scene or totally changing the colors just makes your photography join the pool of artificial photos.

OTA: You see photo books as a way for “photography to enter the real world”. Should photographers today focus less on social media and more on physical objects like photo books?

RJL: Making my photos present in the physical world is of utmost importance for me and the more it goes, the more I feel this way. We really all are overwhelmed by digital content on our smartphones. And the noise of notifications makes us unable to focus deeply on anything we see online. When we are in front of a photo book, or in front of a large print, we can switch off our device and focus on what we see, on what the photographer is willing to show.

Vertical Horizon, a coffee table book published by Asia One in 2012.

OTA: You also do limited edition prints, which reintroduce scarcity into a medium (photography) that has become very abundant. Why did you choose to make limited editions?

This was actually advice from my gallery. I followed them on this, and I am happy I did. I think as humans our nature is to look down on anything which is abundant. So making my prints in limited edition is to me the only proper way to make people fully appreciate my photos.

OTA: Printing photo books and prints also allows you to control the paper, and choose certain materials that highlight the specific elements in a photograph. How do you choose a paper to print a particular photo? 

RJL: It all depends on the photo. Usually for each of my series I choose one type of paper that I will use on all photos. I really like the semi gloss art paper from Hahnemühle and I use it on many of my series like 'Concrete Stories', 'City Poetry' and 'Wild Concrete'. But for a photo of a big cityscape with large glass buildings illumination at night, a metallic pearl paper is the best fit according to me. This is what I use for 'Vertical Horizon' and 'The Blue Moment'.

OTA: In your Old Shops series, you write that Hong Kong street life is slowly disappearing because the modern residential towers in Hong Kong don’t have ideal spaces on their ground floor. As a photographer that focuses on urban environments — and with a background in design – what other architectural elements do you think contribute toward building a rich street life, in Hong Kong or elsewhere?

RJL: A rich street life is only possible if there are enough shops, restaurants on the ground level. And the architecture in Hong Kong after the 80s tends to build only mega structures that have a shopping center on the first few floors. That turns the street life into shopping center life, which is for sure less charming and also less inspiring for photos.

Clock maker, Kwun Tong, 2013

In general I think that an important architectural feature for a rich street life is to have a sheltered walkway. It enables bypassers to take their time walking slowly and shop around even under a scorching sun or a heavy rain. This is typically what you can find in the old districts of Hong Kong.

OTA: Another one of your series focuses on rooftop scenes. Hong Kong seems to have a uniquely rich rooftop culture, but this also seems like something newer buildings are slowly eliminating?

RJL: Yes absolutely, the main characteristics of old architecture buildings in Hong Kong is to have a rooftop which is accessible by all. On small buildings the rooftop is supposed to belong to the last floor owner/tenant and they sometimes fenced it off.

High Kick, Hong Kong, 2018

But in a wider building, there are just too many units on the last floor, so generally no one fences any area. The whole rooftop is then accessible by everyone in the building. It creates a large area where we can find children playing, people doing exercise or using the strong sunlight to dry anything (mostly laundry, but also fruits and meat). New buildings tend to have the rooftop either totally unauthorized or only accessible to the last-floor owners with alarms systems. That's why there are much less people going and much less life on those rooftops.

OTA: In the City Poetry series, you took photos of neon signs in Hong Kong in order to learn Cantonese. As someone also living abroad in a country where I originally didn’t speak the language, I really enjoyed this – and I had the same idea myself!

Cantonese is a character-based language, unlike alphabet-based Western languages. Do you think this has an effect on the visual landscape? And do you think being character-based adds more of a visual element to written language?

City Poetry is focused on any sign that I can find in Hong Kong streets. It can be neon signs which are disappearing drastically in the last few years but also other sorts of signs using any other material like, stone, wood or metal. I tend to prefer shooting the characters that are old where the marks of time are apparent as it makes them look more fragile and treasurable.

百福全圖 - 100 Fortune, Hong Kong, 2022

What I like about character-based language is that each character has a meaning by itself, and it enables me to create collages of these characters where I strip out the actual meaning of the sign it belongs to, in order to create a new meaning when put with other characters. I think that this way of creating is best applied in character-based language because each word has the same square shape and it can be moved around more freely which enables me to find the best possible balance for the overall artwork.

OTA: Your most recent project is “36 Views of Lion Rock,” a series that focuses on Lion Rock, a famous rock in Hong Kong, and was inspired by Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. I’m curious of how you went about creating photographs that all needed to have the rock visible. Did you have specific city viewpoints in mind, or did you just walk around the city and see if the rock was visible or not?

RJL: I did have a few viewpoints in mind when starting the series, but the whole fun of the project was to look for more of them. It made me explore streets and areas of the city where I usually wouldn't go. So it was a lot of exploration, especially because I wanted to show the diversity of scenes we can find in Hong Kong: people shopping in the streets, playing sports outside, taking care of their plants on their rooftop, riding on boats, etc.

Junk and Lion, from the series 36 Views of Lion Rock, Hong Kong, 2020

OTA: Hong Kong has a long legacy of photography and filmmaking, including Fan Ho, Wong Kar-Wai, and Ghost in the Shell, to name a few. Are there any particular photographers or filmmakers that worked in Hong Kong which have been influential to your work?

RJL: Fan Ho had a great influence on me in terms of photography as it made me realize the importance of cropping. I had plenty of occasions to see his books and admire his prints as his work is also represented by Blue Lotus Gallery. So this is probably the photographer I studied the most. I had the chance to meet him once and I was very glad to see that he knew my photos and appreciated them.

I also love the work of Wong Kar-Wai a lot, but somehow his style is too far from what I do to be a direct influence. Japanese animation movies from the early 90s have been a more direct source of inspiration for my work. Especially Ghost In the Shell and Akira which both portrays mega cities in a way that I try to reach. 

OTA: Most of your work has an intimate relationship with the city of Hong Kong. I think this is unique amongst photographers, who often travel to multiple cities. Do you have any interest in traveling to take photos, or do you think being in Hong Kong is “integral” to your work?

RJL: I can say quite certainly that I wouldn't have become a photographer if I was not based in Hong Kong. I come from Paris and experienced life in Los Angeles and Tokyo before arriving here. But no other cities have created in me an urge to take photos as intensely as Hong Kong did.

Now that I built my photographic eye, I could certainly use it and find inspiration in multiple places, but I think that in order to create quality work, one needs a lot of time to be fully impregnated by his subject. It looks to me that travelling a little bit here and there can only result in generic photos.

Wild Concrete #58, Hong Kong, 2014

Do you have a new photography project in Hong Kong? If so, what topics are you focusing on?

I am currently shooting the sequel to my photo book 'Wild Concrete' that I shot 10 years ago. Since then, all the trees that I documented in it have disappeared and there is a whole new generation of trees that are out there that I must record before they in turn disappear. I also keep shooting all the characters I find in the streets in order to create new artworks for my project 'City Poetry.'

But how does AI art creation actually work in practice? While most of these articles talk about the implications of AI art, few seem to explain the experience of creating it.

As such, I thought it would be helpful to walk through the process of actually using an AI art generator, for anyone that hasn’t already done so. While these tools are powerful, using them is still a bit confusing to figure out for the uninitiated.

Which AI Art Tools Should You Use?

As of September 2023, there are hundreds of tools that you can use to create AI art. That said, most of them are still beta projects and/or don’t work particularly well, so you can safely skip them for the time being.

When it comes to the cutting edge, however, there are really only a few tools worth exploring:

• Midjourney is, as far as I can tell, the single best AI art creator on the market. In my experience, it creates the highest-quality images and is the easiest to use. However, it is run by a private company on private servers, which means there are restrictions on the types of images you can create.

• Stable Diffusion is another highly-ranked tool that puts far less restrictions on the user. However, you need to install it directly on your computer, which makes using it considerably more difficult.

I have been using Midjourney for a few months now, so I’ll be using it for this walkthrough. I also think it’s the easiest one to set up (barring the low-quality free online ones) so I recommend it for anyone looking to explore AI art further. However, note that it’s not free and you’ll need to fork over $10 a month for the basic plan.

Getting Started with Midjourney

If you go to Midjourney’s website, you might be a little confused. A giant ASCII animation covers the top half of the page and the text description is rather vague:

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.

There is no sign up button, only a “Join the Beta” link. If you click on that, you’ll be redirected to a site called Discord. Don’t worry – this is supposed to happen.

What is Discord?

Discord is a chat program that is extremely popular in the video gaming community. Increasingly, it’s also being used by companies as a channel for providing support, and in a few cases (like Midjourney’s) as a direct interface for external applications.

