Frutiger Aero: Gen Z's make-believe nostalgia

this video was brought to you by surf shark Hello friends my name is JJ so the people of my generation the Millennials have been enjoying quite the toasty bath and the warm water of our own Nostalgia lately not only have we forced Hollywood to reboot all of the Beloved TV shows of our youth and conol the video game industry into remaking every game we ever played we have even invented multiple different genres of music that exist for the sole purpose of reminding us what it felt like going shopping with our parents like seriously the other day I learned to boot Barber beats a style of music that is apparently supposed to evoke memories of going to the barber shop in the 9s not to be confused with M soft which is the genre that is supposed to evoke memories of going to the mall or clown wave which is the kind that is supposed to remind you of going to McDonald's so amid all of this it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later the Zumer generation would get jealous I mean Millennial nostalgia can be a little self-indulgent and corny but there's no denying it's created some pretty cool stuff as well at the moment the Zoomers are really working hard trying to make Nostalgia for something called frutiger Arrow a thing this is basically supposed to be the Gen Z equivalent of that late 80s early '90s design sensibility that my generation has been having so much fun with YouTube is currently full of all sorts of frutiger Arrow videos from the under 30 video essay crowd often expressing a great deal of self-satisfaction that they've stumbled onto something really important here finally a nostalgic Cult of genen Z's very own friger Arrow the upand cominging term for the aesthetic we've been seeing for almost decades now fuig era may just seem like that silly bubbly Windows theme from all those years back but there's so much more to it than that it shaped people's childhoods even if they didn't know it it inspired people it was an amazing look it got people looking and talking they now represent for me a kind of hazy Nostalgia a lims into a time when the world was racing through the digital age with a hopeful enthusiasm it was frutiger arrow that helped ease us into this new reality now I got to say I have some mixed feelings about this on the one hand I am a pretty big fan of nostalgia in general and it is cool to see the kids getting into it as someone who is turning 40 this year it is kind of interesting to witness people younger than yourself start to develop a sense of nostalgia for the past it provides a fresh perspective for reflecting on eras of your own life but but on the other hand friger arrow is such a terrible foundation for Gen Z to be building their nostalgic project on and in my opinion reflects a kind of weird narrowness of thought and ambition that Zoomers have an unfortunate tendency to fall into what I mean by this is that I have noticed for a while now that a lot of Zoomer aged people at least online have this obsessive desire to name and sort and categorize everything as specific ially as possible if something doesn't have a name and a precise definition that can be filed away on some specialized Wiki somewhere then it doesn't truly exist and isn't worth anything a fellow Millennial friend of mine described this as the Gen Z tendency to make everything a Pokemon and basing zomer Nostalgia Arun friger arrow is such a great example of this tendency because they have taken a perfectly good concept which is Nostalgia for The Vibes of the first two decades of the 21st Century and linked it to this exotic and unintuitive pseudo academic term and all that does is turn what should be a broad and accessible nostalgic project into an exercise in gatekeeping and fussiness over precise definitions and examples I'm not even going to bother explaining what the name frutiger Arrow even means because the mere fact that the name even requires an explanation is an acknowledgement of its failure in my opinion but basically friger arrow is a term that somebody came up with to describe this sort of aesthetic this is the introductory photo to the concept that they almost always use in fact the idea is that we are describing a visual style that is supposed to combine natural things like water and fish with high-tech things to create a bright and pleasant Vibe along with certain other design flourishes like lots of gradients and turquoise colored things the problem arises however in that some of the Zoomer thought leaders are trying to broaden the definition of friger Arrow to Encompass basically everything that defined material culture in the 2000s and early 2010s which like I said then just invites other Zoomers to argue endlessly about whether say Super Monkey Ball 2 is actually friger Arrow as opposed to Y2K or cyber paradism or pool core or any of the other Untold dozens and dozens of pokemones hyper precise Niche micro Aesthetics found on the Aesthetics Wiki so Zoomers I implore you just give this up just say you're nostalgic about the early 21st century and leave it at that if you're nostalgic about 2000's era shopping malls just say you're nostalgic about 2000's era shopping malls if you're nostalgic about 2000's era computer interface menus just say you're nostalgic about 2000's era computer interface menus you don't have to get bogged down trying to express your sentimentality through these jargon nonsense terms that no same person knows but that said let us now talk about the one truth that I do think the whole frutiger Aeros Zoomer discourse is correct in noticing it is objectively true that a lot of visual design in the first Decades of the 21st century were defined by a ton of naturalistic imagery futurism and an abundance of Shadows gradients lens flares and all the rest of it and I think that's a very important thing to call attention to because in many ways it visually symbolizes the end of the 20th century and the sharp cultural break we made with the long post-war era as the New Millennium dawned but before we get into any of that let us just hear a quick word from today's video sponsor surf shark Hello friends so you might think that living here in the Glamorous Pacific Northwest is all smiles and sunshine but I can assure