Windows 11 kicked off its public life showing off that weird blue ribbon-flower thing as the default desktop background, and designers at Microsoft have only further iterated on that, making these designs even more colourful.
This language of high abstraction is something I've brought up before in relationship to queer pride in the corporate world, and this move into increasingly iridescent palettes is giving me, like...
...it's like this is the new vaporwave, like someone behind the scenes really dug the old school aesthetic of random floating shit collaged into highly stylized and abstracted backdrops, except instead of statue busts and chess pieces suspended in liminal spaces, it's rudimentary geometric shapes, letters, amorphous blobs, and bubbles.
And that ... kinda fits with this new era of computing that we're in? Like, at least in the old aesthetic there were real-world objects incorporated into these images. You can go to a physical place and admire a statue as a piece of meaningful culture that has survived through the ages, or you can pick up and feel a chess piece in your fingers and use it to play a game, and pulling those real world objects together into a vaporwave piece has a message attached to it that said something about our relationship to those objects in the contemporary.
...but here we don't even get real objects. Everything has been further abstracted into unreality. The only useful things in the above images are letters, but they aren't pages from a book, or letters from a street sign. They aren't even connected together to form a coherent word, though you can infer easily that their haphazard arrangement is meant to spell out the word "Build", and that this should be taken as a snapshot of a brand new universe birthed into existence from colourful nothingness, still being constructed, still full of possibilities. Look at all the colours!
Of course, those of us in-the-know are horrified at what is coming down the pipe from these tech giants, but I can easily see this aesthetic experiencing a revival in the near future from artists external to corporate enterprise interpreting what all this is through a more personal lens.