The Entangled Sublimity of Contemporary Technological Art by University of Dundee Research

Title:

Author: The Entangled Sublimity of Contemporary Technological Art

Aidan Robertson

Publication Year/Date: May 2024

Document Version: Fine Art Hons dissertation

License: CC-BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20933/100001303

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The Entangled Sublimity of Contemporary Technological Art

Abstract

Gradually merging concepts, this dissertation investigates contemporary artists questioning the separation between descriptors: ‘nature’, ‘human’, and the ‘machine’, and technological entanglement forming an updated concept of the artistic sublime. Recent contemporary artists have realised the neglect of our multi-sensory whole - ‘physical intelligence’, as opposed to the analytical, ‘cognitive’ mind alone. It can be observed in their work that the modern consciousness is entangled between both vast organic and constructed systems. They attempt to ground awesome and abstract ideas, employing scientific catalysts to motivate methods of expressive artwork creation, harnessing futurist ideas, data, and emerging technologies to question future trajectories. We live in a volatile world, particularly with developments within AI technologies and impending climate dangers. Envisioning a wider perspective, certain artists are merging ‘worlds’. Bio-mimicry and new communication methods sympathetically merged, influenced by a new perspective of the contemporary artistic sublime, could lead to a more intimate society. Contemporary artists are inspiring humbled reevaluations of our species.

Contents

Pages:

(p. 2): Introduction

(pp.2 – 7): Chapter 1: Evolution of the Contemporary Sublime

(pp.8 – 12): Chapter 2: Fragility of Life

(pp.12 – 15): Chapter 3: Biomechanical Ecosystems

(pp.16 – 20): Chapter 4: The Sensory Embrace

(pp.20 – 21): Conclusion

(pp.22 – 23): Image References

(pp.26 – 32): Bibliography

(pp.24 – 26): Text References

Introduction

This paper examines key futurist artists inspired by technology, amongst reflections on the contemporary sublime. It highlights how they transform perceptions of organic phenomena around us and our predominantly digital, mechanised world. These vast concepts can be linked, crafting a new branch of the sublime (‘Trans-sublime’). The text is separated into four chapters, each portraying gradual, artistic reductions in the separation between humanity, nature and the machine. This is a representation of a linear path towards a kind of multi-sensory existence. An assimilation. The first chapter introduces changes to the vocabulary of the sublime up to the contemporary particularly following Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Continued writings compare sublimity to its new perspectives, such as in Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych (1992). Chapter two studies sublime representations of the fragility of life, and fears of techno-capitalist domination. By exploring processes influenced by nature, it covers artists such as Gustav Metzger and Janet Laurence’s Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (first shown in 2015); scientifically embracing the biosphere. The third chapter looks further into technology as a mediator for communication and artwork production, emulating the atmospheres of natural phenomena. Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974-7) introduces this section, by seeing flora as equal amongst mediums of communication technology, later delving into Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003). Artists rekindle acceptance of inexplicable links, the mysticism of organic processes via bio-mimicry. In studying artists who have embraced the potential for transhumanism, the final chapter looks into artists such as Stelarc, looking into how artists are stepping back from assigned scientific descriptors, and our segregation from other living entities. It looks into how this may lead to a more interconnected and intimate future. Before concluding, it investigates Anicka Yi, in reference to her In Love With the World exhibition (2021) as an example of a catalyst to an updated artistic sublime, and positive societal possibilities of the implementation of science and technology within biological systems and vice versa. Artists treading this line create immersive atmospheres, simulations and ecologies never before experienced; this hints at major societal effects through immersive networks of communication, Rather than a didactic approach.

Chapter 1: Evolution of the Contemporary Sublime

The initial concept of the sublime can be attributed to the 1st century Greek writer known as ‘Pseudo-Longinus’. The first text published Peri Hypsous in 1554 was intended as a guide to influencing others via intense ‘heightened experience’. Lydia Hamlet in her essay Longinus and the Baroque Sublime in Britain refers to it’s ideas around rhetoric, mentioning how the sublime did not relate to “form per se, but rather its impact on the receiver” (Hamlet, 2013, para.5). Ideas impacted religious imagery, moving the audience. In Hamlet’s essay Sublime Effect(...) she refers to how his concept “the ancient idea of apotheosis, or deification” in which important societal figures could “traverse up to heaven and actually become gods.” (Hamlet, 2013, para.4). People of high status would present themselves similarly in art. The sublime also gained artistic relevance from Nicolas Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s Du Sublime in 1674. Longinus saw a sublime artist as a figure above others “capable of rising above arduous and ominous events and experiences” to produce great refinement, mentions Simon Morley in ‘Sublime’ (2010, p.14). Longinus emphasised the

question, as stated by Hamlet, “In what do we most resemble the gods?” (Hamlet, 2013, para.9). There was emphasis on the ‘heightening’ of the spectator when faced with scale and the existential.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century, the artistic sublime predominantly related to awesome aspects of nature instead. This would merge into a psychological idea of one's personal experience. It referred to an artistically imposed, expanded experience of consciousness, rather than solely witnessing natural scenes. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (first published 1757), concerned more with psychology and ultimate limits of consciousness, would present the sublime from the standpoint of vast or unusual personal experiences. These would cause both terror followed by glee in the spectator, once aware of their separation from the subject. A form of thrilling survival instinct instilled in the beholder. In part two, section two, Burke refers to terror as the “ruling principle of the sublime'' (1757, p.58) In following sections Burke follows this initial concept with ideas around ‘vastness’ (section VII) and ‘Infinity’ (section VIII) describing it as causing a “delightful horror” as the mind struggles to comprehend (Burke, 1757, p.73).

