Miraculous Coincidences

Or, notice the medium

I can pour latte art, because I was a barista for many years. I love pouring latte art. When I did it again recently, at a friend’s house with their little espresso machine, I felt tears well up in my eyes. It’s mostly nostalgia, but there is something that I’ve always felt is particularly beautiful about latte art that I’d like to share now.

Latte art¹ is evidence of a very special relationship between cow’s milk and espresso. There are many milks you can use to make a latte, but so far our science has not managed to produce a milk that can be used to make latte art as crisp and perfect as cow’s milk. Barista formulated oat milks come closest. I think that’s wonderful, and I think about it every time I see nice latte art. We didn’t choose cow’s milk for this property: latte art emerged, was discovered, long after we started putting cow’s milk in our coffee.

As art, the result is not very interesting I think. The interesting thing is that it is possible. The play between the miraculous coincidence “latte art is possible” and the journey of mastery “I can pour latte art” is what makes me happy when I pour. Latter art produces little hearts, and the “rosetta” shape, which is reminiscent of a flower. Imagine an artist trying to capture the beauty of nature who had chosen latte art as their medium. It would be impossible! It’s not a very expressive medium, but it is a medium and it’s worth exploring (or nothing is worth exploring).

Now imagine an oil painter trying to capture the beauty of nature! How frustrating must that be!? Certainly if you are focused on outcomes, and on achieving a specific goal I think it would be very frustrating to paint. If you are trying to transmit experiences, and you see the medium primarily as a barrier to that endeavour, then it’s probably pretty frustrating. How can an oil painting ever express the beauty of a tree or a sunset when that beauty is experienced as much in our skin as it is in out eye? Such an artist is running headlong into an existential crisis.

Oil on canvas is another miraculous coincidence, like latte art, but one with much greater expressive power than latte art. The artist has way more control and can get much closer to some particular experience… and yet we still end up with pointillism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. I would hazard a guess that realism makes up a tiny tiny fraction of all paintings. Essentially, these are artists who are as interested in the relationships between oil, canvas, and eye as they are with the relationship between nature and eye. If they are trying to transmit something, they know it isn’t something that exists primarily in nature. If they are trying to transmit something it is there impression of what they’ve seen. One might say that these artists were looking for places where reality was insufficient, insufficient to capture experience, and then creating lesser realities in those spaces that come closer to experience.

There’s an adventure time episode where Jake finds his brother Jermaine, who has always painted realistic landscapes, painting in an abstract expressionist style. This rocks Jake to his soul, he believes his brother to have been overcome by some demon. Jermaine says:

No one is making me do this. I painted so many landscapes that the shapes of the land began to lose their meaning. The shapes broke apart to me, so… I painted them like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB4I_sGtK7M

Why was Jermaine painting landscapes in the first place? Suppose that he was trying to make art which notices reality; suppose that he was trying to celebrate, or capture, or express the beauty that he saw in the world around him. His abstract art still does that, certainly for him but also for those with an eye for it… but abstract art also notices the medium. Abstract painting notices the miraculous coincidence of oil on canvas, the ways that oil bunches up into little ridges where a brush stroke ends, the ways colours become muddy and indistinct where they meet, or the ways the rough texture of the canvas pushes through into the final product. Like impressionism, abstract expressionism also recognizes how important the human psyche is in the miraculous coincidence of noticing reality. The particular qualities of looking and seeing that reside in us are just as important in the relationship of a person to the natural world as are the qualities of that world.

I ask again: why was Jermaine painting landscapes in the first place? Suppose that he wasn’t trying to make art which notices reality. Suppose instead that he had sat in his father’s house looking out the window at the mountains one day and thought “that’s nice”. He knew he had experienced something but not what. It made him feel good, the way warmth feels good. Then later he thought he might try painting. And what did he paint? He was drawn back to that feeling of warmth. He didn’t know why he wanted to paint a landscape but it’s a thing people do, so he did it. I think Jermaine started painting landscapes as a way to practice a medium, oil on canvas, and as a way to reflect on his own relationship with the world around him, and that in the end it had very little to do with the landscapes themselves.

Videogames is a medium.

