Today, we speak of the SUBLIME. The north star; the all-encompassing gravity of the final word in the name Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. It is the compass that orients us as human beings and what we aim to create through an intentional practice of artful design — “a deeply human aesthetic experience.” This is Definition 1.2, notably the only Definition in a sea of Principles and one Meta-Principle raft. Perhaps, the singular Definition lighthouse. Because — upon reading it, I felt something indescribable. I felt seen.

It has felt as though in the years of my life, I have wordlessly been longing and striving for an ungraspable, tender world. Unable to take form, and oh man, especially not function. In this familiar tangible surrounding reality of manufactured products, optimized life paths, and systems preying on people’s identities as consumable goods, the sublime came to me in bubbles. Imperceptibly embraced in its ephemeral membrane, feeling like I could see all the colors of the world, the joyous swirls ends-in-themselves, for the first time.

But as an existent being, I feel as though everything I do is tremendously clunky. The sounds I make in an arbitrary language crudely bucketing and flattening the very essence of “the thing”. The lines I trace on tree pulp and at times pixels that will never arrive at the immaculate “idea” they were born from. The words, now amusingly a mix of the meaning-buckets and the pixels, I patter on a commercial keyboard. The art I make as a mix of self-satisfaction and a pursuit of recreating fleeting sensations of the sublime.

Chapter 1 has most urgently put into form — with far greater variety of phrases than I could conceive — an emergent orientation toward the sublime. These words in whizbang comic book font held up a mirror to my face in an encounter with myself, and told me that “we are here, and it is now.” The present is the only medium in which the sublime can be glimpsed. I am grateful for everything — my mouthless screaming, the moments I forget I exist at all. And I am ready to do something.

The sublime is the “eye of the hurricane”. The serene center around which the architectures of function and whirlpools of experience crash together anew in waves that have never existed before — and will never exist again. I will not be able to reach it like a promised destination. But what I can do is to enable for others an experience infused with my creative intent in function and form — a transcendent unity.

You know what they say. If you want bubbles for everyone, make a bubble blower —
or whatever it may be.

Tree next to Green Library Coupa next to Meyer Green

The setting sunlight hitting the ridges of its trunk first struck me. From a Coupa chair, the tree was directly in my line of sight. The very air was beautiful because the tree was there. The tree is there because someone decided to have it there, for the very functional-aesthetic reason I was experiencing. <Because these days, trees need permission to exist.> The human landscaper-denoted function of the tree — to make the space beautiful, green, breathing, encompassed — feels inseparable from the aesthetic experienced by those in its presence. In a rare but inevitable way when it comes to the irreplicable ways leaves breathe in the wind, it was the first thing I could truly say, for me, is beautiful.

Lily of the valley lamp

Shortly after I moved into my apartment last Saturday, I purchased a lily of the valley lamp with a whole five lampshades for my bedside table. Prior to my discovery of it, I only had a function in mind — to have ambient lighting in my room. Then, my curiosity and the preferences I have from the life I have lived fused with the intended function — what if it was a flower lamp? In its form that expressed the function with specificity, I stumbled upon something I would call beautiful. I find a trace of the sublime in the spark of joy you witness when you hit the two obtuse stones of function and aesthetic together. A small quintessence of someone’s artful design, experienced by me.

Zuihitsu

My very selection of this third design was of my own design. Cohesion draws me, just as humans are drawn toward narratives of connected, flowing ideas. The two previous designs I naturally found beautiful were a grand, towering tree and a smaller, radiant flower. I wanted to find something about the most primitive plant — a seed, the origin of all plants — beautiful, when I remembered the Dandelion Zuihitsu. The zuihitsu poetic form means “following the brush.” The style of writing cannot be captured as one particular verse or rhyme scheme, but rather the feeling it evokes in the reader in the depths of the poem: spontaneous, as if we were following the poet’s flow of thought, as if we were a dandelion seed willingly surrendering to a “lifting of the self”. Letting ourselves be taken by what is around us, what we are very much a part of — in fact, the very essence of defining what it is. In a sense, the function of a zuihitsu is defined by its aesthetic — which I find lucidly reflective of Artful Design.

An unrelated, highly related dandelion installation (because I made it)

Guerrilla

bubble.ck

//set orbit camera as main camera
//click-drag to orbit, scroll to zoom
GOrbitCamera cam => GG.scene().camera;
cam.posZ(4);
cam.viewSize(2);

//something shiny.. wanted transparency but it's tough
//to get bubble-like texture
PBRMaterial gloss;
gloss.color(Color.WHITE * 5);
gloss.metallic(0.9);
gloss.roughness(0.1);

//had to use SphereGeo to apply gloss?
SphereGeometry bub;
GMesh mesh(bub, gloss) --> GG.scene();

//black bubble
GSphere bbub --> GG.scene();
bbub.color(Color.BLACK + @(.03,.03,.03));
bbub.pos(@(3.5, 0));
5 => bbub.sca;

//white bubble
GSphere wbub --> GG.scene();
wbub.color(Color.WHITE);
wbub.pos(@(-1.3, 0));
0.2 => wbub.sca;

//space-like vibes
Gain bus => NRev rev => dac;
rev.mix(0.6);
bus.gain(.3);

fun void bubPulse(Envelope env, float hz) {
    //graphics loop
    while (true) {
        if (hz == 104) { //big bub
            5 + env.value() * .4 => bbub.sca;
        }
        
        if (hz == 245) { //med bub
            1 + env.value() * .2 => mesh.sca;
        }
        
        if (hz == 622) { //small bub
            0.2 + env.value() * .05 => wbub.sca;
        }
        
        GG.nextFrame() => now;
    }
}

fun void bubSound(float hz, dur note_dur, dur loop_dur, dur offset) {
    SinOsc osc => Envelope env => bus; //dac
    hz => osc.freq;
    
    note_dur / 2 => env.duration;
    offset => now;
    
    spork ~ bubPulse(env, hz);
    
    //audio loop
    while (true) {
        env.keyOn();
        note_dur / 2 => now;
        env.keyOff();
        note_dur / 2 => now;
 
        loop_dur - note_dur => now; //wait for remainder of loop
    }
}

spork ~ bubSound(104, 2.6::second, 3.9::second, 2.1::second); //big bub
spork ~ bubSound(245, 4.1::second, 6.8::second, 4.1::second); //med bub
spork ~ bubSound(622, 1.1::second, 4.7::second, .8::second); //small bub

eon => now;