That’s right: you interact with Midjourney entirely within a separate chat program. There is no unique “Midjourney app” or website that you use to generate the art. While this might seem strange, it actually works very well once you get the hang of it – although the initial set up is very clunky.

Note that this also means you’ll be creating two accounts here: one for Discord and one for Midjourney. These are two separate organizations that have no relation to each other.

Once you add a Discord display name, solve a captcha, and enter your birth date, you’ll end up on a busy chat screen. You’ll now want to open a new tab and go back to Midjourney.com. Click Sign In in the top right and link your new Discord account to Midjourney.

As I noted above, Midjourney isn’t free and you’ll need to pay $10 a month for the cheapest plan.

Once you’ve got that set up, open Discord again. They also have desktop and iPhone apps, which I recommend using instead of the browser.

Take note of a few things here:

• Discord is a chat program. It is made up of Servers, which are run by a specific individual or group (like Midjourney). Servers have Channels, indicated by the pound sign, #likethis.

• Servers are listed in the top left, inside a circle. Channels are listed on the left hand side of the chat window.

• You can also send Direct Messages, which are only between you and another person (which includes the Midjourney bot)

The image below shows the public channels on the Midjourney server. As you can tell by the names, each channel is for a different subject: support, billing help, off-topic discussion, and so forth.

But where do we create images? In the “Newcomer Rooms” channels, you can create images that everyone else will see, too. Usually, there will be new images created rapidly here.

However, I don’t recommend using this public channel. It’s much easier to just Direct Message the Midjourney bot.

To access this, click on the blue smiley face in the top left, and then on the Midjourney icon that appears to the bottom-right of it.

How the Creation Process Works

So, how do you actually create an image? There are basically 3 steps, with a few sub-steps:

1. Type your image “prompt” into the chat box and press enter. This prompt can be a single word or a long string of adjectives.

2. Wait 20-60 seconds for the image to be generated.

3. You’ll then receive 4 images, arranged in a square. You can view and save this image as a PNG file, or…

   1. You can choose to redo the prompt and get different results, or…

   2. You can create “variations” of one of the four images, or…

   3. You can “upscale” an image, which makes it larger and more detailed. You can then save it as a PNG file.

That’s pretty much it. Of course, there are many other settings, but that’s basically how it works.

Let’s walk through each of these steps in greater detail – and with images.

Step 1: Type the Prompt

This is really “where the magic happens.” To create an image, simply type /imagine [your desired image] and press enter. Midjourney will create an image based on the words you submit. For example, if you type “futuristic cityscape,” you’ll get something similar to the first image below.

Midjourney has a fairly large aesthetic vocabulary and so you can also include descriptive words like photorealistic, ukiyo-e style, or in style of Mondrian. This link has a number of interesting aesthetics to try out.

This process of choosing the words to include is called prompt engineering and while you can get very specific, it’s not an exact science. Indeed, there are lengthy guides on choosing which words to include, how to emphasize certain words and de-emphasize others, and so on.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can use an actual image as a source in the prompt. In other words, you can take an image or photo and then generate variations of that image using Midjourney. Personally, I find this to be one of the most interesting use-cases of the app.

Step 2: Wait for the Image to Be Created

Once you submit the prompt, you have to wait for the image to be created. How long this takes depends on your plan and your settings. You can enable Turbo Mode, which generates images more quickly (in ±10 seconds) but uses more computing power. This lowers the amount of images you can create for that month. Relax Mode takes longer but uses less computing power.

Step 3: Receive 4 Images and Redo, Make Variations, or Upscale

Once the image creation process is complete, you’ll see a single image with 4 squares. Below, I’ve shown 4 examples (with 4 images in each one) of how the prompt “futuristic cityscape” can be modified with adjectives to create unique images.

Even though the image file is itself a single image, it’s actually 4 different images, which are numbered left to right. The numbers below the image correspond to this:

What do U, V, and the Recycle icon mean?

• U stands for Upscale. If you click U1, the image marked with 1 will be made larger and more detailed

• V stands for Variation. If you click V2, variations of the image marked with 2 will be created

• The recycle icon redos the original prompt

…and that’s pretty much it! There are a ton of other little settings and Midjourney is continually adding more features to the app, but in essence, the process is still the same: type your prompt into Discord and see what happens. If you like the image, you can save it. If you don’t, you can make adjustments and try again.

The Flow State of Image Creation

For the most part, the image creation process is a game of trial-and-error, where you create an image, see the results, modify your prompt, and try again until you get one that you like, and finally upscale it.

After you get the hang of it, this becomes quite natural and you’ll intuitively disregard the vast majority of the images you create. I suppose this makes it similar to taking hundreds of photos using a digital camera but only using a few – and the opposite of taking a few well-planned photos with a film-limited traditional film camera.

“Let’s see what happens” is thus the defining question in your mind when creating AI art with Midjourney. This makes it akin to a game, where you are always curious what will appear next.

Further Reading + Watching

There are a ton of tutorials online for Midjourney and other AI image creators. While they are helpful, I do recommend trying out the app yourself before worrying too much about the specifics.

• Midjourney’s Official Quick Start Guide

• YouTube has a few hundred tutorials on using Midjourney. They are all basically the same, so pick one that seems appealing. Just be sure that it’s from the last six months or so, as Midjourney frequently updates the app.

Liminal spaces are really popular:

• @SpaceLiminalBot on Twitter has over 1.3 million followers.

• "Liminal Space" is one of the most read articles in the Fandom Aesthetics wiki

• Searching for “liminal space” on YouTube brings up dozens of videos with over 1 million views each, the most popular one with almost 5 million views.

• Reddit.com/r/LiminalSpace has over 630,000 members

• Articles on liminal spaces have been published recently in The Atlantic, LitHub, Architectural Digest, and Forbes.

But what exactly are liminal spaces? And why have they become so popular recently? In this post, we’ll attempt to answer both of those questions.

An obvious place to start: what does liminal mean, anyway?

Part 1: Defining Liminality

Something is liminal if it is transitional, in between two or more other things. The key phrase is in between, or on the threshold. This is hinted at by the word’s etymology; liminal comes from līmen, the Latin word for “doorstep, threshold, doorway, entrance, beginning, or commencement.”

Both space and time can be liminal. While a liminal space is an area in which we physically move through, a liminal time is a period of time in which we are in between two or more other times. Liminal times are often called “liminal states” or “liminal moments.”

We don’t occupy liminal spaces or times, we pass through them, which is why lingering there gives us an odd feeling, as if we are outside of the normal order of things. It’s also why non-liminal things seem unique or strange if placed in liminal spaces; e.g., a permanent dwelling on a bridge or a man living in an airport.

Two Kinds of Liminal Spaces

Thinking about it more, I think we can divide liminal spaces into two broad types:

• Architectural liminal spaces, in which we are physically moving from one place to another. They include hallways, airports, roads, and other places we occupy temporarily while we are en route to a more important destination. As such, movement-based liminal spaces are defined primarily by built structures in our environment.

• Time and Status liminal spaces. These can be considered two subcategories of the same general idea: spaces where liminal life moments occur. They are defined less by the physical layout of our environment and more by events in our lives.

  • Time-based liminal spaces, which we occupy for a period of our lives while transitioning to a new stage of life. The transition from childhood is a common example: playgrounds, classrooms, toy stores, and arcades are spaces we occupy during the process of moving from child to adult.

  • Status-based liminal spaces, which we occupy while undergoing a change in social status. For example, a church during a marriage, in which participants enter legally single, perform a ceremony, and leave married. Or, in army boot camp, where participants enter as recruits, undergo intense training, and leave as soldiers.

Everything is Liminal

The concept of liminality has become a trendy term in academia over the last few decades. A search for the word on PhilPapers.org brings up hundreds of results in philosophy alone, with sociology and literature no doubt having even more. The word has been used to describe airports, prisons, churches, classrooms, refugee camps, hallways, libraries, street gangs, Balinese dances, tourist guides to Rome, Kabbalah, Japanese women on a pilgrimage in Heian-era Japan, Brónte novels, and Hannibal Lecter.

The Origins of the Concept

While I won’t delve into the academic literature too much, it is helpful to understand the origins of liminality as a concept.

Liminality as an anthropological term was first developed in the early 20th century by Arnold van Gennep, an ethnographer and folklorist. Van Gennep’s best-known work, “The Rites of Passage,” was published in 1909. The book (in which the word liminal was coined by the author) details a variety of different rituals that signify a change in social status, age, or other aspect of social identity – hence the name, rites of passage.

Van Gennep struggled to build an academic career in France and his work on rituals was mostly forgotten after his death, partially due to a feud with another (significantly more influential) French social scientist, Émile Durkheim.