Perception in relation to the sublime would be followed up by Immanuel Kant, who in his Critique of Judgement (1790) would continue to focus on the mind's limits; something beyond control or understanding. In relation to nature, in Kant’s second writing named Analytic of the Sublime included within, he distinguishes beauty and the sublime. He states that both rely on presentation for intuitive, imaginative concepts linked to reason, to cause delight; not the knowledge of the actual object. He states that the sublime “cannot be contained in any sensuous form”, but is “concerned with the ideas of reason”. The presentation of nature can be contained within our “entire faculty of understanding”, (Kant, p.92) yet can lead ideas towards the presentation of sublimity in the mind. Kant saw the sublime as feeling of inadequacy when faced with something beyond imagination, while simultaneously revelling in this realisation. Suggestions of a ‘higher finality’ are created by the mind, according to Kant when presented with an object of nature (such as in art) which causes the mind to go ‘beyond sensibilities’ (Kant, 1790). Art could present a suggestion of the unpresentable; rather than appearing as a ‘beautiful’ object.

Then In On the Sublime (1801) Friedrich Schiller updated his Kantian inspired ideas in Of the Sublime (1793). He was in favour of seeing it as the “the way the demon’ within man reveals itself”, rather than in exterior human perspectives of ‘beauty’ (Morley, p.16). Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), as Shaw writes in Modernism and the Sublime (2013, para.16), restructures “the contest between excess and limitation in terms of that between the Dionysian and Apollonian principles” instead. A sublime individual would abandon the grounded ‘Apollonian’ perspective for a Dionysian one. Nietzsche describes the Apollonian as “the veiling, healing, transfiguration of Dionysian horror, converting terror into action and making ekstasis, or being outside of oneself, intelligible” (Shaw, 2013, para.16). A sublime individual in this concept would face such lack of knowledge that they embrace a kind of ecstasy followed by self-overcoming.

Modernism marked a shift in attitudes of the traditional sublime in art. An example of this can be seen in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights (1872). It denounces romantic sublimity, by blending illusion and truth. In 1885 he declared his disdain for the traditional sublime. He stated, according to Philip Shaw in Modernism and the Sublime (2013, para.1), “how dutifully the casual in nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset”, seeing natural sublime vocabulary as blind acceptance. In the painting, the banks feature chimneys, distant constructions and building lights, reflecting off the water's surface, blurring sources and reflections. The Japanese woodblock icon, and the two-dimensional plant cause the disturbance of spatiality through shattered perspective. Similarly, an uncanny floating ‘figure’ in the centre inspires associations with death, drawing the viewer into a kind of ‘sublime’ fascination, away from the landscape. Philip Shaw, in The Sublime Exceeded: James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights mentions that “instead of penetrating a mystical horizon” the viewer is instead faced with “an intimation of mortality” both “alternately repellent and fascinating”, rather than a total grandiose sense of overcoming (Shaw, 2013, para.4). This aspect, alongside the simultaneous illusion of depth, and sense of segregating flatness, the painting outlasts the traditional sublime. Shaw (2013, para.6) describes achieving this through “the elevation of the spiritual over the material; the disclosure of truth behind the veil of appearances”. Artworks outdated the previous idea of the sublime by engaging in their own artificiality. It is key here in revealing how modern art began to focus on the non-representational.

Not only has the experiential concept of the sublime changed, but so has the way it is represented. In romanticism, as Rina Arya writes in Bill Viola and the Sublime (2010, para. 1), main response types are were a result of two topics - “the theological – where nature was viewed as a reflection of the sublime – and the imaginative – where the sublime was seen as a source of creative inspiration for the artist”. Yet, following this, In the twentieth century, with technological and scientific advancements, the sublime raised questions of how to ultimately open viewers to an unpresentable experience. Jean-François Lyotard posed In The Postmodern Condition (version published 1984)

Figure 1: (Whistler, 1872) - Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights

that the sublime relies on abstraction, through non-representation, voids, being the “incommensurability of reality to concept”. (Lyotard, 1984, p.79). In this way, postmodernism, he says, is not to be associated with the nostalgia of the unattainable in modernism’s ‘recognisable consistency’. Instead, he poses that postmodernism is that of forming the rules of “what will have been done”, not to “supply the reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (Lyotard, 1984, p.81). Works by the artist Kazimir Malevich, such as his painting White on White (1918) and then Black Square (1930) are key examples of this infinite space and emptiness being rendered as attempts to produce feelings beyond comprehension, rather than representing them. They feature simplified blocks of colour, brought into ‘now’ through their texture; indications of their creation. They are initially subjective rather than objective. Moving away from the terror suggested by the ‘transcendental illusion’ of Kant, Lyotard suggests that we should be “witness to the unpresentable” and “activate the differences” (Lyotard, 1984, p.82) rather than attempt to converge meanings down. Barnett Newman marked the start of new ideas of the sublime with his 1948 text The Sublime is Now, in which time he created large paintings of flat colour blocks, with vertical ‘zips’, stripes which may suggest something behind the painting, just out of reach. Newman’s notes within his text are said by Gilbert-Rolfe to be “announcing a concern with immediacy” making the viewer present (1999, p.149). Philip Shaw in Sublime Destruction: Barnett Newman’s Adam and Eve writes how Lyotard emphasised the concept of time in Newman’s outlook. Saying that The Sublime is Now has “nothing to do with continuity or duration and as such is opposed to the constitution of the human subject”. Newman’s work here is a “stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it. Rather, it is what dismantles consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate, and even what consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself”, (Shaw, 2013, para.5). In this way, Newman resonated with finding a kind of personal sublime. Seanin Hall states, in the 2021 article Predicting the Curve: Barnett Newman and Post-Postmodernism, in reference to John p. O'Neil, that Newman was exploring a kind of self transcendence. It is stated that he painted ‘metaphysical’ concepts, and that emptiness, impossible to fully represent, “was something of the natural world, while he was painting miracles”, and that “the miraculous here is the revelation he provided into the transcendental self. (Hall, 2021, p.6).

The scale of his ‘zips’ create an atmospheric immersion, suggesting freedom. The up close roughness of the lines break the consistency and uniformity of the paintings, yet each appears selfreferential; in appearance, and that of the artist himself. Newman’s immediacy can be now linked to technology in light of contemporary art according to Gilbert Rolfe in Beauty and the

Figure 2: (Newman, 1949) - The Promise

Contemporary Sublime (1999). Gilbert-Rolfe talks about Newman’s ‘limitlessness visualised’, inspired by the “image of the tundra … as an idea of emptiness and freedom to move” having been replaced by the knowledge that this void is now “filled with electronic signals”. Those signals themselves are never-ending yet constantly flowing, appearing as an all encompassing mental concept (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999, p.54).

Gilbert-Rolfe states that a contemporary sublime could require complex routing through the planes of late technocapitalism, A continuation of exploring multifaceted issues, through Newman's self-referential “origin and return” of “intersection of differences and repetition as difference” (Gilbert-Rolfe,1999, p.54). However, the difficulty is due to the ‘permanent immediacy’, such as in our digital screens. A lack of origin. There is a lack of mental laws as it requires a ‘heteronomous’ form of ‘movement’ through multifaceted ideas, which in themselves are ‘heteronomous’; (GilbertRolfe,1999, p.55). Whereas, In ‘nature’ there is a beginning, origin, end, and then return. He believes that artists such as Shirley Kaneda’s non-representational representations of ‘linkages’ in technology are concerned with limitless concepts as process, but ‘other than nature’, like a painting as a screen. He mentions an ‘androgynous sublime’. This, rather than Newman’s, is concerned with a non-central idea, “collapsing orders of priority” (e.g. representations or media usage in art) into each other, therefore “a temporality of simultaneity and sameness, a completeness” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999, p.65). It is suggested that Kaneda’s contemporary works suggest this new trajectory. Gilbert Rolfe refers to her quote that “this notion of linkage”, (through combining the media, texture, and so on), “between similar and diverse bits of information seem to be the real content of the digital as a universal medium” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999, p.62). This is well represented in the title, abstract forms, and a suggestion of a depth of field through blurred and sharp coloured shapes and textures in Confident Apprehension (2013). There is a temporality through the combination of media as a whole, but the sensuous ‘linkages’, are undetermined. In Kaneda’s technological ‘linkage’, there is no ‘outside’ entity, like nature was. The infinite concepts of technology and nature limit and delimit each other and provide crossovers, yet each with unclear ‘trans-sublime’ non-conclusions. The sublime is associated with taking parts of both endless nature, technology, and connecting them to produce something somewhat tangible, yet still not fully within reach of the viewer’s mind.

Figure 3: (Kaneda, 2013) - Confident Apprehension

Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych (1992) is a useful example. The three films featured are displayed as an immersive audio-visual whole, where natural stages of life are shown as one duration, in stages, and as an infinite loop via digital outputs. A condensed timeline tied by the sounds of breath, crying, and moving water. The left panel shows footage of birth, in the centre a clothed man in water switching between bouts of struggle and calm, and the right shows footage of the artist's own severely ill mother. Rina Arya writes in Bill Viola and the Sublime that life itself is represented by the clothed man as he “signifies the journey of life with its ups and downs, and is literally suspended between birth and death” (Arya, 2010, para. 10). It could be said that Burke’s terrifying excitement is connected as the viewer is confronted with their own reality in individual succession. However, due to the repetition and simultaneity, particularly within the audio, “The linear framework of birth, life and death is transcended” and they become entangled “in the cycle of existence, where death is not viewed as a state that occurs at the end of life but is inherent within its very condition” (Arya 2010, para.11). Viola’s video work suggests the sublime by influencing subjective emotions through technology. Nantes Triptych, as Arya states, does not attempt to ‘solve’ the meaning of the sublime. Instead, it “communicates to us the reality of our material flesh-and-blood condition: it just is”. Like Lyotard, closer to Newman’s idea, it reveals the “impossibility of representation” (Arya, 2010, para.25) rather than trying to connect the inconceivable and material. It urges a theoretical ‘step back’ on our relationship to life itself, which could be seen as a type of goal towards a societal ‘selftranscendence’.

Figure 4: (Viola, 1992) - Nantes Triptych

Chapter 2: Fragility of Life

The contemporary art period started around 1970. Recently, it is likely for technology’s powerful influence to aid the characterisation of the sublime arising from an overwhelming terror, and excitement less so. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe writes in Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999) that technology has “subsumed the idea of the sublime” as it is “terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential, while being entirely a product a product of knowledge” - merging both “limitless with pure ratio”. Humans eventually become obsolete once it is unbound. (GilbertRolfe, 1999, p.128). Simon Morley writes of how theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard and Frederic Jameson viewed the experience of modern life in “the extreme space-time compressions produced by globalised communication technologies'' creating an outlook which is “fundamentally destabilising and excessive” (Morley, 2010, p.12).

It’s current relevance is due to what Luke White in the essay Damien Hirst’s Shark: Nature, Capitalism and the Sublime refers to as “our embrace within a capitalist modernity whose form of capital” now bears resemblance to the “hyper-liquid and perplexingly spectral capital of the eighteenth century” (White, 2013, para.3). To White, the traditional notions of the ‘natural sublime’ are now linked to capitalist worries; The “relevance as an aesthetic of terrible nature” being linked to grave environmental issues, destruction and ‘human power’ (White, 2013, para.4). Damien Hurst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a glass box featuring a large shark floating in a formaldehyde solution might suggest fear through common associations of danger, its imminent appearance compared to that of the deep ocean; floating in the void. Referred in mass media, with films such as ‘Jaws’ the shark has become an icon of death and

Figure 5: (Hurst, 1991) - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

pp.144 -145). The 1990 to 1999 installation does this through endlessly varying the temperature of liquid crystal slides inside projectors. While computerised and automated initially in the process, there are unpredictable organic results. Changing colours and globule patterns emerge like growing organisms. Described by Kemp as creating “art forms that serve as theatres of natural process” (2000, p.145), Metzger’s work displays terrifying aspects of technology based destruction, similar to his initial auto-destructive art, but fuses this with the creative potential of “integration with the life-giving properties of nature” (Kemp, 2000, p.145). He demonstrates possible navigation of the unpredictable, vast forces of both nature and technology, but also the catalyst for chaos created by automation and forced control for techno-capitalist means. Here, he begins with technology, and proceeds to work in collaboration with natural processes which follow, rather than vice versa. Here there is a crossover of the natural sublime and technological sublime at a point where hope for the future prevails, despite the non-finality.

Roxy Paine creates work, which like Metzger, holds tension, but hope, between industrialisation and the organic landscape. His steel, tree-like ‘Dendroids’ stand out in context, both industrially artificial but familiar and organic. The widely spread branches of interconnected ‘trees’ in Maelstrom (2009) appear as metallic neurons, growing naturally from the ground. Eleanor Heartney in Roxy Paine (2009) describes this as proving how “Such concepts as body, nature and industry, growth and decay, interior and exterior states, can’t be easily disentangled” (2009, p.211). Similarly, mocking control over nature within Bad Lawn (1998), made of uncanny false plants, he reveals true terrifying perspectives of ‘the garden’, and persuades the audience to reconsider their ideals. His work exceeds the “suspicion of scientific progress” and suggests a better future in which “ceding a certain degree of control to the larger forces around us whether it is natural or man-made” (Heartney, 2009, p.132) is required in the future, and within the contemporary art

Figure 7: (Paine, 2009) - Maelstrom process.

Janet Laurence expands on an empathetic, technological ‘sublime’ concept. Her Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef installation (2019, first shown 2015) symbolises small technological impacts to an environment having large, real consequences, and their reversal to prevent our own harm. This reversal is scientifically initiated. Laurence writes in her website section Alchemical that the intention was to represent creatures “metaphorically being nursed and on life support. Making visible the invisible and offers hope for the healing of the natural environment”. The overall installation consists of glass boxes, like Damien Hurst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which include a wide selection of sea creature specimens. Their death is clear and confirmed in labels, suggesting immediacy and sterile order. However, the Coral, small plants, fish and molluscs are hooked into breathing apparatus, wires, tubes, and held in glass containers. Futile attempts at rescue; empathetic and hopeful, yet anxiety inducing. A technosublime fear of irreversible ecological damage. Separated and protected from viewers behind layers of glass, It's as if human survival instinct is represented in the scientific equipment, acting as a hospital for the creatures of the sea. This mirrors our embrace of technology to escape overwhelming sublime concepts such as the ocean and death. It also suggests that this could save the ecologies we have damaged too; a ‘trans-sublime’ crossover of the biological cycles and exponential technological advancement. Layered projections behind the glass extend the context of the installation beyond and into the real world. They depict dead and living coral, as well as other living creatures. The glass boxes linked to a Kantian sublime, depict natural vastness separated from its context initiating an ironic joyous relief via outside observation. But, the metaphorical suggestion of endlessness and suspension of time; or of death. Due to the projections, movement of time is clear, with evidence of human impacts. Scientific technology in respects to the metaphor of

Figure 8: (Laurence, 2019) - Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef

survival and destruction, suggests the unpredictable future in a hopeful, yet also fearful light; Burke’s fear and overcoming in a constant cycle. The sublime is floating in suspension between endlessly advancing technology and biological processes. It’s perhaps the immersion of the projection and scientific context which creates a sublime aura of ‘self-transcendence’; a sort of selfovercoming. The audience acts as the mediator of time and mentally navigates the past (life), present (dead and labelled), and future (saving or failing to save humanity as a result), choosing how to connect with true environmental issues.

Chapter 3: Biomechanical Ecosystems

Artistic immersion created through mechanical and biological convergence can suggest new sublime ecological systems; real science-fiction. pioneering artists like Nam June Paik during the 1960s and 70s ventured into video technologies through the intersection of natural and manufactured experience. He was focussed on communication mediated via new technology – its density, intimacy, and sensory and spiritual possibilities. He was inspired by the contrasts between western mass communications and traditional eastern philosophies, crossing them over. His early work Zen for TV (1963) provides an early contemporary and technological connection to Newman’s ‘zips’, a mute television on its side displaying one vertical white line by altering circuits within. The ‘zip’- like line suggests an infinity and potential; an endless void. Inspired by spiritual self-transcendence in old eastern philosophies, the work suggests a technological enlightenment yet to come – Connection to the endless, terrifyingly exciting possibilities of instant communication technologies. The title suggests a state of meditation, the static line in the centre focussing the viewer into a peaceful state. The alteration of a purely informational tool has allowed it to reach spiritual connotations of the higher self, suggesting peace and acceptance within the idea of the infinite. Paik’s TV buddha (1974), consists of a small 18th century Buddha statue and a camera pointing directly towards it. The footage is relayed to a white, round 1970s cathode ray tube television also facing the statue like an

electronic eye. The Buddha is both, as Leontine Coelewij puts it in Nam June Paik (2019), “the viewer and the viewed image” which brings up ideas of our “individual experience of the mass medium of the television beyond any programmed content”, ‘higher’ or entirely personal human experiences communicated via technology, yet outside the influences of capitalism in set formats, and sways of media influence (2019, p.141). Working with us, rather than persuading or dictating.

Figure 9: (Paik, 1963) - Zen for TV

This also goes for his TV Garden installation (1974-7) in which plants, screens and audio form an atmospheric, chaotic landscape. Strong scented tropical plants of different heights form a deep, dark primordial environment, lit subtly by blaring snapshots of media culture through many monitors. The flashing CRT screens blend in the undergrowth, hidden in leaves. The installation is described by Andrea Nitsche-Krupp in Nam June Paik (2019) as being related to the density and interconnectedness of the world, saying “for Paik, art could – even should embrace the fullness of the world” (2019, p.99), being at one with the endless chaos, a sort of Nietzschean sublime, rather than attempting to be entirely in control of its outcomes. Nitsche-Krupp refers to Paik’s intention towards participation as his background voice-over states “Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Threequarter close your eyes.” and so on, allowing presence and awareness of roles of control, amongst additional narrations persuading similar tasks (Nitsche-Krupp, 2019, p.99). Periods of offset between human constructional elements and natural experience result. It suggests attempts at controlling perceptions by the media, and of organic experience. Also, it could mean one must assimilate, immersed in an unpredictable, vast (sublime) entanglement of connections to experience true reality, rather than escape from fear by following instructions. Off the techno-biological beaten path and into the wilds.

Paik writes in a 1979 text that information itself can be perceived as a sublime concept tied by the biological and electronic. He writes that “communications flow is the new metabolism of homo sapiens”, and that it is “as natural as breathing in our body, waves in the sea, or waning of the

Figure 10: (Paik, 1974) - TV Garden

moon”. The increasing speed of endless information via technology and interpersonal means, he believes, will bring an end to fears from capitalist greed and power struggle (Paik, 2019, p. 158). Despite the videos of consumerist, popular culture associations within works such as his Electronic Superhighway (1995), Paik’s recent art emphasises possibilities in the immediacy of those infinitely flowing connections as a multi-transcendent, global, Longinian-type sublime in which the subject and spectator are ‘raised’ as one. In his TV garden a spiritual, meditative outlook is observed through weaving electronic, chemical, and audio signals suggesting infinity in multiple directions. Though, their crossovers unearth tangible, representations of humanity's future.

Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project deals with complete immersion too, considering bodily sensations and perception. His work persuades integration, rather than separation of natural sublimity as part of everyday culture and society through technology, to bring us together with its grand collective experience. Works involve viewers in an equivalent of a real world context, rather than merely an observer. Susan May in Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project (2003) refers to Elliasson’s recent practice as questioning our true experience of nature’. The artwork may “challenge presumptions of our surroundings by creating situations that require viewers to reorder their perception of their environment and place within it” (May, 2003, p.19).

A key example of this is present in his early work Beauty (1993) where sprinkler systems spray water, refracting the spotlights above to create a unique rainbow from every viewpoint. A sublime effect in this way is exemplified in works such as Green River (1998), recreated in Stockholm (2000). It was a site based piece where a harmless substance, uraninite, was secretly released into the Strömmen river. As May states, “the substance turned a luminous green colour” and passers by would “stop in their tracks and reassess elements of their everyday environment”. This emphasised the river flow pattern in an unusual, exciting and perhaps frightening way, a “heightened reality”, as there is no evidence of the source and outcome (May, 2003, p. 19). There is a real world context, and illusion of a mysterious natural occurrence beyond control; Burke’s traditional sublime happening in a real world context. Eliasson creates sublime experience by simulating atmospheric conditions that cannot be explained, only felt. They bring people together as they become aware of the everyday place in relation to it, the screen or museum. As stated by May (2003, p.22), Eliasson thinks of the museum as “a ‘microcosm of society’, a situation that parallels the world outside”. He proves how the weather is a part of the ‘collective consciousness’, a part of our senses and social framework. Biological

systems

Figure 11: (Eliasson, 1996) - Your Strange Certainty Still Kept are powerful

communicative and psychological tools. In Your strange certainty still kept (1996), inside a dark space, a simulation of rain is repeatedly frozen in time by a flashing light, highlighting the droplets as they batter into the container below. Here, there is a cycle of atmospheres as the audience is aware of the technology controlling the natural phenomena, yet the associations are inseparable and unexplainable, the light keeping the viewer present. There is a sense of uncertainty and realisation as artifice and truth become one; rather than beholding, the audience are linked through ingrained sensations of rainfall. In his 2016 Waterfall installation in France, the terrifying crashing of a waterfall is simulated live from a towering scaffold, unlike Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 painting Niagara for example – the distant romantic sublime.

It is mentioned in the book The Weather Project (2003) how his work attempts to avoid “divisions between wild and domesticated, private and public, technical and organic” and “replaced by a set of experimentations on the conditions that nurture our collective lives”. (Latour, 2003, p.30). In his 2003 installation, The Weather Project, a Mechanically constructed, looming illusion of a setting sun hovers high above the darkened Tate Turbine Hall. People underneath bask in the shared glow.

Exemplifying a blend of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, Eliasson highlights what is described by Latour as “the simultaneous extension of science and the ever increasing entanglement of human activities with things” and that there is “no longer any outside”. (Latour, 2003, p.39). He shows the lack of separation due to the vast sublimity of the weather, and equally that of technology. He states, “The remaining inside is to be explored in great detail and with great caution because it is neither a mind nor an ‘outside world’… but rather a delicate sphere of climate control” (Latour, 2003, p.39). In this way, Burke’s traditional survival instinct is created via the representation of natural phenomena, but also in a sustained real world context where technology provides delicate maintenance of our climate. There is a sense of hope through collective introspection, but uncertainty, as the city is a merging of endless nature and organically evolving technology, often overlapping boundaries beyond individual affect. In ‘The Weather Project’ the trans-sublime is revealed through technologically mediated, inexplicable sensory associations of certain environmental conditions.

Figure 12: (Eliasson, 2003) - The Weather Project

Chapter 4: The Sensory Embrace

Stelarc, The transhumanist artist, approaches the human body as an amalgam with surrounding biology, and our electronic systems. He creates performative works to demonstrate digitalmechanical extensions and limits of the human body. A useful explanation of this is referred to in Totally Wired (1996) where Rachael Armstrong refers to his Fractal Flesh performance in Luxembourg in which Stelarc surrendered movement to the electrical impulses of a STIMBOD machine. The artist was contained within an electronic interface which would take input from various remote participants. A lack of control displaying a real risk of death. Stelarc’s involuntary movements would then be translated into programs, manipulating an industrial mechanical arm nearby. The audience could gain control of the artist's limbs via the internet, his “identity fractured into characters”, both digitally connected and biomechanical (Armstrong, 1996, p.26). Armstrong suggests that this multi-interaction, through the “shared sensations and the possibility of death”, unlike online games with computers alone as the mediator, due to the true danger, people were much more aware of the “human factor in Stelarc’s character” (1996, p.27). The apparent loss of ego presents a form of Nietzschean abandon and ecstasy as the artist must accept his fate, while at the same time, the split audience replaces him and may gradually form survival instinct and empathy. a sublime, collective sensation of overcoming is formed beyond the unpredictability. This reveals the changing definition of humanity itself as Stelarc’s primary focus.

New technologies may allow for extrasensory experience. Emerging creativity through an immersive environment suggests vastness in a progressive light, rather than paralysing. Roy Ascott in Art Journal vol.49 no.3, a section from Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?, he mentions how from the ‘digital

Figure 13: (Stelarc, n.d.) - Fractal Flesh Performance matrix’ we have brought new technology into a ‘telematic embrace’; widespread global connective systems. He states how our “sensory experience becomes extrasensory, as our vision is enhanced by the extrasensory devices of telematic perception”. In other words, being interlinked with ‘the computer’ widens artistic perception through its integration. It becomes engaged in an infinite process of ‘autopoiesis’; part of its own creation. He states how as the computer deals “invisibly with the invisible” processing vast, chaotic layers of information and how these “patterns of events, these new exhilarating metaphors of existence – non-linear, uncertain, layered and discontinuous” can be ‘re-described’, allowing for a view into the unknown, a sense of the contemporary sublime – not just as a tool but as a “vehicle

of consciousness, of creativity and expression” (Ascott, 1990, pp. 246-47). Ascott seemingly believes that our assimilation within the vast digital unknown negates fear.

Contemporary art, associated with grounded social values to create cultural values, gradually exceeded the past visions of a ‘higher’ reality or in grandiose experiences of nature. Spiritual artistic representations often become more concerned with ways of expressing a transcendence of self, and self-realisation, amongst a dense world of electronic mass media, capitalism, and consumerism, somewhat similar to Newman’s introspection. In Contemporary Art and the Sublime, in attempt to identify a recent account of the sublime, Julian Bell describes the American art critic Thomas McEvilley’s idea of “the unknown face of global capitalism” as being “terrifying in its vastness” and that this points towards an idea that “Art and technology and so on are just role-players in the grand game” (Bell, 2013, para.21). Perhaps this perspective may change via the influence of certain newer contemporary artists, based on the ideas of what is just beyond comprehension, yet with clear scientific knowledge rooted in its conception. An intention of somewhat facing the volatile complexity of a ‘Techno-capitalist system’, but also pushing contemporary social and cultural progression in an intimate, collective sublimity amongst the vastness of nature and more so, the infinite vastness of technology. A suggestion of a ‘trans-sublime’ is one of combined fragility and hope. Art linked to technological advancement and biological systems can affect the future as it unfolds, as a ‘future presentness’ via experimentation. ‘Trans-sublime’ is on the pinnacle of tangible. True science-fiction; a knife edge of sublime experience. Reality, (posing realistic technologies, and those of moral limits), and their representation.

Anicka Yi’s artwork embraces sublimity of technology through the idea of Ascott’s ‘Telematic Embrace’ but with a sympathy for biological systems; physicality. A symbiosis which negates the

Figure 14: (Yi, 2017) - Lifestyle Wars

terror through immersive sensory presence, embracing the biotechnological future by suggesting societal shifts in how we view ourselves. The sublime communicated in her work derives from the deep interconnectedness of human senses, digital senses, and chemical signals. These are uncontrollable systems and subjective experiences. The overcoming then resides in the empathetic and collaborative elements instilled in the work, particularly her In Love With the World (2021) Installation. An acceptance and awareness of regeneration through an organically developed, mechanically initiated, selfless ecology points towards a hopeful future.

A communication entanglement, Lifestyle wars (2017) described by Carly Whitefield in Anicka Yi: In Love with the world (2021) is a diorama of two large mushrooms made of foam, acrylic and gravel encircled by looming server cases and cables. The walls are lit by glowing, complex arrays of circuit patterns containing thousands of live ants. The circuit patterns are filled with a scent combining “compounds analysed from Asian American women’s sweat with those emitted by carpenter ants” (Whitefield, 2021, p.37). The intention here is to draw attention to socio-political perspectives of scent, as we share similar processes as ants – use of pheromones – within communication, but also navigation. Also, similarly, as mushrooms communicate through molecule exchanges, “mycorrhizal networks” or the “the fungal internet”, Yi treats this “sense-based learning” as an example for the future, creating “a richer and more diverse portrait of communication wired into the biological world” (Whitefield, 2021, p.37). The differences lie only within the mediums. By combining them, further immersive, intimate connections to the biosphere could result.

This is similarly present in ideas around her film The Flavor Genome (2016). Yi’s 3D film installation is set in a speculative world in which science allows for experiencing others' unique, personal, sensory perception through chemical distillation. A ‘flavour chemist’ is followed within the film, attempting to find a certain “perception-altering flower” as a narration states historical information of colonialism’s biases against hybrid life forms such as the Liger (Whitefield, 2021, p.30). Whitefield mentions how the piece “anticipates an increased integration of perceptual experiences into ever more embodied composite and perhaps even empathetic forms of cognition”, demonstrating the inseparable modern ties between synthetic and natural biology. It displays a world where “chemical personas can be sampled like wine”, raising questions around future genetic technologies (Whitefield, 2021, p.30). The sublime here lies between the infinite technological fear generated by overwhelming interconnected perception, and science as power. However, the film also has spiritual connotations through first hand, usually unreachable feelings allowed by biotechnology.

Yi’s ‘trans-sublimity’, exemplified by her sculpture Terra Incognita (2019) is one of an electrical and chemical interface. In framed mud layers, gas sensing circuits detect the conditions of the odour-emitting bacteria amongst the microbes. The detected results are presented through light flashes in the frames. a “machine language responsive to the complex molecular feedback” (Whitefield, 2021, p.39). The information is unexplainable. Ideas beyond control are gradually offset by actual immersion within these systems themselves.