There are lots of really interesting videogames, but way more very boring videogames. Unlike paintings, I think gamism and realism dominate the form. When someone makes a videogame, in my experience, 9/10 they want to make something fun. A fun game. I don’t think it is particularly interesting to catch all the pokemon, or defeat Kefka. Open worlds I’ve explored are never as interesting as open or rich as the real thing. After walking in the Japanese countryside I am always left feeling like videogames are deeply insufficient. The game designers are not interested in awe, or in the sublime. Videogames is so close to so many other mediums that often people just paint a videogame, or write a videogame, rather than going really deeply into the medium.

There are things videogames are good at. Executing a good cheese in Starcraft is enjoyable for roughly the same reasons as pouring latte art. Building slowly in minecraft, with an eye for the relationships between things, is nice. Developing a skill that takes months to master instead of years is satisfying. Not because it is useful, or efficient, but because mastery is enjoyable. There are things I’ve learned about myself that would not have been as evident outside of videogames precisely because of how small and focused they are.

I’m a formalist. I love form. I love haiku not because I am particularly interested in old ponds, or cuckoo birds, but because I am particularly interested in kigo, and the structure of a clever turn. I love pouring latte art not because I am particularly interested in rosettas, but because I am interested in exploring the consequences of this miraculous coincidence. In the past I’ve felt a bit removed from artists who are interested in awe, or in ponds. Now I’m thinking that there isn’t really a divide there. I am most interested in noticing, and celebrating, the miraculous coincidences that make things possible. Why is driving around a city interesting? Why are sunsets beautiful? What makes a perfect chair? The answers, I think, lie in the cracks that divide us from reality. We call those cracks “experience” or “being” or “psyche”. The space a signal has to pass through to become an experience has a particular shape, and that shape is what makes a tree beautiful. The machinery that makes us capable of appreciating the awesome machinery of nature is itself awesome.

You can work with a medium, and I think the interesting thing to do is to deepen your understanding of the medium. You can cook, and then you can really cook. I mean, you can make dinner, or you can make miso. I can appreciate the tides, but I can’t really work with them. The best I can hope to do is work with a medium and try to express my appreciation for tides in that medium. To do this I have to work deeply with the medium, to understand how it is expressive, and I need to work deeply with myself, to understand how tides become the appreciation of tides, to notice where the miraculous coincidence of “appreciating tides” exists. I need to try to understand its mechanism, like the way the impressionists understood the mechanism of appreciating a scene.

But maybe that’s not the right approach. Maybe instead maybe I should reflect on what the tides make me feel. If all I ever did was go and see the tides, and walk the shores, and throw stones into shallow pools… maybe I would understand the tides better, but I don’t think I would understand my own appreciation for the tides better. I need to get different angles on the cracks that make that appreciation possible, and to do that I need different media. I need to notice the way a close is like the tides, maybe I should get some lego gears and try to model the tides as a sum of sine waves. Or maybe I should include some tidal action in a game I’m making. If I can create something that makes me feel the way tides make me feel, or even just hints at that feeling, then that is evidence that I’ve understood.

This kind of got away from me. The point is:

I’ve been spending more time offline and just generally loving it, and feeling less and less desire to explore these fantastical unexperienceable things — because real stuff is so cooool. Driving around a city! Talking with a friend! Sunsets! Trees! Colours and fabrics and patterns. Sitting in the perfect chair. The pleasure of removing dust from a dusty screen with a microfibre cloth!!!

I don’t want to spend my time looking for the places where reality is insufficient just so I can create lesser realities in those spaces! Reality is sufficient in so many really cool ways! I want to make art which notices that rather than spurning it, because I want to spend my time noticing that.

droqen, May 2022

That’s great! But you can’t escape needing a medium. If you want to make art you will always have this problem, regardless of the medium. Art has a resolution problem!

¹ When I talk about latte art, I’m talking about the “free pour”, not stylus work like little bears and unicorns, and certainly not the computer printed latte art of the 21st century. Those are fine too, but they aren’t what I love. When you do a free pour, you kind of wiggle the milk pitcher… and magic happens! The patterns are intuitive. In the photo above, I know that I first poured a big circle, then stopped and pushed another circle into it. That’s why you get that distinct white outer ring, followed by a ring of brown, then the bed of milk in which the rosetta itself sits. The rosetta’s leaves are not sharp, they are big soft loops. That’s my style.