ABSTRACT
The concept of the sublime, applied to experiences of technologically mediated, or digital culture, raises multiple questions that go beyond the redefinition of the sublime itself and give insights about the effects of technologies on how we conceive of the “self” and what it means to be human. On the one hand, the sublime is applied to certain phenomena of digital culture such as: the autopoetic, generative qualities of code; the extension of the senses that makes new perceptions possible; virtual reality, which offers an illusion of immersion into “other,” imagined worlds; and datascapes that are hardly navigable in their immensity and escape our ability to comprehend them in their “totality.” All these phenomena can be approached through the features that are most essential to the classical sublime (both Burkean and Kantian)—the encounter with the unknown, the feeling of being overpowered by a bigger force incommensurable with human cognitive abilities. On the other hand, these same qualities, especially the quality of ambiguity and the sublime’s affective dimension (its intensity), blur the boundaries between the sublime and other categories such as the uncanny, the mysterious, and the subliminal. Yet, most importantly, the confusion—and hence the difficulties in stretching the concept’s application to questions brought up by artificial intelligence (AI), the transformation of the human sensing apparatus, prosthetics, etc. (what Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli calls “ghost effects” 1 )—comes from the humanistic origin of the sublime as a category. It is the humanistic grounding of the sublime described by classical aesthetics, its ties to the perception and judgment of the human subject, that is being challenged today by the radical changes in the experience of being human under the influence of technology. The claims of machine intelligence to represent something about us that escapes our cognitive abilities confront us with the “alien” within ourselves—an “alien” that undermines the stability of the human as a subject of aesthetic experience. The phenomenon of the technological sublime is a response to this challenge: its subject is no more the human being as we know it, nor is it the non-or post-or in-human. The techno-sublime is positioned within the feedback loop of reflexive exchanges between the two sides, the human and the non/post/inhuman, in the space of undecidability.
