Media is in its Decoration Era
How books and TV in design have come to define an age with too much content
To live a modern existence is to constantly outsource our inner world. Cognition allows us to conjure up our own images in our mind’s eye, but most of the time I prefer to let someone else do the work of mental picture-making. When I’m riding the subway, I’m imagining an elaborate wedding gone-wrong, supplied to me by a storytelling podcast. When I’m waiting for a friend, I’m reading an article on my phone and letting the characters of the story take up my consciousness. The psychological experience of idle time is often completely divorced from the actual space I inhabit. When I escape into a book or album, I am less a part of my physical space, and I signal to others that disconnection is permissible.
Except lately, these physical spaces have adopted a clever camouflage to reflect our new reality.
Recently, restaurants and cafes everywhere have been big on bookshelves, but not to house books which patrons might take and read – they’re design tools. At Poetica Cafe, a chain of coffee shops in Brooklyn, books quite literally are climbing the walls, their spines splayed open and glued to the wall, a tantalizing intellectual collage – except their haphazard placement makes them impossible to read. At Cafe Lyria in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, an old-fashioned TV sits on a shelf with other relics – a sewing machine, a Greek-style bust and a stack of newspapers. Nothing plays on this TV – it’s just another object in the shop’s attempt at an airy and erudite aesthetic.
Welcome to media as decor. Foliage, fauna, and even buildings have long been inputs of design, showing up in prints and silhouettes. As media increasingly becomes the everpresent backdrop of our lives, the objects of media – TVs, books, newspapers and records – become as eligible for print-making as flowers.
How we got here: ambient media to ambiance media
Media, of course, must be read or registered to some extent. Decoration, by contrast, is primarily meant for adornment and not any greater engagement. To describe a table, I simply need to look at it. To describe a song, I need to pay more attention. Or do I?
Several decades ago, artists began to explore the possibility of mass media to enhance a space – to exist somewhere between decoration and media. One of the most preeminent artists of this genre, Brian Eno, created the album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports.” In this, he sought to enhance the experience of being at a physical location by toning down some of its most engaging properties and taking notes from the space it was trying to complement. The airport mood, he notes, has “something to do with where you are and what you’re there for — flying, floating, and, secretly, flirting with death.” In the liner notes on “Ambient 1,” Eno writes that ambient music should be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Ambient media, once avant garde, has become inescapable, albeit in an inverted format.
The rise of platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and TikTok have provided an endless supply of content, where algorithms study our every move, feeding us ever more material to keep us from logging off. Critics like media studies scholar Paul Roquet have named this evolved form “ambiance media,” digital noise which allows people to escape into “a mood as a concretized thing, an off-the-shelf “vibe” consumable as a product.” Think lo-fi beats to study and relax to, or Emily in Paris and Chef’s Table – slickly produced, visually appealing shows where not much happens. Writer Kyle Chayka compares the earlier era of “prestige TV,” – demanding watches full of complex plotlines – to modern television, writing, “Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.”
It’s not just scholars cherry-picking the most mind-numbing examples. The CEO of Netflix has told investors its biggest competitors are not other corporations but sleep, while a Spotify executive said the company “fights for the background” of people’s attention.
In this climate, is it any wonder that media artifacts like books, newspapers, and TVs are infiltrating our decor and our fashion, not as art to engage with, but as totems of the modern age?
Cultural capital to capital
Our media-filled realities are not the only explanation for why prints of books and newspapers have popped up on blouses and bakery walls. Another theory is that designers want to borrow some cultural capital from forms of media typically regarded as more high-brow. Writer Nick Harmis notes the recent phenomenon of fashion houses collaborating with authors as a form of branding. Valentino invited poet Rupi Kaur to read her writing at a post runway-show party and partnered with literary (albeit thirsty) Instagram account “Hot Dudes Reading” on an ad campaign. Dior, for a Jack Keorac-inspired men’s collection, had models walk on a runway covered with the original manuscript for “On The Road.”
The tendency for one artform to reference another is not particularly novel – it is fundamental to the creation of art. But the routine process of intra-medium inspiration has fallen prey to rapid-cycle consumption, resulting in a dangerous trend: art as vibes.
In the digital age, books themselves have started to become art cum ambient media, a place to exist in ephemerally but not really engage with. Via platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, authors regularly post moodboards – digital collages of images that capture the aesthetic of the book. In response to an anonymous Tumblr’s user’s critique that the rise of moodboards has made young adult novels more similar, with certain plotlines seemingly designed to be placed on a future digital collage, fantasy author Claire Wenze responded that literary moodboard culture is the result of “the congealing of "YA [fantasy] as a Marketing Category," acknowledging the role of digital dynamics on creative production. Writing about the modern novel’s transformation under the pressures of the Internet, cultural scholar Mitch Thereiau suggests that Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History is itself a foundational text to the digitally-borne, literary aesthetic “dark academia,” which “already anticipates its robust afterlife at the center of an online image culture.”
So long as creators exist in a digital world, they need to use its tools and vocabulary to make art that is culturally salient. But just because artists can adapt to this new reality does not make it net good. As we continue to live on the information superway, everything becomes landscape.
Artificial intelligence is already guzzling years of knowledge and creation and spitting it out into handy answers for our queries. Media as decoration has a similarly flattening effect – human creativity and intellectual output doesn’t have to be seriously engaged with. It can exist solely to serve a superficial function in our lives. When media is the print of a dress or the backdrop for a living room, it hems in our world, far gone from its original potential of connecting disparate people.