mujun .works
A field study in contradiction, conducted at the unhurried pace of dawn.
Two truths, one shelf.
The chrome of 1999 promised a future of everything, everywhere, faster. We have arrived at that future and discovered, to our quiet surprise, that the most beautiful thing inside it is the moment between two clicks.
mujun.works holds a translucent toolbar in one hand and a raked stone garden in the other. Both are interfaces. Both are correct.
The pages that follow do not argue. They simply set the two objects on the same shelf and turn down the lights until the iridescence appears.
A polished river stone, rendered as software.
Three objects, set on a bare shelf.
Chord
at dawn
Scatter
field
Node
constellation
On the careful placement of bright objects.
The Y2K interface — bevelled, translucent, optimistic — was always reaching outward. Tabs multiplied. Toolbars stacked. Cursors trailed glitter. The promise was: more surface, more pleasure.
“ A bevelled button on a bare shelf is no longer a button. It is a small, polished argument with the present tense.
What we have learned, in the long quiet between then and now, is that the same surfaces are even more pleasurable when they are given air. A single chrome orb on a violet field. A toolbar fragment that performs no function. A loading bar with nothing to load.
This is not minimalism. Minimalism removes ornament. mujun.works keeps the ornament — the iridescence, the round edges, the soft-glow halos — and removes only the hurry.
“ The garden is raked at dawn. The toolbar shimmers anyway.
Each spread of this document is rendered as a magazine page from a parallel issue of Wired, dated forever. The columns shift like tide marks. The data, fictional and unlabelled, exists for its own warmth.
Hold two truths.
Light a small lamp between them.
Thank you for spending these spreads at the pace they were drawn at. The contradictions remain. They are, on inspection, the point.
— mujun.works · vol. 01