Half a century later, British anthropologist Victor Turner “rediscovered” the work of Van Gennep while in a liminal state himself, awaiting a U.S. visa so that he could begin teaching at Cornell University. Turner went on to write a now-famous article, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, in which he explores the “liminal period” class of rituals highlighted by Van Gennep.

What Isn’t Liminal?

Defining what isn’t liminal can be a tricky task. After all, what can’t be described as a step in a process or a temporary place?

The thesaurus is a good place to start. Antonyms of liminal include stable, unchangeable, constant, and eternal. We are no longer in a liminal state when we have arrived, when we have stepped through the limen and find ourselves at the destination, permanently. Or, when we never left in the first place.

Non-liminal spaces are thus destinations, places that are not on the way to somewhere else:

• The cozy, personal, and familiar bedroom at home is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, cold, impersonal, and unfamiliar hotel room in a far-away country

• The old rural house that has been passed down in the family for generations is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, temporary, corporate-owned urban apartment listed on Airbnb

• A decades-old local café run and frequented by long-time local residents is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, generically-designed, international coffee chain staffed by interchangeable short-term employees and occupied by anonymous consumers

• A home driveway where the family minivan is parked every night is non-liminal – as opposed to a liminal rental car stopped at a roadside gas station

God isn’t liminal, either. Traditional religious concepts (at least in Western Christian traditions) like God, eternity, or afterlife are typically not liminal, as they deal with final states, unchanging entities, and the “ultimate nature” of reality. More on that below.

Liminal is Not Spooky, Abandoned, or Nostalgic

As liminal spaces have become more popular, the aesthetic has expanded to include a lot of things which aren’t quite liminal. If you browse /r/liminalspace, you’ll see a lot of empty office rooms, abandoned buildings, and various childhood tropes from the 80s and 90s. These cannot be considered liminal spaces in the strict sense of the term.

But if they aren’t liminal spaces, why do so many people think they are? A few guesses:

• liminal is an extremely broad word and can be used to describe just about everything (as I illustrated above)

• the liminal space aesthetic overlaps with some other popular aesthetics like mallwave, back rooms, or dreamcore, and liminality is trendy while the others are becoming blasé

• due to its Latin roots and the plethora of academic papers on the topic, the word liminality carries a sophisticated aura

• on social media sites, the comments saying, “actually, this isn’t liminal” tend to be downvoted, deleted, ignored, or accused of being exclusionary. Over time, this results in the original definition expanding to include whatever is popular with that audience, until the concept bloats to include nearly anything

That said, I do think some otherwise non-liminal spaces can be considered liminal in the Time or Status-based sense that I mentioned above. The difficulty with this classification is that while Architectural liminal spaces are liminal for nearly everyone, we all have different liminal life moments.

Now we know what liminal spaces are. But why are they so popular lately?

Part 2: Why are Liminal Spaces so Popular?

What is the appeal of liminality? Is it just a trendy Internet thing, here today and gone tomorrow? Or is there a deeper cultural pattern at work?

I don’t think it’s just a trend. At its core, I think the modern world is fundamentally a liminal place. Here are some of my scattered observations as to why liminal spaces are so popular.

• We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals

• Millenial Nostalgia

• Our Cities are Transportation Networks

• Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal

• The Death of God

• We Lack a Process-Oriented Language

We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals

For most people, the modern Western world lacks clear coming-of-age rituals; the average age of marriage has risen dramatically, marriage rates themselves are down, home ownership is increasingly out-of-reach for the middle class, jobs are becoming more short-term and gig-based, and many activities that were formerly considered to be “just for kids” are now socially acceptable at any age.

The closest universal rituals Americans seem to have are age-based: getting a driver’s license at 16, being able to vote at 18, and being able to buy alcohol at 21. These are not really “rituals” in the ceremonial sense and are more just markers of time passing.

All of this has contributed to a widespread feeling of immaturity in many twenty-and-thirty-somethings; they feel that “they aren’t really adults” or “they still feel like a kid.” The word adulting is a prime example of this phenomenon. Consequently, many younger people feel as if their lives are in an extended liminal moment: no longer a child, but still not quite an adult.

Millennial Nostalgia

Millennials, who grew up in the late 80s, 90s and early 00’s, are the youngest generation to remember the Ancient Times Before Social Media and Smartphones. Like any generation, they are nostalgic about their childhoods, which included a lot of malls, field trips, in-person interactions, and a general sense of optimism about the future. This nostalgia for the pre-smartphone world is often parodied in the Not a Cell Phone in Sight meme.

Place Montréal Trust – Montréal, Canada in the late 80s and early 90s

Now fully “adult” and in their thirties and forties, millennials have begun to grow nostalgic about their childhoods – and the spaces they spent them in, like malls, which are pale imitations of their former selves. This seems to have been the original inspiration for the mallwave/mallsoft genre, parts of which have been absorbed by the liminal space aesthetic.

Our Cities are Transportation Networks

Most cities in the United States are designed around the automobile. There have been a million articles written on this topic and I won’t rehash them. I will, however, point out that streets (and highways, parking lots, etc.) are functionally liminal spaces. While some people may drive purely for the sake of driving, the vast majority of drivers are on the way to somewhere in particular, with the car as a means to get there.

Image of Los Angeles from Unsplash.

If you live in the typical American city, it’s very likely that you spend nearly eleven hours a week in your car, as of 2019 at least.

The COVID-19 pandemic and contemporaneous spread of remote work have thrown a wrench into this statistic, no doubt. Will another side effect of COVID and remote work be a decreased interest in liminality?

Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal

In current Western democratic political systems, the individuals in power are never quite decided “for good.” They never quite arrive. The moment an election ends, preparation for the next one begins. Politics is thus a ceaseless, unending attempt to cross the threshold, the limen of power – and to prevent others from doing the same. We, the citizens, can’t know who will be in power in a decade, in a year, or even the night before an election day.

This state of affairs is very unlike other eras. In monarchical or imperial political systems, the average citizen could reasonably expect to live and die under the same ruling family. In many instances, the same individual was the supreme political authority for an entire lifetime. As the exemplar, Louis XIV of France reigned for 72 years and 110 days. Millions of French nationals lived and died knowing a single person as their ruler.

Of course, kings get usurped, emperors overthrown, and revolutions staged. But these are unexpected events conducted outside of the system, rogue events that interrupt expectations about the future. Compare this to a modern democratic system, wherein it is expected and predicted that the current Person in Charge will be replaced in 4-8 years.

Again, I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, merely that it leads to a political system which is inherently liminal, at least when it comes to elected representatives.

The Death of God

Whew, that’s a heavy title, but stick with me here. The traditional concept of God in Christianity (and in many other monotheistic religions) is of a being that is eternal, unchanging, limitless, indivisible, omnipotent, and so on. That is to say, according to traditional monotheistic thought, God is not liminal, and the idea that God could be anything other than eternal and unchanging has been a theologically hot topic for millennia.

As traditional religious belief has declined in the Western world, it seems likely that interest in related concepts like eternal and unchanging has also fallen away. If “God is Dead,” as Nietzsche put it – and by this he did not mean that an actual being was alive and died, but rather that the concept of God was losing influence – perhaps interest in discussing His qualities is also dead or dying – at least the qualities that traditional theology has considered Him to have.

At the same time, interest is growing in “liminal” conceptions of the divine,

For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, it is an essential attribute of God to be fully involved in and affected by temporal processes. This idea contrasts neatly with traditional forms of theism that hold God to be or at least conceived as being, in all respects non-temporal (eternal), unchanging (immutable,) and unaffected by the world (impassible).
Process Theism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If you’re interested in the debates surrounding this topic, I recommend checking out Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

This leads me to my next point: our metaphysical vocabulary is inadequate.

We Lack a Process-Oriented Language

This is, again, a topic far beyond the scope of this article. But it arose from a basic observation about language: English appears (to some people, at least) to be a very noun-oriented language. That is to say, we tend to discuss concepts in terms of static, unchanging entities rather than as steps in a process. I’m not a linguist and I don’t know enough about language to know if this is accurate or not.

But, this New Yorker article does say that, unlike speakers of other languages, English speakers don’t slow down their speech before saying nouns. If I am understanding it correctly, it means that English speakers are more comfortable with using nouns.

The topic of linguistic relativity is a very debatable one, of course, but I think we can interpret this to suggest that liminlity is a popular topic because it is a “unserved need” by our usual ways of communicating.

Calendar image by Edward Penfield.

It’s been about three months since I first launched On the Arts, so it seemed like an opportune time to reflect on what I’ve written – and to share older content with new subscribers.

It’s also a good time to say thank you for subscribing! If you find On the Arts interesting, please consider sharing it with your friends, family, and colleagues.

Articles

Below is a list of every article published on the site since launch. As you can tell, we’ve covered a wide variety of topics, from mosques to wind turbines.

