Wabi-Sabi for
Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren is an
exquisite little text. The back of the book reads:
Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.
It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a
beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things
unconventional....
I was thinking of a computer system with a wabi-sabi
flair. The printer occasionally rips a hole in the page or tears off a
corner. Random words are greyed out. Digital images acquire dust and
scratches.
Then I thought of computers as they exist now. Toner
fades and paper gets jammed. Pixels become corrupted and discolor digital
images. Machines crash and save only partials of the original, or raw
data alone. E-mails accidentally get sent before they are finished or to
the wrong address. Wabi-sabi is already here to be appreciated.
