Module pieces - bygone eras of the internet: Frutiger Aero (2023)

Introduction

Anemoia is nostalgia for a time you have never experienced; it also means having feelings for something that we don't have now but would like to have, such as Frutiger Aero. So, I am showing my love for this feeling through my work, trying to show viewers what I see when I feel such emotions. But to me, the state of anemoia is comforting, as it was triggered by revisiting places I visited when I was a young child, such as vividly remembering the children's wing of a hospital waiting for a check-up with all the fish on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. My comfort zones contain the details mentioned above, as well as thinking back at things I had used, played with or watched as a young child, as it brings back good memories of times that make me remember doing so.

This is how I became interested in this aesthetic. My versions of this forgotten aesthetic can bring back some memories to viewers who remember experiencing it in the past, even if they see it in passing, like inside a shop or on some software. I will explore this aesthetic by recreating my own versions using images of places I would see daily. I will also show the absence of people, thus giving them an immaculate look, as humans extract natural resources, making areas look unclean and unkempt. So, my pieces of art should look pure and untouched.

Artist Research

Frutiger Aero is named after Adrian Frutiger (who created the Frutiger fonts commonly used alongside Frutiger Aero) and Windows Aero (the UI theme of Windows Vista/7), which spread outward and influenced many other companies' design choices during the era. However, Sofi Lee coined the term Frutiger Aero in 2017 as a combination of Aero and the Frutiger typeface, which was popular with corporate materials of the time.

(an example of Frutiger Aero, Pinterest)

Research on the topic

Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are classic terms used to describe the evolution of the World Wide Web. Each iteration has brought new capabilities and changes to how we interact with the web.

1.0 emerged in the 1990s and was primarily used for information sharing and retrieval. Websites were static and mainly consisted of text and images. Users could only view and read the information but not interact with it. But everything changed after the second wave of internet evolution.

Web 2.0, which emerged in the early 2000s, introduced interactivity and user-generated content. With its changes, websites became more dynamic and allowed user participation through blogs, forums, and social networking features.

But soon, Web 3.0 made headlines as the "Semantic Web". It is said to be the next evolution of the World Wide Web. The concept behind Web 3.0 is to make the web more intelligent by using technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. This would allow computers to understand and interpret web content in a more human-like way, making it easier for people to find the information they need. However, Web 3.0 is still under development, but some early examples include virtual reality, augmented reality, and voice-enabled search.

Artist Research

"James Casebere, born in 1953, is an artist with a similar style to this aesthetic. He grew up outside of Detroit and studied with Siah Armajani as an undergraduate at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and John Baldessari as a graduate student at Cal Arts.  

For over 40 years, Casebere has built and photographed architecturally based models which explore the relationship between sculpture, photography, architecture, and film. Starting with Sonsbeek '86, in Arnhem, Holland, through 1992, Casebere made large-scale sculptural installations.

His work is in the collections of and has been shown at major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum (New York); the Tate Gallery (London); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); and many others. He has had solo shows at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Spain); Museum of Modern Art Oxford (UK); the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (Ohio); the Indianapolis Museum of Fine Arts (Indiana); and other museums.

In 2016, his work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany and has been included in exhibitions highlighting the work of what is now widely regarded as the Pictures Generation, the title of a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Casebere receives three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts and one from the Guggenheim Foundation. In April 2019, he was awarded the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize through the American Academy in Rome."

- James Casebere, bio.

The image below is by Casebere, called 'Yellow House on Water', made in 2018. It shows a simple yellow house with no windows or doors, a very high doorframe, and a railless staircase to one of the rooms. This building is in front of a group of mountains that are silhouetted due to the dark, overcast clouds, yet its reflection is seen in the water in front of it, distorted by the water's surface ripples.

This has inspired me to create my own by taking a picture of some exterior or interior and editing or redrawing them to make them look white and clean so that I can add some frutiger aero aspects into it, such as glassy looking bubbles, significant things in a smaller space, like a giant butterfly in an average room. I have always been intrigued by retro aesthetics such as Frutiger Aero because this style reignites memories and stories of a particular time, making it unique. But these aesthetics give me a sense of anemoia.

Images that I took for some inspiration

'Yellow House on Water' can be used as inspiration, as well as Postmodernism. Postmodernism is a more advanced version of Modernism, showing that art can be anything other than some paint on a canvas. Modernism shows that art can be made on a canvas, whereas Postmodernism shows the same thing; the art can be made on a screen instead.

"Postmodernism was a reaction against Modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism, a utopian vision of human life and society, and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths, such as those formulated by religion or science, could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique, and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.

While Modernism was based on idealism and reason, Postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on the philosophy of the mid-to-late twentieth century and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience were more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity, Postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.

By the mid-1960s, an increasing number of architects (and most of the public they designed for) were questioning the blandness of the new architecture that, in the wake of Mies van der Rohe and the "commercial" style he created, was beginning to smother city centres. Characterless for the most part, the new corporate style seen alongside mass-produced housing estates and roads cut unsympathetically through the heart of old communities was viewed as a travesty of the brave new world promised by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.

"Postmodernism is one of the most controversial movements in art and design history. Over two decades, from about 1970 to 1990, It shattered established ideas about art and design, bringing a new self-awareness about style. An unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical, Postmodernism ranges from the ludicrous to the luxurious—a visually thrilling, multifaceted style."

- vam.ac.uk

This idea of looping back interests me because as time passes in the modern age, more trends, such as different art styles and mediums, tend to resurface. In recent years, we have seen the return of old trends, such as abstract art, which was more prevalent in the early 20th century, becoming popular again due to an emotional response triggered by the colours, forms, texture or energy the artwork gives off. Thus sometimes triggering a nostalgic response, using people's fondness of the past as inspiration for future work. I am just using the fondness of the past for my work.

(Above: Marilyn Diptych by Andy Warhol, 1962, via Tate, London (left); Self-Portrait by Andy Warhol, 1986, via Christie's (centre); and Pink Panther by Jeff Koons, 1988, via MoMA, New York (right))

(Below: Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry, Los Angeles, California)

I think that the Walt Disney Concert Hall (above) is an excellent example of Postmodernism, as it challenges what can be seen as the genre, as it is made of basic shapes but made of metal in a sporadic presentation, rather than it being like a neat, traditional building with straight walls with no excess materials.

My experimentations

This has inspired me to the point that I took my own photos after using some from the internet for inspiration. I edited them with trial and error to resemble the original Frutiger Aero aesthetic.

(for the image above, I experimented with layers and practising how to give objects a glossy and clean shine to match the aesthetic as mentioned above)

For the image below, the inspiration was to look at the opposite of Frutiger Aero. "Which is the Hexatron aesthetic is a vague sci-fi aesthetic that was prominent throughout the 2010s following the end of the Frutiger Era and is characterised by hexagons, neon blue, holograms, and futuristic technology, which I try to maintain in the image below. It holds some Frutiger Aero motifs, such as futurism, gloss, and 3D graphics. Still, it contrasts it by largely omitting the nature-centred values of Frutiger Aero, incorporating sharp corners and edges to emphasise Abstract Technology. Such aesthetics can be seen in different media types, such as TV shows, movies, and video games. Hexatron influences are usually found in modern sci-fi music and real-life gaming equipment."

- Aesthetics wiki

I have taken inspiration from all aesthetic aspects and put them together to create my own versions. I used images of local architecture to incorporate to make them truly unique.

The image below is the first piece of art I made trying to replicate the Frutiger Aero aesthetic, using the aspects of underwater and bigger versions of smaller animals in the background or foreground. However, if I recreate this image, I would choose a different colour pallet for the water, as it seems too dark and too deep of colour for it to match its inspiration.

Yet, I prefer the images below as they represent the aesthetic better than the images above. I refer to these images as simple in shapes, colours and placements. But if I were to detail these images again, I would add some edits to make some parts more glossy, such as the windows of the buildings, as well as animals and/or objects being more oversized than they should be, so that they are in the background or foreground; just like my trial image of a wall being an aquarium and a large butterfly across the room.

I prefer the first two of the three, so I chose them as my final piece and as a rework of a previous one. However, upon thinking of printing them, I came upon the error; its size (A3). So, if I were to print them out, their scaling would not be at its best, and it would show pixelation, making it fuzzy. To upscale it, I can't stretch the image to its desired size, as it would still pixelise, making it worse. So I redrew them bigger (A2) instead, thus making the outlines sharper and details more apparent to the point where pixelisation is minimal to none.

Here are my chosen three images, but scaled up, along with their processes:

Final pieces printed and mounted

I positioned these pieces so that the tallest one (centre) is the centre of attention, yet it shares its attention with the landscape on either side. I positioned the image with the darker setting and the windows with the globe in the background on the far left so that when you look through them, right to left, it seems as if the image is based inside of one of the buildings in the other image, letting the viewer see more and give them a different outlook on a narrative.

I asked one of my peers and a friend for what they think and for any feedback;

- One of my peers said that they like them as they are and how clean they are, as they could not think of anything that they would add or change to think the same. However, I would change some stuff, such as its colour scheme and how the images are presented, i.e. where everything is placed and orders of layering. But I like how people like it how it is and can't think of any possible changes. It also reminds them of a previous project that I have done, which was centred around liminal spaces.

- The friend said that they were getting a lot of Frutiger aero vibes from these without telling them what my topic was about. They think the composition of each of them is excellent, and the placement of the dappled light/bubbles seems very thought about but naturally co-occurring.

"The second one jumps out at me significantly. The bright grass at the bottom makes the image more dynamic and exciting. I especially love the third one, too. Something about the specific shading and texture is reminiscent of low-poly PlayStation games. It looks almost confusing at first, in a good way, because it takes your eyes a moment to adjust and realise that the shading is smooth and blurred."