• Plastic palm trees and inflatable pineapples – Just where did all those gimmicky plastic bananas and piña coladas come from? An interview with Max Ryynänen on the “tropical kitsch.”

• Gore Vidal Was Everywhere and Now He Is Nowhere – When he was alive, Gore Vidal was one of the best-known writers in America. Today, a mere decade after his death, most have forgotten his work. What happened?

• Modern Culture is Too Escapist: Part 1 – In this first part of a three-part series, I argue that the arts today are too focused on escaping the world, rather than enhancing it.

• The Necrologs of Bulgaria – What is the best way to remember the dead? In Bulgaria, they put up small posters called “necrologs.”

• The Paradox of the Garden of Eden – The Garden of Eden is, paradoxically, not actually a garden. An interview with Professor David Fenner.

• The Sea Has Always Looked the Same – Stand on an empty beach and cover your entire vision with the water. The image you’ll see is almost exactly what people saw thousands of years ago.

• Istanbul’s Blue Tile Paradise – Discussing the hidden mosque of Rüstem Pasha, which is covered in thousands of hand-painted tiles.

• What Does Wabi-Sabi Really Mean? – Explaining an over-used and often misunderstood idea in Japanese culture.

• From Gothic Invaders to Mall Goths – How an ancient Germanic tribe gave its name to a modern subculture.

• How to Start Learning About Aesthetics – A guide to learning about aesthetics, the philosophical study of art, beauty, and the senses.

• Are wind turbines ugly? Could they be beautiful? – How to make ugly things appear less ugly – or appear like something else entirely.

• How Wittgenstein Watched Movies – After lectures, the philosopher would ask a friend, “Could you go to a flick?”

• The “Scenic Route” in Google Maps – Taking the most beautiful path from A to B, not merely the quickest one.

• Art Nouveau vs. Art Deco: What's the Difference? – Art Nouveau and Art Deco are often confused with each other. Learn how to tell the difference between the two.

The Future

What’s in store in the future? More and better, hopefully.

• Interviews – I’m currently in the midst of interviewing 5 different artists/academics, so their interviews will be live on the site in the coming weeks.

• Classic academic papers on aesthetics – In a similar vein, I plan on covering some of the most “classic” papers in aesthetics. For example, Plato, Schiller, Danto, and other works included in this book.

• Original essays on artistic/aesthetic topics – I’ll also be publishing more of my “original” work. This is a bit more difficult than summarizing an art movement or exploring an author’s biography, but sharing my own ideas on the arts was and still is one of the main goals of On the Arts.

• Paid memberships? – This is still months away, but I’ve begun to brainstorm what might be compelling enough to incentivize a paid membership. For now, I have two benefits in mind: paid members will be able to ask interviewees questions and receive a monthly roundup of interesting links pertaining to the arts. Any thoughts? What would make you become a paid member?

• A podcast? Video interviews? – I’m not sure that the time is right yet for a podcast or video series, but it’s something I’ve started to explore. Would you listen to a podcast or watch a video series – or do you prefer reading? I’m a bit hesitant to jump into a podcast, but I think a well-crafted one might be worthwhile.

Other suggestions or comments? Feel free to reply to this email or post a comment on Substack.
- Kiefer

Max Ryynänen is Principal University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland. In the interview below, we discuss the concept of “tropical kitsch” and its relationship to tourism, consumerism, and kitsch as a whole. The full paper, Making Sense of Tropical Kitsch (co-authored with Anna-Sofia Sysser) is online at Contemporary Aesthetics.

On the Arts: Kitsch is a word familiar to most people, but it can be difficult to define and has a variety of meanings. How do you define it?

Max Ryynänen: I think the most important thing to note is that kitsch is a concept which comes from a certain geographical area and a certain time period. “Kitsch” won an international race against many other concepts in the late 19th Century.

Russian had and still has Poshlost, which could be used for example about a sneaky politician as much as about a vase which represents bad taste. Spanish had and still has cursi, which means corny and sentimental. There were many concepts around in the 19th Century, like French Camelot and Shlock (probably Yiddish).

There was a need, in the mid-19th Century to find a concept for the growing amount of sentimental, a bit sugared, sleazy, mass produced or stereotypical (fake artistic) culture. Middle class taste was changing, and so were the means of mass production too. And, also, the art system had just appeared on the scene – seeking for hierarchically lower ‘enemies’. Kitsch was good for that. One could say, “this is real art”, and that is just “kitsch”.

As a Southern German concept – originally from Munich, 1860s – it builds on Southern German 19th Century metaphysics, and thinking typical for that period. “Kitsch” has no originality nor depth, and it is stereotypical, often pretentious. This is how the original meaning has it. One can still feel this underlying base in today’s concept. If it would have been created in Brazil or Japan, it would have a different base.

Today, the Western cultural elite is no longer against everyday culture nor does it have a problem with sentimental culture to the extent it used to have. So, kitsch has become a more positive concept. Also, we apply it freely to many different things and with different reasons. Some colors, like pink, evoke the use of the word easier than others. Porcelain is easier conceived of as kitsch than bronze.

This all leads to the craft and mass-production history of early modern life. Now we of course discuss even Taiwanese cat puppets as kitsch, and for sure, Western production has affected them too, but in the end, there are many levels and ways of applying the concept today.

Anyway, although “kitsch” can mean many different things, it has a root, which it seems to not get rid of, at least not totally. For anyone into the history of the concept, Matei Calinescu’s essay on kitsch in his book Five Faces of Modernity (1986) is a great start. For more contemporary changes in the concept, I sadly cannot really recommend anything othern than the introduction I wrote with Paco Barragán for The Changing Meanings of Kitsch (Palgrave, 2023) – which talks about the issue globally too.

OTA: How would you define tropical kitsch?

MR: The interesting thing in countries like Finland, where I live, is that our culture is not very colorful. Often when it is, in spas or at the beach in the summer, it is labeled ‘tropical’. The concept of the tropical seems to be anchored to pineapples, flamingos, banal soft objects, and so on – and often only there do we, who live up north, find pure bright colors.

The tropical as a concept leads to the geographical south, but it has of course also roots in European colonialism (although e.g., here in Finland, we did not have southern colonies, so the concept arrived to a more naïve context).

As a kitsch scholar I worked with Anna-Sofia Sysser on this topic. She is an artist and a scholar who has worked on the issue of the tropical, both in art and through writing. We wanted to raise awareness of this weird cultural issue. Banal objects like inflatable bananas and plastic palm trees are a part of this phenomenon, which has not yet fostered much discussion.

OTA: The concept of the tropic as aesthetic has a long history, but as you note, it wasn't present in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Could you tell us a brief history of the tropical idea in Western culture?

MR: The history of the concept is tricky, and goes back to both geography and colonialism, like I said. It has some tricky political roots, but it has also been just used about certain areas – where e.g., pineapples grow. One could go deep into those problems from a post-colonial perspective.

What is interesting, though, e.g., up north, like here where I live, it is often used in a very naïve, curious way. We have a lot of snow, and people are often also just curious about the south. Many wish they’d live somewhere where they could go to the beach every day. The concept has arrived from dominant Western countries like England and France, but here the simplifying, positive way it is used, is a bit of a utopian one. I suppose this could be the case in many countries in the Global North without a colonial history in the south. It is a naïve aesthetic utopia, which still, of course, bears traces of the colonial adventures of colonialist Europe (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, etc.).

OTA: As you note, many tropical kitsch items function as icons representing "warm weather" or "the beach" and don't actually refer to a specific place or object – indeed, they are not actual representations of the real countries in the tropics, which often are savannas or mountains, not islands with beaches.

MR: Yes, they are a bit like banal visual tags. The inflatable banana which my daughter sometimes likes to swim with and the plastic palm tree in the spa where my university unit organizes a recreation day are simple icons.

On a basic level they tell us about warmth and certain tastes (fruit, e.g.), but of course, during that kind of a recreation day we laugh about it, and see weird connections to colonial imagery, tourism advertisement, and many other cultural issues. This affects of course the South too.

In Southern India people sell stuff as tropical – with, weirdly (this is something Anna-Sofia works on), the same imagery, and the same aesthetic. Interestingly, and nicely, this phenomenon, though, makes possible the use of bright colors. We can have fun with yellow color for example, which is otherwise not much present in many cultures of the North.

OTA: Do you think that Miami Vice, Scarface, and other 80s films had a role in spreading this aesthetic to a larger audience? Miami and Florida especially seem to promote this "tropical but modern location" in a lot of movies and TV shows.

MR: Films have for sure had an impact on spreading this visual imagery. I think Florida is a topos, which has affected the whole US. Miami Vice as much as John Waters’ Pink Flamingos are about the visual imagery of certain tropical areas.

But the imagery was distributed also by 19th-Century kitsch objects, small and cute things you could bring home from the tropics or buy in big cities like in London. Celeste Olalquiaga’s The Artificial Kingdom (1998) is a great book about this. One can trace the way the tropical has affected the production and consumption of cheesy, small, cute objects easily at least to the early 19th Century.

OTA: Other than Florida-related American media, who or what else would you consider to be influential on popularizing tropical aesthetic in modern times?

MR: Well, it is quite natural that products meant to be used on the beach don’t feature images of polar bears or reindeer... I suppose anything related to the tropical south and leisure easily goes for symbols everyone knows. Some are also easier, like pineapples and bananas. I like mangos more, but visually they are harder to get.

There are also, of course, conventions. Someone went for the pineapple more than bananas, and now that concept is more in the DNA of the whole culture of tropical kitsch. There might be no other reason for it.

Getting back to other influences, the French, also, have for sure, created their own “tropical south” in literature and painting already long time ago. Think of Paul Gauguin, and his kind of sleazy adventures in Tahiti – which could, anyway, (I think this side of it is a nice, positive one) spread bright colors into Western visual art.

OTA: Tropical kitsch seems to get a less hostile reaction than other types of kitsch. For example, a piña colada in a decorated cup is just a drink you get at the bar, while no “serious” person would ever hang a painting of dogs playing cards in their house. I’m wondering if it's because other types of kitsch are more sentimental, whereas tropical kitsch is more escapist and touristic. Why do you think that it has less of a negative reaction?

MR: Well, at least this is true: in the Global North we feel that we need more warmth (we will now get slowly, in a sad way, as we know from climate change, but this is not what we dreamt about) and we need bright colors too (which our cultures often don’t really accept in the everyday). We need tropical kitsch around us.

The dog is just a motive for an image. We might want to cuddle dogs, but they don’t relate to this big thing that we are lacking, and which we have segregated into spas, juice cans, and so on.

Also, it could just be about conventions. There is a convention to have images of mountains on the wall, but not gravel pits – although I think most gravel pits look actually really interesting. The same way, you can have pasta or piña colada on the wall, but not kiwis and dal (to take up two tropical food products) – without someone asking what’s that about. Maybe if we’d have a Tom Cruise movie where they eat kiwis and make love on the beach, and then eat dal and discuss romantically, this might become a thing.

OTA: It also seems like many southern European vacation destinations are branding themselves in a somewhat tropical kitschy way. I'm thinking here of Split, Croatia, which I've been to many times. The main waterfront avenue is lined with palm trees. I looked into this a bit and apparently the first palm trees were planted in Split about a hundred years ago when tourism started picking up. This is fairly recent for the city, which was founded in the ruins of a Roman palace and thus quite old.

MR: Yes, this is interesting, actually, what you say. I think in many places where there are tourists in the south, they build also the imagery of the tropical through real things, like real palm trees. But it applies to all tourist destinations in the end, that they are already built for tourists. Venice built bridges for tourists. Originally you could not walk there, really. In Helsinki, we don’t spend any time in houses built with ice. We like warm houses, for a reason... But tourists have an ice bar and even a hotel made out of ice. We have never been inside of those.

OTA: What happens when elements of the tropical aesthetic are adopted by northern countries in their "serious" aesthetic? For example, when buildings are painted in bright colors and more “southern” greenery (like palm trees) are added to an urban space. Does this lessen the power of tropical kitsch as a symbol of escapism to a brighter, sunnier place? Or is it just a reminder of the real one?

I have not noticed much competition in this sense. It seems that tropical kitsch is still the thing in most places in the North. But of course, colorful buildings might become a hit any day – e.g., after the success of the Barbie movie? If our everyday becomes bright enough, though, I think it could destroy some of the pleasures now hidden in the use of tropical kitsch.

OTA: Similarly, do you think climate change might impact the tropical kitsch, especially in Europe? This summer has seen record temperatures and the last few winters seemed very mild. If the element of leaving northern climates to "escape" to warmer southern ones becomes less necessary, will the appeal of the tropical kitsch fade?

Well, this is hard to say, but for sure our idea of the warm south is changing... It is still countries like Italy which we think about, not the tropical ones (which might get even longer rainy seasons). How much will climate change affect the aesthetic utopia of tropical kitsch?

Often utopias survive, as they are anyway not about the real world. Look what happened with Marxism: the socialist system was in many ways worse than real capitalism, but people kept dreaming in the West. Maybe tropical kitsch becomes, in the end, with time, nostalgic? Culture changes in ways which are hard to predict!

As the biography illustrates, Vidal is an interesting case study in artistic fame. Scarcely a chapter goes by without some serious name-dropping:

• In Washington for FDR’s inauguration, an 8-year-old Vidal watched the inaugural parade from the window of the famous Willard Hotel. He has an interesting anecdote about this: apparently the loudspeakers were not synched correctly, causing FDR’s speech to echo around Washington.

• Visiting Los Angeles as an army cadet, 17-year old Vidal met Orson Welles (only two years after Citizen Kane), Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, and other future film stars.

• When Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, Vidal joined the spontaneous celebrations in Times Square, which were made eternally famous by a photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse.

• Throughout the 50s and 60s, he was periodically with the Kennedys, even campaigning (for senator) alongside JFK (for president) – at least until he had a falling out with Bobby Kennedy and was unofficially banished from the family’s activities.

• In Rome in the early 70s, he was with Federico Fellini, even managing to snag a 60-second monologue in Roma (1965).

• He was a regular guest on television, especially on talk shows like Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, and David Letterman.

• In Oxford, he dined with Isaiah Berlin, one of the most respected philosophers of the time.

• In 2006, he voiced himself in a Simpson episode, “true fame,” as Parini calls it in the biography.

Despite his lifelong proximity to fame, I doubt that most people today under the age of 40 have even heard of Gore Vidal. He wrote dozens of plays, essays, and books and appeared on television hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times, as well as acted in 7 feature films. Given his immense output, it’s surprising how little of it is remembered today.

If there is any piece of media that younger people know him from, it might be 1997’s Gattaca, which is – or used to be – an assigned movie in high school biology classes.

In Gattaca (1997), Vidal starred as the unapologetically elitist director of a space exploration corporation– an extremely well-cast role – alongside Uma Thurman, Jude Law, and Ethan Hawke.

Why Have We Forgotten Gore Vidal?

After having read his biography, a handful of his books, and listened to dozens of hours of interviews, I have a few ideas as to why Vidal has faded into relative literary obscurity.

The main reason, I think, is because he seemed more interested in playing a character – Gore Vidal, writer, bon vivant, and cultural commentator – than in creating lasting cultural works. The books, the essays, the storied American political heritage, the houses in Italy, the televised political debates – all seem like mere props in service of his chosen role.

Reading Empire of Self, one gets the impression that Vidal’s primary occupation was socialite and drinker, not writer, even though he was exceptionally hardworking and prolific. Indeed, even when Vidal is mentioned today, it’s rarely for his literary work, but rather for his personality or for his political speeches and debates.

The relative unpopularity of his work may also be because it’s somewhat difficult to categorize in toto. One minute, he’s writing erudite essays and novels about classical political figures in American, Greek, or Roman history. The next, he’s switched to campy novels on gender-bending Hollywood actresses or time-travelers that battle a hacker trying to erase Christianity.

In a publishing world that demands an author to have a singular style or “brand”, Vidal was too unpredictable to fit into any labels more specific than “social critic” or “writer.”

Nor was everyone happy about Vidal’s outspoken criticism of pretty much everyone, especially people that otherwise would have been on his side. Throughout his life, he had feuds with Truman Capote, Robert F. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, and Christopher Hitchens, to name only a few.

A more pessimistic – but probably realistic – reason for Vidal’s lack of widespread recognition may simply be because the public is no longer interested in what men-of-letters like Vidal think about literature or politics. It’s hard to imagine such a figure having an audience today in a world of memes, hot wings podcasts, and TikTok clips. Then again, Vidal was exceptionally good at creating short witticisms, so maybe he would have figured it out and gone viral.

Thankfully, Vidal seems to be undergoing something of a revival. A 2015 film dramatized his debate with Buckley and was adapted for the stage in 2021. The debate was even mentioned recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast, of all places. A biopic spearheaded by Kevin Spacey was also in production circa 2017, but seems to have been canceled permanently, for obvious reasons.

Where to Start with Vidal

If you are entirely unfamiliar with Vidal, I don’t actually recommend starting with his books, although Lincoln and Burr are the usual critics’ picks and Julian is an interesting historical “what-if.” His essays are also excellent too, although sometimes they get bogged down in then-relevant contemporary politics.

