Record ID: 002
Date: January 01-2026
Subject: This System Is Functioning as Intended
Filed Under: Self / Practice / Dystopian
As a short exploratory writing, I wanted to share a topic that was on my mind over the holiday. Why are the people in power, even villains, the ones with access to calm, serene, vast, and minimal spaces in most depictions of the future, specifically in films portraying dystopian settings?
Across science fiction film and literature, spaces associated with authority and technological control are frequently depicted as minimal, quiet, and highly ordered. These environments contrast sharply with the surrounding world, which is often portrayed as chaotic, polluted, overcrowded, or visually noisy. The more unstable or oppressive the external environment becomes, the more pristine and controlled the interior space of power appears. This pattern suggests that “calm” in speculative futures does not function primarily as healing or liberation, but as regulation. Minimalist interiors operate as controlled landscapes that reduce visual complexity, slow bodily movement, and encourage introspection. Here, peace becomes something administered rather than practiced.
Architectural commentary and film analysis reinforce this line of thinking. Cultural analyses of cinematic villain spaces, including discussions surrounding Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains (Oppenheim & Gollin, 2019), show that villains are often situated in sleek, modernist, and aesthetically refined environments. These spaces are frequently aspirational, even enviable, yet morally ambiguous. Minimalism becomes a visual shorthand for intelligence, distance, and authority. The association of calm architecture with power is not incidental, but a repeated narrative device.
This thought then led me to Zen-inspired spaces, which are often used in speculative settings because they abstract nature rather than reproduce it. In these same paradoxical futures, Zen aesthetics become a visual language detached from their philosophical origins and reintroduced as instruments of control. The garden is portrayed as scarce, inaccessible, and contained. Academic literature on Zen aesthetics emphasizes that concepts such as ma (interval or negative space) and emptiness were originally embedded in philosophical and ethical practices centered on impermanence, awareness, and non-attachment. However, global and speculative uses of Zen aesthetics often retain only surface qualities such as simplicity, restraint, and silence, while discarding their ethical foundations.
So let’s talk about calm.
The regulation of calm operates not only visually, but atmospherically. Theoretical work on atmospheres, particularly Gernot Böhme’s framework, positions atmosphere as something produced between environment and perception. Atmosphere is not a subjective mood, but a spatial condition generated through light, sound, material, and scale. Calm, in this sense, is designed.
Lighting, in particular, is permission rather than decoration. In real-world operational environments such as airports, hospitals, offices, parking garages, and data centers, lighting determines where bodies are allowed to move, where they are permitted to stop, how visible they are, and how long they are expected to remain. These spaces do not use light to express emotion, but to manage behavior, specifically through wayfinding. Calm lighting signals safety, legitimacy, and efficiency, while simultaneously enforcing control. Sound functions similarly. Low-frequency hums, mechanical rhythms, and controlled silences operate as infrastructural elements rather than background atmosphere. These auditory conditions shape attention, regulate stress, and normalize surveillance without explicit instruction. Political content can exist in sound without language.
In many speculative futures, control no longer appears violent. It appears efficient. Participation becomes difficult to distinguish from observation, and individuals internalize regulation without coercion. Surveillance is ambient, and behavior is guided by design rather than force. This raises an ethical question for contemporary artistic practice. Minimalism and meditative aesthetics are not neutral. When calm becomes scarce, it becomes a form of power. When serenity is privatized, it signals exclusion. To work within these aesthetics today requires acknowledging their associations with control, class, and governance. If an artist’s intention is purely to create commissioned works that promote peace, the question becomes: where is this work residing?
As someone who has always been drawn to works of minimalism, I have to ask: if the future I am depicting already exists in fragments today, where do I stand inside it? I am building worlds not to predict the future, but to understand my position inside the systems that will maintain it. My brutalist dreams are not fantasies about structuring lives, but about creating moments where people are encouraged to acknowledge their environment. For the public, this becomes a desire for clarity in the noisiest of times.
If I become a villain, it is by accident.
If I become a hero, it is by accident.
My desire is not power over people, but power over uncertainty.
Coming from a design background, I have always looked at space as a form of scenography, where environments operate as stages and visitors become actors who willingly adjust their behavior to fit the part. For example, a deep red, dimly lit restaurant might be where someone wants to feel mysterious for the night. This dynamic is not inherently negative. In many cases, it is intentional, consensual, and even enjoyable. Rather than attempting to resolve or correct this condition, my interest is in staying attentive to it. I am less concerned with prescribing experience than with observing how subtle shifts in material, light, and space influence perception, behavior, and awareness over time.