Aesthetics

I am trying to define a sort of workable set of definition for aesthetic, since I believe the Aesthetics Wiki, while certainly a fun resource, has muddled things quite a bit. I'm gonna do this with two broad categorizations: consumer aesthetics (as very clearly defined by CARI) and online subcultural aesthetics. To illustrate these categories, I will pick a few of the ones that speak to me.

Consumer aesthetics

Utopian Scholastic

Utopian Scholastic is a term that originates from the Facebook group Utopian Scholastic Designs from a pre-9/11 World to describe a prevalent aesthetic that was prevalent in the late 80s and 90s. A lot of the educational media I enjoyed made heavy use of this aesthetic, and the sort of optimistic embrace of the Fukayaman “end of history” is pretty fundamental to who I am as a person today.

I very much enjoy modern-day evocations of this aesthetic (especially music-wise), though I would distinguish those as encartacore (an already established term).

Global Village Coffeehouse

While a very different style, the very notion of our interconnected modern world creating a global village sits in the same headspace as the end of history for me.

I strongly remember its digital counterpart. Some of the clip-art that came with Microsoft Office and the Curlz MT typeface, for example.

Frutiger Aero

I fondly remember the skeuomorphic design and the soothing gloss textures. But this is definitely the one aesthetic that suffers the most from the unclear definitions. Aesthetics Wiki and other online communities have attached much more intentionality to this aesthetic than it actually had, and they subdivided it accordingly to an unworkable degree. They're also pulling very different consumer aesthetic trends into its orbit.

Online subcultural aesthetics

The big thing here is that these are not corporate and are primarily a participatory thing. It's about remixing music, cobbling together different bits of media as a sort of Pinterest moodboard to evoke a sort of vibe, …

Vaporwave and adjacent

Seapunk

Miscellaneous

To be explore in more depth later on: