Comments on: “Tilt shift photography is an aesthetic response to the web…”

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:10:54 +0000

You should pick up this book anyways. It’s one of the smartest, most critical, yet most lyrical and tactile academic books I’ve ever read. I wish I could write like Susan Stewart.

By: Nav

Nav — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:17:54 +0000

No, I was wrong. It’s the not the inverse sublime. It’s the aestheticisation of the sublime. It’s the same move – or at least an analagous one. Take magnitude and frame it aesthetically in order to both contain and revel (safely) in its threat.

Ah well. Still interesting though.

By: Nav

Nav — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:56:30 +0000

Thanks. It was a just a random thought – nothing I’m going to follow up really. I think if you push the idea, then a lot of (realist) aesthetic representation is an attempt to capture something that ultimately can’t be captured. It’s the framing of it that I think is neat – the self-conscious attempt to take the large and make it small. It seems different than Englightenment approaches to the sublime. If that was about asserting the capacity or infinity of consciousness/the subject to ‘overcome’ magnitude, then this is interestingly different.

I think I’m just generally interested in how we aesthetically respond to ‘so much’. It’s like when you wander through the library and realise just how much stuff is out there – it’s simultaneously inspiring and crushing. The web feels like that exponentially magnified.

I wonder if there are other aesthetic responses to this phenomenon (if we do agree that it is one). Microfiction perhaps?

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:47:48 +0000

If you’re interested in pursuing this, there’s a great book by Susan Stewart called On Longing – great chapters on the sublime and miniaturization.