Understanding Aesthetics with CARI Institute
As styles warp, change, dissolve after being nothing but a microtrend or blossom into culture-dominating aesthetics they tell us infinite amounts about ourselves. We always wonder how aesthetic ‘moments’ come to be, and who identifies them, the CARI Institute answered both of those questions for us.
Starting as all good things did – on the internet – CARI (or the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute) has spent the last decade identifying, recording and categorising consumer aesthetics. And compiling an extensive online library for researchers to explore and identify moments in time that they may remember and never have known a name for before.
Here’s how our conversation went down with the institute’s founders Evan and Sofi. (mentioned aesthetic categories are linked, so have a click through to envision all the aesthetics we reference!)
Above: Examples of Y2K Millennium collages & Exploration.
Evan:
“we’re a group of, design researchers and archivists, that came together organically through a common interest. The interest of discovering, categorising and better understanding design. We try to focus on a later time period than what's already been well researched. We don't go into mid-century modern and Art Deco 'cause those have been covered by other entities and people. So we focus more on where we felt there was a huge gap.. which is around the '70s to the present.
I do a ton of work scanning physical materials, collecting those, putting them online, trying to fill in a lot of gaps that exist online in terms of design examples. We try to focus on all the different design fields that we can, like fashion or industrial design, architecture, interiors, graphic design, anything, everything.
Our mission is to sort of piece this all back together so we can give social, cultural, economic context for why these aesthetics arose and, became popular when they did, then how they became oversaturated or reacted against.”
Sofi:
“I would also like to add that we also work towards the theoretical development of consumer aesthetics as field of research. There is actually no real, comprehensive study of consumer aesthetics, there have been some in the past but nothing to the scale we are working on. Like Evan said we also look into music, cinematography, cinema, even cuisine!
We also look at the theoretical foundations of what makes an aesthetic an aesthetic, and why is it different from, for example, internet aesthetics like cottage core, or national aesthetics.”
The Grey:
“Ok, question – when you say ‘consumer aesthetic’ how do you define what that is?”
Sofi:
“Oh this is actually what my doctorate is going to be about. . So, basically, it’s a designed experience, which means it could be anything that appeals to the senses, and constitutes a multi-modal culture. So not just visual culture, but many different types of culture being unified by one theme. And growing to the point where it becomes appropriated by capital – so it becomes a consumer-wide phenomenon.”
The Grey:
“Got you. So how did you begin to research these kind of dominating aesthetics?”
Evan:
“I guess on my side of it I became really interested in the Vaporwave scene of music and art in the pretty early 2010s. I found it and then I got just really, really interested in why that emerged and like what it was, the imagery and iconography and the music and everything, I just became really fascinated with like kind of dissecting that.
I’d always had an interest in futurism since I was a kid, especially around the turn of the millennium, and I started thinking ‘what would vaporwave look like around the turn of the millennium?’ After grad school I spent a whole summer putting together this giant library of like 800 images, showing an idea of millennium futurism.
I shared it to reddit and it snowballed from there. I made a little Facebook group for Y2K aesthetics, which kept ballooning – other groups spawned off it and people were joining who were interested in doing some archival digging. We spread to Twitter and Tumblr before creating our centralised website. And that’s kind of where we’re at now, we work on a volunteer basis so people come in and out, working on what they’re particularly fascinated by.”
Above, examples of Vapourware aesthetics.
The Grey:
“Sounds like the internet doing its job – being a magical place to find people with shared interests!”
Sofi:
“It was! There is an element that Evan skipped over – I used to live in Seattle, and one day I found out he was also living there at the time, we met up and as we were walking home it turned out that we were neighbours! After a while we just hung out every week to walk about and watch what we called ‘bad McBling comedies.’
My work now is almost exclusively with Frutiger Aero and adjacent aesthetics. I studies photography at a commercial trade school, then we took a class including graphic design and I thought ‘wow, why is everyone doing this lame design?!” Like it was the same as everyone else and they didn’t realise they were just responding to it.
I was also really inspired by naive art movements, and the way technology can shape the way people produce and consume naïve art and media, it led me to doing field work in the suburbs and I just started noticing patterns – all these little things that eventually became Frutiger Aero. I was also doing fieldwork on Asian stock photo sites, and experimenting creating my own aesthetics – and I came across Evan’s Y2K group…Together we actually started looking forwards instead of backward because he discovered Global Village Coffeehouse. He basically showed up to my apartment with a pile of books like “Holy shit, I found a new aesthetic.”
Above, visual examples of discussed aesthetics. Row 1: Global Village Coffee House, Row 2: Bad McBling 2000s movies, Row 3: Frutiger Aero.
Evan:
“I remember it was the most terrible aesthetic I’d ever seen, I think I said ‘this is a Starbucks Panera Bread aesthetic.” At that time I was so hyper-focused on Y2K, I’d go to the Seattle Central Library every day after work, they have the most amazing magazine and design book collection I’ve ever seen. I would go through these old design magazines from the '90s being like...’Oh, I'm so excited. There's gonna be so much Y2K in here, like, all this cool futurism. Like, I'm sure it's here.’ And there was nothing, it was all Global Village Coffeehouse! But I was also excited to find it, there was that feeling of ‘of course, I’ve seen this!’”
Sofi:
“But this is a good point, one of the reasons for CARI if that this stuff wasn’t online. They were in graphic design and art from the time and no one was posting them.”
Evan:
“When you do assemble it though you can see where it comes from and the 90s nostalgia, like for example you can look at the Rugrats and you can tell that was made by someone who lived through Global Village Coffeehouse.”
The Grey:
“Ok so my next question links to this, 'cause, to me at least, aesthetics can have quite a lot of overlap and just be quite hard to pin down and define. So are there any processes or definitions you used to actually break them into these specific categories?”
Sofi:
“A lot of us came from the, the meme subculture of Facebook, which was called Weird Facebook at the time. There was a lot of aesthetic groups there already. The thing that was different about Y2K was that it was actually a serious cataloguing effort. There were other ones like ‘Subtle Asian Traits’ which was basically Asian diaspora aesthetics, or there were some political aesthetics, healthcare aesthetics, corporate aesthetics.. they were kind of all over the place.
So, what I do personally is I always look back to see the intention of the work. I might see things have a similar appearance but then I ask what’s the ideology behind it. Because oftentimes when something has an appearance, there's a reason for it. For example, if you see a clothing commercial a pretty girl with an aura around her, that clothing stops being just about the clothing. It's about how wearing that clothes will make you modern, futuristic, eco or whatever.”
Evan:
“Yeah, it feels like what, some of the stuff that we're doing is, is reverse engineering – we’re figuring out what corporations were doing internally. Companies come up with little names and create little vignettes for the season - they're trying to craft this like generated aesthetic thing and then to sell it back to people. Everything is meticulously chosen to have a particular motif or meaning behind it and stuff, and to come together to form some sort of cohesive lifestyle ideal…
If it's an aesthetic, it should at least span across a couple of different types of design fields or product categories. It’s tricky. It is difficult. All these things move at different speeds too. Like fashion moves extremely fast, architecture moves incredibly slow and is wildly behind mostly everything else. I try to be more rigorous but sometimes just trust my gut!”
Above: examples of Weird Facebook aesthetic groups. Below: examples of Vignettes created by companies to create trends, specifically in this case from Levis.
The Grey:
“No, that makes sense. I feel like needing to see it across these different areas definitely helps to actually identify aesthetics as opposed to trends. Do you think this kind of categorisation is helpful in uniting people?”
Evan:
“I do think there's use for diving into this and then using it to better understand our recent history. I think a lot of these styles can then tell us a fair amount about the cultural and political recent past. Dissecting how an aesthetic came about can reveal what forces were at play. That’s quite valuable, and we’re also giving the language to actually talk about these things, otherwise like you said they can get quite amorphous.
I don't love what's happened to a lot of the styles that we've investigated, we didn't have any intent for them to become a marketing aesthetic in themselves again – which has happened to a fair few of them”
Sofi:
“There's this, like, idolatry that comes out sometimes. With Frutiger Aero I’ve seen comments on a post where all these Christians showed up in the comment section and talked about how Frutiger Aero is how they imagined heaven would look like. And it was just really... It was just huge blocks of texts from Christians about the kingdom of heaven looking like Frutiger Aero. The thing is that when you dig into one aesthetic really deeply, you do start to find really troubling things. With Frutiger Aero, I can also say that, that aesthetics’ downfall coincided with Arab Spring, and with the WikiLeaks scandal. We can also say Y2K’s downfall was heavily influenced by 9/11. There is a darkness to a lot of these aesthetics but I still believe that our research is really meaningful.”
The Grey:
“That's so interesting. I really see these political and cultural visual links through my area of work which is fashion. It’s something I always try to explain to people to prove studying fashion is actually really insightful! I see a lot of people on the internet now saying ‘the internet killed subcultures’ – agree or disagree?
Evan:
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about like what's going on with the youth these days. [laughs] Just from anecdotal stuff in LA I still see skater kids like hanging out with each other and just sort of wandering around the city or something like that. They're similar to each other and they're just kinda doing their own thing. I do think a lot of it, at least in the form that we understood subculture, did require being physically present with other people -in a place. Sharing physical space and seeing each other's fashion and mannerisms and lingo and everything like that, and music exchanging that with each other, then kind of forming a group. Subcultures probably existed a lot more so when the internet was not like this super homogenized, like, you know, couple of platforms type place or something like that. Like, I feel like it was probably more when there were little forum communities - it's tough to exactly understand how subcultures form nowadays with the structure of the internet being basically four sites constantly posting screenshots of each other.”
Sofi:
“My perspective on this is, I'm gonna be really obnoxious and just say that I think subculture is a product of consumer culture, subcultures didn't really even exist in early capitalism. You know? They emerged with the birth of youth culture, people started living longer and having more money, and then that means that you can target the youth and create a culture for the youth.
Actually, I'd say we have more subcultures than before. I mean, more people engage in subcultures, people can be many different subcultures at the same time. You could be, I don't know, a Twilight subculture person, but also be a Steven Universe subculture person, but also be in queer subculture, and be a skater…
Subcultures today are very much alive, just maybe not in the same way they used to. Maybe the internet just killed subcultures the way we think of them before. But also, there's a lot of things that changed. Like, we don't have third spaces anymore in the same way that we used to.”
Above: Examples of the Aesthetic Soft Countryana.
The Grey:
“Do you guys have favourite aesthetics?”
Evan:
“Well, I can say a least favourite will be easier because I feel like I've learned to appreciate a lot of things that typically wouldn't be my personal style. But sometimes if the cultural or political context behind them is horrible that will make an aesthetic my least favourite. So GVC for example when it crosses into cultural appropriation. There's also one called soft countryana, which is like that '80s Laura Ashley sort of sundress thing, like a prairie dress. It's from the 70s but it dominated the '80s in a way that people don’t understand when looking back. A lot of that is weirdly regressive and neo-traditional which I find quite icky, especially because it represents a lot of like Reagan-era America type stuff and this hard turn towards the conservative in design and culture and fashion and stuff like that.”
Sofi:
“Well, you know, this is actually going to be a big surprise, but my favourite is probably Gen X Soft Love and Gen X Home, but specifically like Asian Gen X stuff. I'm such a big fan of like that specific design era.”
Follow the work of Evan, Sofi and the rest of the CARI team at https://cari.institute and catch them on some of our fave podcasts High Brow & Nymphet Alumni.