Instead, I think you can get a better sense of Vidal by watching one of his many interviews:

• This series of out-takes from the documentary The Great Depression is a good starting point. Vidal has some incredible behind-the-scenes stories about his grandfather (a famous senator) and FDR.

• Vidal was a guest on Charlie Rose’s show numerous times over the years and Gore Vidal: An Appreciation by Charlie Rose is a nice overview of Vidal’s life, along with some interview clips.

• Dick Cavett was a great interviewer and this hour-long episode with Vidal is entertaining.

It seems to me that we can divide the arts into two basic categories:

• Art that is experienced in a separated or isolated state. In this category, we can include art galleries, films in theaters, theatrical plays, reading a book alone, most video games, watching videos on your phone, listening to music via headphones, and so on. We can call these isolated arts, as they are separated from everyday life and are often (but not always) escapist in nature.

• Art that is integrated with the world and enhances life as it is being lived. In this category, we can include architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, gardening, street musicians, public transportation, urban design, and everyday objects like furniture or dinner utensils. We can call these integrated arts, as their artistic qualities are experienced as a part of other activities in life.

Of course, these aren’t strict definitions and the boundaries between the two categories are quite blurry. In general, however, I think it’s a useful distinction. Why is it useful?

Because at the moment, it seems that the “creative energy of civilization” is too focused on the isolated arts – and not enough on the integrated arts. In other words, more creative energy is put toward helping us escape from the real world, rather than enhancing it.

It feels like there is something fundamentally wrong about this situation. Wouldn’t the world be a more beautiful place if more of society’s aesthetic energy was put toward the real world, rather than imaginary ones? Instead of aestheticizing the lives of fictional characters in a Netflix series, aestheticizing our own lives?

Where Does the Money, Time, and Energy Go?

Consider how many resources are put toward a big-budget film or video game, both by its creators and by its consumers. Films routinely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with video games not far behind. A “low budget” movie is one made for a few million dollars.

From the consumer side, billions of people discuss and debate films, books, and video games, develop expert-like knowledge of their intricate plot details, and dedicate hours of their lives toward experiencing them, all entirely unpaid and without any coercion.

Now compare that to how little money, energy, and time is spent on the aesthetics of the typical housing development, city park, or piece of middle-class consumer furniture. The average new office or apartment building looks basically the same as any other, inside and out, whether you’re in Ohio, Poland, or India.

More tellingly, there is virtually zero cultural debate or interest in most integrated arts when compared to popular TV shows, films, or video games. Imagine the general public caring about the aesthetics of park design or the architecture of subway stations as much as the Barbie movie or the last season of Succession. It seems absurd, yet people in the past did care about such things passionately.

While the hunger for new video games, television series, and other escapist media seems insatiable, we seem to have quietly accepted that the actual physical spaces we live and work in everyday will never change from a “basic box” model. The city of the future we’re building isn’t a sci-fi metropolis filled with flying cars and architecturally innovative skyscrapers; it’s an endless row of glass box buildings with an LCD screen – eventually replaced by a pair of VR goggles – for every resident.

Locked Away

Another consequence of the focus on isolated arts is that it results in a large portion of artistic works remaining behind closed doors: in private collections of billionaires, dormant and zombie-like in freeport zones, or simply in the storage basements of museums, which only display a small percentage of all the works they own.

While you could blame this situation on wealthy collectors and limited museum budgets, I think the issue is actually much deeper and related to this focus on isolated arts.

The Italian Renaissance provides a good counter-example of an alternative approach. While there were certainly plenty of private works created by artists during the Renaissance, there was more of a balance between isolation and integration. A significant portion of artistic output was in the public sphere: murals and sculptures were put in churches and town squares, and the design of civic buildings was the subject of intense public debate.

Today, if a wealthy benefactor wanted to emulate a Renaissance patron and fund an architect or artist to create a new town square or city park, it’s unclear how he or she would even go about doing so. There don’t appear to be any financial instruments specifically designed for rewarding investors that fund integrated artworks. The design of the public space would almost certainly be watered down and subject to various governmental councils and community groups. Hostile attitudes toward the wealthy would probably result in the park being vandalized, if it were actually built.

Consequently, it is much easier and more creatively rewarding to instead spend a few million on a rare painting or backing a film project. Put simply, there are very little incentives for the wealthy to fund integrated arts.

Part 2: How We Got Here

How did this focus on isolated arts happen? It is a huge topic, involving technology corporations, arts education, individualism, consumer agency, private property, and even the concept of capital-A Art itself.

In the next post in this series, I’ll explore some of these reasons. In the third post, I’ll suggest some potential solutions.

At a glance, they seem like posters for missing people. Take a closer look, however, and you quickly realize that they are actually memorial posters of the (not so recently) deceased.

In Bulgaria (and apparently in neighboring Serbia, as well) it is common for families to put up these posters, called “necrologs”, to commemorate passed loved ones. The posters contain a brief biography, information on the funeral arrangements, and brief lines of poetry or other kind words about the deceased.

As you can tell by my photos above, many of the posters have been there for years. However, it is a common practice to replace the posters when they get too weathered. Sometimes, the newer posters are simply placed next to the older ones.

The new versions often have a slightly different design, as well as updated information: the 8 and 9 indicate how many years have passed since the person died. For some reason, the newer one (on the right) is more water damaged.

Image from NeverendingEverywhere.WordPress.com

These posters made me wonder about the ways in which we architecturally memorialize the dead in public spaces. After all, some of the most famous artworks in the world are funerary in nature, including the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and the Terracotta Army, to name but a few.

The necrologs were a little too omnipresent for me, although Bulgarians say that they aren’t as ominous as they seem to foreigners. To quote one of the few online posts in English on the topic:

The pervasiveness of necrologs makes for an interesting cultural relationship with death and grieving. When I was younger I found them to be a saddening sight, sort of a constant reminder of death. As an adult I am not affected in the same way – these necrologs as we call them are a tribute, a sharing of grief, a way to preserve someone’s memory. They are not joyous in the tradition of the Day of the Dead, but they are also not exceptionally sad. The words from relatives and families are often beautiful, a heartfelt expression of the value that the person brought to their lives. They remind us of the people we have lost, and they ensure that a person is remembered in their neighborhood for many years after their passing.
Stoytcho Marinov Stoytchev

What I do like about the necrologs is how they are an avatar, or representation, of the “real” memorial, i.e., the gravestone in a cemetery. They function remotely as a society-wide memory object of the deceased, and this gives them more collective cultural power than mere photos in private homes. This also allows for memorials without the gloominess and heaviness – not to mention the physical space requirements – of traditional cemeteries.

The future of urban cemeteries has been something of a hot topic in the last few decades, as the combined trends of desire for public green space and increased secularity (or to use a term by the philosophy Charles Taylor, immanence, defined as “focused on this world and not the next”) have come up against the simple fact that many desirable green areas in city centers are cemeteries.

While I certainly don’t want to remove historical cemeteries and replace them with bland condos, there is something odd about the fact that so much beautiful land is taken by dead people, the majority of which are from centuries ago – making such cemeteries primarily into tourist attractions – like the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris or Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City – and not as places for the living to mourn the dead.

At the same time, contemporary Western culture is already extremely avoidant when it comes to the topic of death, so I’m not sure that further isolating memories of the dead is a healthy solution. This may already be a foregone conclusion, however, as most American cities (and most cities built recently) already put their cemeteries on the city outskirts. Adding to that is the increased popularity of cremation, which mostly negates the need for a cemetery.

A better solution for remembering the dead, I think, would be a time-based memorial along the lines of the Bulgarian necrologs. It could work like this: one day per month, a designated person hangs up the posters for a single day, then takes them down that night. Posters could also be replaced by sculptures or another art form.

Although it might not be possible now, in the future this could be a virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experience. I am imagining a hologram that shows the deceased person going about their day in the spaces in which they lived. Again, it might be too much to see everyday, but once a week or once a month seems ideal. Alternatively, it could be activated at any time by pressing a button on a nearby building.

This approach would allow for a consistent society-wide reminder of the deceased, without being omnipresent, as in the necrologs, or overbearing, as in graveyards.

The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, Giovanni di Paolo

David Fenner is Professor of Philosophy and Art at the University of North Florida. With Ethan Fenner, he is co-author of the forthcoming book The Art and Philosophy of the Garden (Oxford University Press).

In the post below, we discuss how the Garden of Eden became so influential on real-world gardens, while not truly being a garden. You can read the full paper, The Aesthetic Impact of the Garden of Eden, at Contemporary Aesthetics.

On the Arts: In your paper, you discuss how the Garden of Eden has been extremely influential on the form of real gardens throughout history. Yet the Garden of Eden cannot be considered a “true” garden. Why is that?