This is the concept surrounding Yi’s ‘Aerobes’ within In Love With the World (2021). Her floating, elegant, jellyfish-like sculptures possess electronic sensing to react to their surroundings as animals. As Yi mentions, “These aerobes are also ecosystems. You have a series of nested ecosystems. The density of the crowds will play a role in how the aerobes behave, and how they create their own community, whether they’re flocking or fleeing” (2021, p.50). They work in an evolutionary way, undergoing rounds of behavioural modification. This information can be tracked but is ultimately unpredictable. Seeing the Tate Turbine Hall as a looming aquarium, the biomechanical dirigibles elegantly swim, like upscaled microscopic lifeforms, with transparent skin and gentle limbs. The types of ‘Aerobe’ are named exploratory ‘Xenojellies’, with tentacles appearing as the edges of a ‘Veiled Lady’ mushroom, and ‘Plenulae’ that are “coated in a fine substance meant to evoke cilia'' (Yi, 2021, p.47) that act as tactile protrusions or undulating fins. Within the live installation, certain engineered ‘scentscapes’ were generated, which ‘aerobes’ would react to; acting ‘stressed’ when experiencing ‘Machine age’ related ambiences for instance, and inquisitive in smells associated with damp vegetation of late Jurassic periods. They have autonomy driven by these, context, and connection to humans. Yi talks about how these ‘scentscapes’ “convey the evolutionary transformation of machine alongside human, and how we have inextricably influenced each other” and through this concept of joint evolution she asks whether “machines become a sort of companion species for humans and vice versa?”, exchanging information through alternate senses. Yi’s creatures symbolise the amalgamation of life, and information present within the body, and the eventual replication of this in machines; a harmony of species (Yi, 2021, p.54). She emphasises the sensory, physical intelligence rather than solely the cognitive, which is often used to categorise and

Figure 15: (Yi, 2021) - In Love with the World

separate us from other life, asking “How does intelligence change if you expand your focus beyond the brain and you add a gut or a nose or a tongue into the mix?” (Yi, 2021, p.51).

In an interview, she describes the fact that “technology is evolving, and machine intelligence too”, seeing this transforming our “self-definition as human beings”. As artificial intelligence moves further towards ‘deep learning’, the artist believes that the concept of humanity itself will also change. She describes how “Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) engineering is not just trying to replicate human intelligence but all forms of intelligence”, leading to an interesting speculation for a restructuring of evolution (Yi, 2021, p.45).

Anicka Yi’s practice persuades us to view the world at an honest, interconnected microbiological level, where humans are entangled in an intricate system of chaos. Our bodies are an amalgam; intertwined electronically, informationally and biologically within ecology. From this knowledge, she creates immersive, hybrid environments. Within sculptures she makes use of all senses, particularly smell, and other microbial mediums to develop communication and alternative approaches of familiarity. The artist imagines a world where ‘biologised’ machines “grow so deeply enmeshed with an ecosystem that they would become more like a natural force, like the weather” (Yi, 2021, p.103). Here, the means of ‘trans-sublime’ is created via a conceptual, mechanically born, organic, ecological system that is on the precipice of reality and of unknown outcomes; traditional, natural sublime ideas of fearful beholding and self-realisation, crossing over technocapitalist sublime of scientifically initiated self-sabotage. As Yi states, our fear is that these types of machines may ‘overtake us’, however “we do know that they are not exempt outside of evolution, and that’s another way of saying they’re not outside of nature”, like other animals, they cannot be separated from the ecosystem.

Familiar and simultaneously uncanny representations of evolution present in Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures also suggest infinite trajectories of scientifically influenced life. An example being those in her 2019 exhibition in the Cairns Art Gallery Life Clings Closest. The protective embrace of a creature resembling a human-dolphin hybrid and a young girl in No Fear of Depths (2019) seems to reveal a strange future of genetic modification. A dolphin, an intelligent animal, would have little fear over ventures into the ocean’s deep unknown. It suggests that altering our place in the ecosystem to embrace uncertainty, both scientifically and naturally, may become the only way to survive, and symbiotically function.

Conclusion

Ascott states in a 1995 essay within the Transhumanist Reader (2013) how the twenty-first century, Is an age in which “new metaphors to house the complex interacting systems of biological, technological and social life which we are developing” will be, (are), required; these systems are becoming intertwined rather than separate concepts (Ascott, 2013, p.438). He states, “I may seem paradoxical to the popular view of art’s relationship to nature, but it is these technological and computerised systems which are providing us with a threshold, an open doorway into the natural world – whereas, landscape and figure painting, the faithfully realistic and naturalistic painting of Western culture, have kept us separated from it” (Ascott, 2013, p.439). This can be observed with immersive contemporary installations, where scale and connection to the present allow for real

context, unmatched by those ‘staged’ representations of artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner’s theatrical paintings of the violent ocean, as an example of the traditional romantic sublime. To conclude, the artistic ‘trans-sublime’ in this dissertation is an anticipation and hopeful feeling created within audiences via societal, collective, sensory experiences; those which reconverge our ‘cognitive’ separation of vast concepts via scientific language. Embracing future technology, and acceptance is suggested, as humanity becomes ingrained – assimilated. This sublime sits between the infinite evolution of the biosphere and technosphere. With artists such as Anicka Yi, the sublime is explored as one of introspection – art to initiate honesty, overcoming one's self through a multiplex of communication systems. Technological art can reveal the false hierarchy in which we place ourselves above all through humbling fear, and realisation of equality. It is demonstrated through technological art, that rather than elevation of self or individual artist alone, it can help pave the way for a potentially harmonious and seamless existence among other lifeforms.

7,531 words

Image References:

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