SUMMER 2024: THE OCEAN ISSUE
Welcome to the debut season of Synthesized Sunsets: a seasonal Seattle magazine about speculative fiction and the future of pop! This season, Synthesized Sunsets turns to the ocean for inspiration. The ocean is fickle— it can go from peaceful to violent at a moment's notice.
The ocean's dual nature makes it a great example of a famous duality in art: the beautiful and the sublime. According to philosopher Edmund Burke, the beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, while the sublime is that which has the power to compel and destroy us. If you've ever felt utterly insignificant and vulnerable in the face of nature phenomena, then you've felt the power of the sublime.
I’ve always had an aesthetic preference for the sublime. My favorite media is characterized by massive scale, whether that’s the incomprehensibly large mechas of Gurren Lagan, the breathtaking comet from Your Name, or the towering alien structures in Arrival. Art usually causes me to overanalyze, but the sublime stops my thought process dead in its tracks. Sometimes nature's power just forces you to stop and stare, especially in the ocean.
My favorite painter of the sublime is Ivan Aivazovsky (1817 – 1900), whose seascapes will feature in the pages of this issue. Ivan Aivazovsky was a Russian painter who devoted his life to the ocean, painting it thousands of times. I admire his obsessive focus on a single subject— his absolute mastery of this one form gave him the tools to depict much of the human experience. As Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
In Chaos, Aivazovsky uses a desolate seascape to capture the sublime nature of a world before Creation— a world without God and without light. The towering clouds combine with the endlessness of the sea to make us feel insignificant in the face of the painting’s religious subject matter.
I could say a lot more about Aivazovsky, but I’ll let his art do the talking. There’s a great issue in store for you: I'll be taking you from the heights of airships to the depths of alien oceans to the backs of... world turtles? I hope it inspires new thoughts on the ocean's full range: the sublime, the beautiful, and everything in between. Thanks for reading!
—Kevin Kodama, Editor