Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has just announced that artist Yuan Goang-Ming will represent Taiwan at the 60th Venice Art Biennale (April 20 – November 24, 2024).
Yuan's project – entitled "Everyday War" (at Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice) – revolves around themes such as "home," "dwelling" and "an uncanny tomorrow".
The artworks project anxieties about the current political and social environment and point at the geopolitical tensions with China, but also at conflicts all over the world.
The exhibition's eponymous work "Everyday War", for example, is a single-channel video presenting before-and-after scans of a domestic space: glass shatters loudly, then warplanes fly in, destroying the objects in the room. In the end aircrafts annihilate one another, and the whole house is left a ruin in the aftermath of a furious battle.
As the camera keeps panning back and forth in a straight, steady line, lights and shadows gradually bathe the entire interior, and the collapsed home slowly returns to its original unscathed appearance.
The video becomes therefore a metaphorical exploration of the hidden fears and threats in Taiwan, but also invites to consider two unsettling thoughts – "war as part of normal life" and "war becoming the new normal".
While Yuan Goang-Ming's art mainly focuses on the state of affairs in Taiwan (a theme that will be even more relevant after the local elections in January 2024), the artist also ponders on the fact that the concept of war today has evolved from the actual firing of artillery to invisible expressions. "War as part of normal life," could indeed be interpreted as post-capitalist unequal distribution, cyber attacks, pandemics, and the discrimination and oppression of different religious and ethnic groups.
In the end, we all live a tumultuous life, in countries where there is an actual war and therefore a physical and psychological threat, or in situations where conflicts are carried out in other more subtle ways. All these battles destabilize us, stripping us of the necessary calmness to get on with our lives.
In this great era of uncertainty, it is therefore only natural to be pessimistic, but, for a much needed dose of temporary optimism, there are still uplifting trends left – like Frutiger Aero.
Making a notable return in 2021, almost marking the beginning of post-pandemic times, Frutiger Aero has found a home on TikTok, with the hashtag "#frutigeraero amassing almost 300m views.
Originally unnamed, Frutiger Aero emerged between 2004 (it succeeded the Y2K aesthetic) and 2013, shaping a distinct aesthetic across advertising, media, stock imagery, and technology. The aesthetics, provide a harmonious blend of technology and nature: motifs mainly revolve around computers and early flip phones, blue skies with clouds, aquatic themes, animals such as tropical fish and dolphins or plants and flowers.
User Interface key elements employing Frutiger Aero include linear gradients, bloom/glow effects, and a sheen for a 3D appearance.
Design-wise Frutiger Aero was characterized by Skeuomorphism, that is a style that imitates the appearance of physical objects by using elements that mimic their real-world counterparts.
So, for example, creating icons and elements that closely resembled physical objects to provide users with a familiar and intuitive experience (think a floppy disk for the save function or a bin for the trash function; as design trends evolved, modern interfaces moved onto flat design and minimalism).
The main palette for this aesthetics revolved around grass green, aquamarine, aqua green and yellow (think about Super Mario Galaxy 2 and you get an idea) and the images were more refined than most Y2K imagery and characterized also by glossy textures, but, at the same time, they were not that polished.
It was Sofi Lee, a member of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI), an online community committed to documenting visual aesthetics within consumer culture from the 1970s to now, who identified Frutiger Aero in 2017 and defined it with the Frutiger font family (by Adrian Frutiger) and Windows Aero, the design language of Windows Vista (the User Interface theme of Windows Vista/7).
Costume-wise the Frutiger Aero palette can be found in Bo Welch's film "The Cat in the Hat" (2003), while, for what regards fashion, some of the designs in Marni's S/S 24 collection evoke this mood, especially oversized T-shirts and long azure leather sleeveless dresses, floral decoupage evening gowns, mini-dresses or coats (some of the collage-like floral embellishments in these pieces were made from repurposed tin cans molded and painted to resemble metallic flowers), and more humble designs such as basic crop tops and hipster jeans or designs with plaids and stripes made strip by strip.
The combination of craft aesthetic/DIY with more sophisticated, almost technological designs in this collection points at Frutiger Aero. Besides, also Marni's Resort 2024 seems to reference this mood in its lookbook that features images characterized by distortion and by a bokeh effect on designs with a floral patterns.
More recently the optimism of Frutiger Aero was evoked in Coca-Cola's new Y3000 drink: co-created with the assistance of AI, its packaging aesthetic is glossy and the light-toned color palette featuring violet, magenta and cyan against a silver base, gives a futuristic feel and also incorporates the distinctive Frutiger Aero bokeh effect to hint at a morphing, evolving state, communicated through form and color changes that emphasize a positive future (View this photo).
Frutiger Aero also spawned sub-trends and subcategories such as Frutiger Eco (futurism and environment) and Helvetica Aqua Aero (also known as Frutiger Aqua, Aquacore, Low Frutiger, or simply Helvetica Aqua, obviously with images related to the sea).
Frutiger Jolly (sometimes also called Frutiger Santa, Frutiger Christmas or Frutiger Noel) explores instead holiday themes and hints at Christmas and Winter season holidays.
Frutiger Aero's aesthetic waned in 2012 in favor of the Flat Design look (Windows 8/10), but we are drawn to it through a blend of nostalgia for happier and less complex times and because this aesthetic offers a virtual escape from the permacrisis.
Its resurgence reflects indeed a desire for simpler times when connectivity didn't dominate our lives, offering a touch of retro-futuristic happiness amidst the complexities of modern existence, amidst talks of AI armageddon, wars and climate change (think about the devastating omission of a call for the phase-out of fossil fuels by the recent Cop28).
So, get optimistic filling your eyes with retro futurist Frutiger Aero images, reinvent its aesthetic using AI text-to-image tools, wait for Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga to do an overpriced T-shirt about it or, if you can't stand its return, simply lie low until the trend subsides.
Rispondi