David Fenner: Nature is always changing – sprouting, growing, flowering, fruiting, fading, dying, evolving – through the years, through the seasons, and sometimes even more frequently. While one can argue from some parts of the Genesis text that the Garden of Eden changed, too, if it was in a constant state of perfection – as the overall story, including the expulsion, suggests – then it could not have changed much if at all. So: not a true garden if we understand gardens to be continuous with, or incorporative of, nature.

OTA: Could you talk more about the dynamism of gardens, especially compared to other art forms?

DF: There are interesting parallels between gardens and dynamic art forms – there are articles devoted to understanding how gardens are like music, performance, literature, and film.  But the key difference is in how these are experienced.  If I go to a film, I will be in the theater for the start of the film and leave after the film is done.  And if I go back to watch this same film, my experience of it – with minor variation that depends on how I’m feeling that day, who’s sitting around me, etc. – will be very much like it was on the first viewing. 

An experience of a garden does not begin and end with the beginning and ending of the garden.  We must frame the time we spend in that garden; we set the temporal boundaries of that experience, the garden doesn’t. Also, each time I visit a garden – especially if those visits are spaced out in time (so to speak) – the garden will be different, because of nature always being in a state of change. 

Finally, if I am experiencing a film, what I see and what I hear are largely prescribed by the film – presumably by the director’s choices – but in a garden I choose what to pay attention to:  a whole vista, one flower, one bed, a bird singing, the conversation of other visitors.  So in all these ways, experiencing a garden is much more dependent on choices I make as the subject or “audience-member.” 

Adam and Eve Driven From Paradise by James Tissot

OTA: So, why can’t the Garden of Eden be considered dynamic?

DF: It could be, but that would radically undercut the moral of the story, I think.  Adam and Eve, in the story, disobey God and are expelled – specifically from their access to the Tree of Life.  They are sent away to till the soil and sweat a lot.  For the story to function optimally as a morality tale, the punishment must be felt to be severe.  Moving from a garden that needs tending to an agricultural area that needs tending is not much of a stretch – one could argue that with modern agricultural processes, it takes more work to maintain a standard garden.  But being kicked out of paradise is a big deal – but only if paradise really is paradise, a perfect place. 

OTA: What role does the desert play in the idealization of the garden? Traditionally, a garden was an enclosed space, which seems similar to the idea of the Garden of Eden as a sacred space separated from the wider, impure world. And thus the expulsion from the garden is a bigger deal than if it were simply in a deciduous forest. Even the word paradise itself comes from this type of garden in ancient Persia, correct?

DF: Exactly. Gardens may have originally developed as enclosures to keep plants safe from desert winds.  Nowadays we might think an enclosure necessary to keep out foraging animals and perhaps even foraging humans, but there’s also the sense that a garden should be felt to be a safe place – nature made safe – and a wall helps with that. The “enclosed garden” has a Latin name:  hortus conclusus, and if you look up “garden” in any dictionary, it likely will reference enclosure. 

DF: However, if we think about the Garden of Versailles – designed by André Le Nôtre – or any of the great British estate landscapes designed by Capability Brown – or even the standard American suburban front yard, obvious enclosure is the last thing that’s wanted.  Capability Brown actually hid his walls – used to keep livestock from getting too close to the house – by burying them so, from the house, they were invisible.  Every garden must have a boundary – because it is a place, and if the place is not the universe, then it has a boundary – but the hortus conclusus, of which the Garden of Eden is definitely a member, is no longer the norm.

OTA: Even though the Garden of Eden has served as inspiration for real gardens, you argue that it is better understood itself as a literary concept in a morality tale. Could you explain that?

DF: In both the Islamic and Jewish (and so also Christian) scriptures, the story of the creation of the world includes the placement of the first human/humans in an idealized natural state, and that perfect nature-focused place is a garden.  It is expulsion from paradise that demonstrates not only the penalty of not obeying God, but also the result of exercise of free will and, in some traditions, the initiation of the depraved state of humans after the expulsion – what St. Augustine called original sin. 

Whether Eden existed as a real place – and if you follow the description of its location in Genesis, it is very difficult to locate it as a real place – the story of Eden is a powerful morality tale about the relationship of humans to the divine, from the point of view of the Abrahamic monotheisms. 

OTA: Whether the garden of Eden was truly a garden or not, it has influenced more than any other single garden. You call this Edenic culture. Could you give us a few examples of this influence; e.g., Islamic gardens?

DF: You got one of the best examples – the Persian garden (the most iconic type called a chahar bagh) evolved into the Islamic garden, an idealization of the Garden of Eden, with four channels of water dividing up garden quadrants, each quadrant usually focused on a central tree.  The chahar bagh is a representation of paradise.  It has been observed that every botanical garden is a version of the Garden of Eden as it attempts to capture the full range of diversity of plant life on the planet. 

Layout of the Charbagh at the Tomb of Jahangir in Lahore, Pakistan.

OTA: In a broader sense, what do gardens represent – in Abrahamic religions and in other traditions?

DF: The garden is a symbol of the place where the physical world and the divine world meet. This is not just true of those places where Abrahamic monotheism took hold, but it is true of ancient Mesopotamia as we see in the Gilgamesh Epic, in the funerary practices and tombs of ancient Egypt, in the Homeric poems of ancient Greece, and in ancient China as gardens typically embodied mythological themes focused on the intersection of the divine and nature.

If the garden functions as a symbol of paradise, no matter the tradition, there must be something that is fundamentally stable about it. This is especially true for the Abrahamic monotheistic cultures where God must be always perfect in all respects. Yet gardens, as amalgams of nature and design, are subject to the many changes that all nature is subject to. It is through gardening practice that we work against the devolution of the garden back to a wild space. It is through our efforts in tending gardens that we actively seek to keep gardens as places of the immutable perfection that, at least in monotheism, we associate with the divine.

So the garden presents a paradox – a place of perfection, even transcendent perfection, but a place that is constantly working, because nature changes, against maintaining the order and design we, as gardeners, have imposed upon it and keep imposing upon it. I think it is this paradox that for many is the reason they become gardeners – it is an aesthetic form whose perfection is fleeting without the application of unwavering and constant creative activity.

A big thank you again to Professor Fenner for discussing his work with On the Arts. You can read the full paper, The Aesthetic Impact of the Garden of Eden, at Contemporary Aesthetics.

Visit Rome today and you’ll see the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and dozens of other Ancient Roman buildings. But the atmosphere is not the same. The buildings are mere relics, physical remains of days gone by.

When we look at them today, we aren’t really seeing what the Romans saw. For the Romans, these buildings were contemporary expressions of engineering expertise and cultural power, not ruins of a past civilization. And of course, the Colosseum wasn’t surrounded by tour buses, and the Pantheon wasn’t across from a giant advertisement for McDonalds.

Not so for the sea. Stand on an empty beach and cover your entire vision with the water. Now imagine that a ancient Roman ship is over the horizon, just out of sight. A person standing in the same spot, two thousand years ago, would see nearly the exact same image as you are seeing now. The color might be slightly different and the concept of colors themselves might vary, but for the most part, its appearance hasn’t changed.

The sea is a kind of timeless space, a visual image which stays the same as the world around it changes. Few other places remain so static: bridges are built over rivers, green hillsides are deforested, islands become inhabited, and empty plains are filled in with houses. Mountains are perhaps the only natural phenomenon similar to the sea, with many (like Mount Fuji in Japan) exerting a permanent influence on their surrounding cultures.

The sea has of course been a cultural symbol for thousands of years. It has represented nearly everything: dangerous journeys, the origin of life, freedom, power, fearsome monsters, the Jungian collective unconscious, and hundreds of other things.

Yet I couldn’t find any reference to the idea that the view of the sea has been largely unchanged through the millennia – and what aesthetic significance this has, if any.

When I was taking the photo above, a thought came into my head: thousands of years ago, someone stood on this beach and saw this exact view. That alone made me feel more connected to the past than any tourist-optimized ancient monument ever has.

It made me wonder about the future of tourism and how historical places could be more “alive” for tourists without resorting to actors in costumes. VR/AR might be a solution, especially if it reframes the tourist experience to be more like a film or theatrical performance and less like a museum.

Istanbul has a lot of mosques. At last count, nearly 3,000.

When tourists visit the city, they tend to focus on the famous names: the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Süleymaniye Mosque, or the impressively modern Çamlica Mosque. During a recent trip to Istanbul, however, a lesser-known mosque turned out to be my favorite.

Crouching in the shadows of the much larger Süleymaniye Mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque is like a cave filled with hidden treasure. Built by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for the extremely influential – and somewhat controversial – Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, the mosque is unique in a number of ways.