you it is not for instance the other day I was doing some research at the University of British Columbia and Not only was their Library full of all sorts of looking students Google Chrome told me that their public Wi-Fi connection was not secure so how did I overcome this anxiety by using surf shark of course surf shark is one of the world's leading VPN apps that you can use on an unlimited number of personal devices connected to the internet with a few simple clicks you can keep your internet connection both encrypted and masked which is a necessity in today's modern world using a VPN is one of the most responsible ways that you can practice good internet at hygiene and is recommended by all sorts of trustworthy authority 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new elaborately designed visuals and as a result our culture went through a phase beginning in the mid90s where an obsession with good graphics overwhelmingly defined the visual tastes of the next couple of decades as someone who lived through it I can assure you that the '90s revolution in computer processing power was a subject of enormous public delight and excitement and as a result once it became possible to produce computer generated imagery with a level of realism previously unseen companies of All Sorts were constantly straining to impress customers by making use of this technology to stick next generation computer generated graphics and absolutely everything it was all a very conscious effort to wow people by showing them how far computer generated visuals had come in such a short time the excessive use of color texture and lighting was intended to contrast with the computer Graphics of the past which were defined by limited pallets and flat two-dimensional looking pictures the focus on depicting nature likewise was supposed to emphasize this idea that post 99s computers could produce images that were realistic when earlier computer Graphics were mostly known for being abstract and stylized the growth of this whole phenomenon was slow but steady and eventually reached a sort of climax in the age that the Zoomers group up in and are having so much fun reminiscing about today but because it is ultimately a very large and long story I think other Generations can relate to it a lot as well when I was 10 a Super Nintendo game called Donkey Kong Country came out and it was my first introduction to this new age of Aesthetics Donkey Kong Country was the first Nintendo game to make use of what I feel we now call CGI style graphics with threedimensional rendered characters the game took place in a jungle world which allowed the creators to really show off the capacities of next generation computer Graphics in what would become a very stereotypical way with realistic looking trees and coral reefs and sunsets and that sort of thing in those days there was a lot of rivalry between Nintendo and Sega so a few months later Sega released their CGI game called vectorman and I remember it being scorned for the fact that unlike Donkey Kong it didn't take place in in nature and thus was that much less visually impressive this was also a criticism made of Pixar's Toy Story which came out to ruin the same time though obviously very beloved and technologically revolutionary as the first fulllength CGI feature film it was also a bit less visually ambitious than it could have been since it was about plastic toys rather than nature things Pixar's follow-up film however A Bug's Life was all about nature and although mostly forgotten today was considered at the time even more groundbreaking than Toy Story Once ordinary desktop computer started using CDs I remember there was a real explosion in nature Graphics everywhere too even in very mundane middle class contexts I have a particularly vivid memory of being captivated by an aquarium screen saver on one of the computers in my high school office and of course everybody in those days would be super proud of having a highresolution digital photograph as is their desktop wallpaper usually of the beach but sometimes the mountains or a nice Rolling Hill there was this website called Digital Blasphemy that I was quite fond of as a teenager and it would always have these really cool CGI wallpapers featuring scenes of nature stuff sometimes mixed with future stuff I remember I had this one called Arbor Day on my bedroom computer for a long time later replaced by this one of dolphins swimming to an underwater city along with nature futuristic stuff was probably the most popular thing to depict with CGI in this era sometimes this was done to fulfill the long-standing expectation that anything involving computers had to be sci-fi in its sensibilities and sometimes it was just done to conceal the fact that late '90s early 2000s computer Graphics still weren't that great so it was sometimes easier to use CGI to depict things that were supposed to look a bit Fantastical and thus invite less criticism this was around the time that the concept of The Uncanny Valley started to go mainstream which is basically the idea that the harder something tries to look realistic the more critical of it we become a good example of threading this particular needle was the Canadian cartoon reboot which ran from 1994 to 1998 and I believe was the first ever fully CGI TV show it took place in this fantasy world that was supposed to be literally inside of a computer which allowed the show to occupy this sort of nebulous aesthetic space where it was both realistic and artificial at the same time that was a sweet spot that would define the ambition of a lot of computer Graphics until quite recently 1995 marked the dawn of a new generation of video games on this continent with the release of the PlayStation 1 followed by the N64 and then the Sega Dreamcast all of which boasted state-of-the-art fully CGI graphics and they too would make a big show of their graphical ability to depict both futuristic and naturalistic things since I was a real firm Nintendo partisan back then I only played N64 games and I remember pilot wings and Wave Race really being held up as games whose Graphics depicted just how realistically digital water and lighting could be rendered in this exciting new age but even L JJ had to admit that that scene where Sonic ran away from the kill whale was pretty impressive anyway things continued in this direction for a while as computer technology got better and better companies would cram more and more show offy computer generated visual effects into everything nothing was ever allowed to be simple or abstract food packages album covers TV commercials office software even your phone became full of 3D looking CGI things packed full of details and the problem that started to emerge by the dawn of the 2010s was that computer generated Graphics were beginning to get a little unappealing in just how overproduced they were everything was too shiny too glowy too smooth too colorful too detailed too realistic which ironically started to make everything look too fake this then generated a backlash as all things that go too far inevitably do and today we are living in the aftermath of that an era where flat and minimalistic designs that high rather than flaunt their computer generated are very much in fashion the Zoomers came of age basically at the tail end of this decades long phenomenon when overproduced very gimmicky and flashy computer Graphics were at their peak of cultural prominence Jen's defining cultural experiences as kids were thus characterized by a lot of exposure to this sort of stuff which they now often wrongly attribute to a bunch of discreet design trends like the called friger Arrow rather than something grander and more historically significant again I don't want to undermine the degree that the kids did in fact grow up in an era of very distinct visual Aesthetics I'm just saying that I think it's an era that should be appreciated in full as opposed to chopping it up into its component pieces and arguing about where to make the cuts the other somewhat dubious aspect of the Zoomer project to make frutiger Arrow a thing is the degree that they really want their Nostalgia for it to symbolize something about the present I mean I guess on some level that's always what Nostalgia exists to do Boomer Nostalgia for 50 and 60s era diners and hot rods and my generation's Nostalgia for Reagan Era shopping malls and shaah era Japanese Imports exist in large part to fetishize the supposedly more chill and easygoing middle class culture that existed in those days but beyond a vague sense that those were times of enviable economic prosperity and consumer abundance I also feel like we older people don't really tend to tie our Nostalgia towards the aesthetic sensibilities of the things that defined our past with overtly political conclusions I mean obviously conservative-minded Boomers and Millennials might think that the values of the old days were better but I don't think they necessarily think that those values were embodied by say the Jazz cup friger AO Nostalgia by contrast is often held up by the Zoomers as a component piece of their grander political Narrative of generational betrayal because a lot of the computer generated visuals of the 2000s and 2010s depicted scenes of nature often coexisting with technology this is frequently described as evidence that the Zoomers were promised a future that respected and honored nature rather than the world of climate change and environmental destruction they instead wound up inhabiting fra at its core represents hope the aesthetic came about during an era where technology was new and exciting and becoming increasingly more accessible the possibilities were seemingly infinite and hopes were high not only that this technology could improve lives but that it could improve humanity and thus we enter possibly the most hopeful time in futurist aesthetic design one where technology wouldn't be its own fantasy or character in our lives but would rather smoothly integrate itself into our world almost almost as if a part of nature itself Friga Arrow was how we viewed the future but little did we know that at the time we were already living the socalled aesthetic and that in the actual future the world will look close to nothing like this despite the Green Thumb message of ferer Arrow Technology consumes a lot of energy from the planet and pollution is still a relevant problem which well ironically is the fault of Corporations the ones saying that the future will be green and this strikes me as a somewhat naive Eve Reed on what was actually inspiring the creation of a lot of this stuff which as I said I think was motivated much more by just a desire to wow the public with realistic computer-generated depictions of things like water and trees more than any coherent ideological message regarding the relative importance of these things if anything I think you could make the case that a lot of the computer generated depictions of Natural Things actually symbolized man's growing indifference to Nature just given that we were growing so increasingly proud of the fact that we could create digital versions of nature that were every bit is beautiful but in general I tend to think that Aesthetics are relatively value neutral I think a lot of the people who make the visual media that Define our world are more inspired by a desire to be creative and Innovative than anything else meaning that a lot of the dominant Aesthetics of Any Given era can just be attributed to the Allure of whatever artistic technology was on the rise at that particular moment be it lithographs silk screening color printers or digital graphic software anyway I don't want to be too critical of the Zoomers like I said at the start I think it is very cool that Generation Z is now old enough to be nostalgic about the lives of their younger selves and as time goes on I really look forward to seeing all of the Nostalgia related art and creative Works they make in the same way that the Millennials have made the Barber Shop music or whatever to my younger viewers I am very keen to hear what you guys think of all of this have you noticed an upswing in Zoomer Nostalgia recently do you share my belief that fetishizing so-called frutiger Aero Aesthetics kind of misses the point let me know in the comments and I will see you next [Music] week

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 116,801

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Id: 9P7H87sdV7k

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024