Sofi Xian
An Archaeology of a Promised Future: How Frutiger Aero Was Uncovered
Talk
20 May 2026 at 6.30 PM
ALUO / Tobačna 5, Ljubljana
Q&A moderated by Lea Sande & Ema Maznik Antić
Pre-event to the release of the 3rd issue of multithread
Perhaps you have heard of Frutiger Aero, the aesthetic floating around on TikTok and in people’s retro-tech filled bedrooms, which Valentina Tanni calls the successor to ‘Vaporwave’. But how does one even ‘discover’ an aesthetic? In a talk for Aksioma, Sofi Xian, a co-founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, charts her meandering journey through eclectic and unpredictable sources including open-source software theming, hipster semiotics, Wes Anderson parodies, Japanese and Korean music of the 90s and 00s, and the Weird Facebook subculture to explain how she came to describe this ‘lost future’. The talk traces how these seemingly disconnected observations, spanning over a decade, gradually coalesce into a methodology for identifying and naming ‘consumer aesthetics’—and what that methodology reveals about the way our collective experience is shaped by disposable and ambient expressions.
THE AUTHOR
Sofi Xian (冼納然, also Sofia Lee) is a researcher, cultural theorist, and multimedia artist based in Rotterdam, NL. Informed by a diverse background spanning computational linguistics, experimental photography, and cinema, she charts the semiotic terrain of consumer culture and theorises its evolution and circulation. Her particular focuses are on how unpopular, naïve, marginal, repetitive and forgotten detritus of culture serve as potent reservoirs of emergent aesthetics and ambient meaning formations. As a founding member of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, Sofi has pioneered approaches to ‘consumer aesthetics’ and contributed foundational research on the aesthetic Frutiger Aero, a term she also coined along with Froyo Tam. She has led workshops on consumer aesthetics research practices. In 2018, she also founded digicam.love, a community dedicated to highlighting the untapped aesthetic potential of forgotten point-and-shoot digital cameras.
CREDITS
Author: Sofi Xian
Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
and
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
In partnership with:
ALUO – The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
The project is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union through the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+)
Additional support:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia