Leonard Koren wrote a beautiful book about Wabi-Sabi. After Ichi go ichi e, Wabi-Sabi is another Japanese concept having its origin in the tea ceremony.
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is the beauty of things unconventional.
The sound of a scratchy old record, is Wabi-Sabi. In a digital age, it seems that we are losing the sens of beauty of irregularities and accidental defects. Hence the nostalgia for film photography, old Polaroids and the success of Instagram.
Could a Wabi-Sabi pixel be a big square, one escaped from Space Invader? Pixel and graffiti artists often use it as a nostalgic gimmick.
Probably not. The square is too perfect, eternal and complete. A perfect square definitely cannot be Wabi-Sabi.
A Wabi-Sabi pixel would be some sort of handmade blown glass pixel. And it would deteriorate with time. It would mature. When you first light it, the immature pixel would be green, like an unripe fruit. It will then lose its shape with age. It would change color. But not all pixel would change the same way. Each pixel would have its own way of getting older.
Would it die?
Would a Wabi-Sabi pixel eventually die? Would it stop emitting light forever?
In some ways, Wabi-Sabi is the celebration of the increasing entropy, of irreversible decay. You won’t get younger, it’s a one way process. And it seems that after having decayed for too long, a pixel would, like everything else, not be a pixel anymore. It would be something else.
Some sort of pixel dust.
