datascapes: Redefining the Sublime in Contemporary Art

Abstract

Despite the recent resurgence of the sublime as a key theme in contemporary art and its profound art historical lineage, the concept largely remains defined in terms of its 18th century formulation by German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He conceived of the sublime as an aesthetic space where the human observer is overwhelmed by the massive scale of a pictorial object, triggering the perception of awe and dread. However, recent developments in art, philosophy and technology provide the foundation for reformulating the sublime: firstly, as emerging from minute rather than massive scale objects, and secondly, as the result of the material and virtual relationships between these objects. Through a creative body of work, the thesis experimentally tests the contemporary hypotheses of Claire Colebrook, that ‘sublimity allows all infinities to unfold from insignificant minutiae’, and Wojciech Kałaga, that the sublime is a relation between physical and virtual objects. It does so by exploring how a comprehensive analogue and digital approach can provide a portal into a new practice and understanding of the sublime by expanding Kant’s two notions of the sublime. Firstly, while Kant conceives the sublime as a function of vast scale, the research investigates the sublime as emerging from minute scale. Drawing on the work of Roman Opałka and Ryoji Ikeda as starting points, the creative works integrate the hand painting and digital notation of minutiae to trace a sublime that occupies a minute scale of infinity. Secondly, while Kant argues that the sublime is the property of human perception triggered by natural objects, the studio research explores how a reimagined sublime is the property of the infinite virtual and material relations between objects. Theoretically, the thesis explores this new, expanded concept of the sublime by evaluating its theoretical legacy alongside its artistic expression in the work of selected artists and the creative work undertaken as part of the doctoral project. In particular, it unpacks the tension in Kant's division of the sublime into the dynamical and the mathematical sublime. In the former, Kant offers the sublime as a formless infinity of massive objects that can be mastered through imagination, in which its unbounded nature is aesthetically sublimated to be rendered awe-inspiring. In the latter, he formulates the sublime as an absolute infinity that presents an un-representable limit to the imagination that can only be mastered conceptually through mathematical thinking. In response, the thesis conceptualises the sublime in terms of objects, rather than the imaginative limitations of human perception, arguing these objects occupy a spectrum from the actual to the virtual and at a scale from the minute to the cosmological. By focusing on the relations between objects at minute scale and using a methodology that integrates analogue and digital techniques, this thesis experimentally explores a new way of imagining and conceptualising the sublime beyond the limitations of Kantian imagination and thought.