Unlike the better-known mosques in Istanbul, it isn’t flanked by acres of fountains, flowers, and gardens. Nor does it have grand views of the Bosphorus or of the city itself.

Instead, it’s built on top of a shopping arcade at the edge of a street market. The entrance, a pair of small doorways nestled between a kebab stand and a public restroom, is easy to miss. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d probably never find it.

Through the doorways and up the narrow staircase, you arrive in the mosque’s courtyard. The sensation is that you’ve been transported to an urban oasis. Istanbul’s car traffic, notoriously busy and loud, is only about 100 feet away. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of the bazaar are even closer. And yet the sahn, or entrance courtyard, is quiet and mostly empty.

What makes the mosque truly special, however, isn’t simply that it’s hidden. It is the balance between its understated view from the street and an extravagant, richly adorned interior, which is covered in thousands of colorful İznik tiles.

İznik tiles, as the name suggests, come from a town called İznik in western Turkey. Predominately white and blue, the tiles have images of flowers and Arabic sentences from the Qur'an and from hadith, which are records of Muhammad’s life.

Iznik pottery and tiles were used extensively by the Ottomans, especially in religious and political architecture like the Topkapı Palace, the center of government from the 1460s to 1856.

The Rüstem Pasha Mosque is a prime example, with over 2,300 tiles containing 80 different patterns, each with its own specific purpose. To learn more about them, I bought a small book from the mosque’s caretaker, which exhaustively details the variety of motifs used and their symbolic meaning:

While the Rüstem Pasha Mosque lacks the gravitas and sheer scale of the Hagia Sofia or the Süleymaniye Mosque, its human scale and hidden nature lends it a certain magic that is missing in the more monumental structures.

Wabi-sabi is one of those concepts that seems to mean just about everything. In the West, it seems to be used to refer to anything that seems “traditional” in Japanese art and architecture. This, as you can probably guess, is not an accurate definition.

But what does wabi-sabi actually mean? In this post, I’ll briefly attempt to define it by looking at the history of the concept. The short version is this: wabi-sabi is an idea in Japanese aesthetics that focuses on impermanence and imperfection.

Before jumping into a longer definition of wabi-sabi, however, there are three things to keep in mind:

The first is that wabi-sabi, like many other terms in Japanese aesthetics, does not have an extremely specific, exclusionary definition. To quote the introduction of Donald Keene's A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (bold emphasis mine):

In writing about traditional Asian aesthetics, the conventions of a Western discourse—order, logical progression, symmetry—impose upon the subject an aspect that does not belong to it. Among other ideas, Eastern aesthetics suggests that ordered structure contrives, that logical exposition falsifies, and that linear, consecutive argument eventually limits.

As the aesthetician Itoh Teiji has stated regarding the difficulties that Japanese experience in defining aesthetics: “The dilemma we face is that our grasp is intuitive and perceptual rather than rational and logical.” Aesthetic enjoyment recognizes artistic patterns, but such patterns cannot be too rigid or too circumscribed.

Most likely to succeed in defining Japanese aesthetics is a net of associations composed of listings or jottings, connected intuitively, that fills in a background and renders the subject visible. Hence the Japanese uses for juxtaposition, for assembling, for bricolage.

So, one should be careful not to focus too much on the idea that "wabi-sabi is this specific idea and not something else." It is not a formal, structured definition in the way mimesis or representation are.

Instead, the subject of Japanese aesthetics is more like a net, with individual concepts like wabi or sabi overlapping with each other and with other concepts like miyabi, furyu, or yūgen. Also, the influence of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto cannot easily be separated from “purely artistic” topics, just as the influence of Christianity cannot be easily separated from Italian Renaissance art.

The second thing to note about wabi-sabi is that, contrary to many blog posts on the Internet, it is not the "only" aesthetic mentality of contemporary Japan. While a visitor to Japan in 2023 will notice some things influenced by wabi-sabi, he will probably notice kawaii or Western-influenced objects more. Like any other country, Japan has a rich history of competing ideas that have manifested themselves in various ways in modern culture.

Wabi-sabi is generally considered to be more representative of traditional, not contemporary, Japanese art and aesthetics. However, it is still very much an influence on Japanese culture, if a more subtle one.

Finally, the third thing to note is that wabi and sabi are actually different concepts that are often paired together, as Keene suggests, because “…the accidental alliteration of the words suggests a fruitful affinity. And the two are related, to be sure, both in their affinity and in their histories.”

Now let’s look at what wabi and sabi really mean.

Wabi

In one sentence, wabi means an understated beauty, a rustic simplicity, or an austere, noble poverty – but aesthetically, not politically, focused. The word comes from the verb wabu (to fade, dwindle). Its adjectival form wabishi (forsaken, deserted) originally had an unpleasant meaning, but by the Kamakura Period (1185–1333), it began to have a more positive connotation.

D. T. Suzuki, the well-known 20th-century Zen scholar and author, described wabi as:

…an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty… [wabi means] to be satisfied with a little hut, like the log cabin of Thoreau . . . with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall.

The pursuer of wabi isn’t interested in fame, wealth, power, abundance, opulence, or popularity. Instead, he seeks an elegant simplicity, typically in natural surroundings. He doesn’t create objects with expensive, rare metals, instead using simpler, organic materials. Wabi isn’t about asceticism or glorifying poverty, however. The idea is that less is more sophisticated, not that objects themselves are to be despised.

In art and architecture, wabi is best exemplified by the tea house, which we will discuss a bit later. Other wabi-influenced items are the dry rock garden and pottery, often with kintsugi golden repair joinery.

In the West, we don’t have the same historical concept of wabi, but the philosophy of Thoreau’s Walden or later Simple Living Movements might be comparable examples.

Wabi would also play a key role in the Tea Ceremony, but more on that later. First, let’s look at sabi.

Sabi

In one sentence, sabi means having a rustic patina and showing the marks of age – all with a hint of solitude. Originally, the word had the negative meaning of “desolate.” But over time, it was used to describe something that has aged well and acquired a beautiful patina.

The word itself has many sources:

• sabu, a verb meaning “to wane”

• susabi, a noun which can mean “desolation”

• sabiteru, “to become rusty,” and thus “to become old”

• sabishi, an adjective which means “lonely”

• another word that is also pronounced "sabi" means “rust”

In his essay In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki discusses the appeal of sabi in traditional Japanese culture:

There is also a hint of solitude, loneliness, and melancholy in sabi. Basho (1644-1694), the most famous haiku poet, was a key figure in modernizing the “positive” nature of sabi. In his haikus, he used sabi to emphasize the tranquility or peace that results from loneliness.

A Western example of sabi might be the continued appeal of Urbex (Urban Exploration) photos, which depict the beauty of abandoned structures. There is also a Japanese equivalent of Urbex called Haikyo. The Statue of Liberty also has a nice sabi patina to it, as the original copper color has oxidized into its current grayish-green color.

An episode from history perhaps best explains sabi. In 1950, a Buddhist acolyte, disturbed by the immense beauty of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, lit it on fire, burning it to the ground. An exact replica was put up on the same site five years later. In the 1980s, thanks to Japan’s thriving economy, the building was covered entirely in gold leaf – as the original creator had intended.

Upon seeing the new structure, many residents of Kyoto complained that it would take many years for the building to re-acquire the sabi that had made the old version so beautiful.

But what about the Tea Ceremony?

The Tea Ceremony

If you read about the history of wabi-sabi, you’ll probably see the Japanese Tea Ceremony mentioned as exemplary of the concept. This is essentially true; although there are hints of wabi and sabi in earlier centuries (especially in poetry), it’s ultimately the Tea Ceremony (known as sadō/chadō 'The Way of Tea') that tied wabi and sabi to each other and more broadly to Zen Buddhism.

Tea itself first came to Japan in the 800s, brought by a Buddhist monk returning from China. By the 1200s, tea had become a status symbol among the upper classes. A few centuries later, inspired by his studies of Zen Buddhism, Murata Jukō introduced many of the aesthetic and philosophical ideas of the tea ceremony. These included the use of rustic and imperfect Japanese tea utensils (as opposed to only using the perfect, intricate Chinese designs), the importance of Buddhist ethical concepts, and the preference for smaller teahouses, typically only 4.5 tatami mats (7.4 m²; 80 sq. ft.)

A few generations later, Sen no Rikyū further developed and codified these ideas (which were very influenced by wabi and sabi) while working as the tea master to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a feudal lord and de-facto ruler of Japan.

To summarize a very long story, the Tea Ceremony became intimately linked with Japanese politics and later developed into various schools that exist to this day. Many of these continued the wabi-sabi ideals of Rikyū, while others went in different directions.