The Digital Sublime: Orientation Strategies for a Vertiginous World

Abstract

This article addresses the increasing levels of complexity and abstraction that digital technologies produce, which generate a feeling of amazement nowadays similar to what the philosophy of art and aesthetics deemed the experience of the sublime. Through the idea of the “digital sublime”, we aim to find ways to find direction in this vertiginous world. Our intention is to research the extent to which art and design can function as mediators of scales that translate the digital sublime into concrete images that are more digestible, as well as easy to understand and perceive. We believe this is one of the challenges that these disciplines must face in our era governed by extra-human scales, both technological (the cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G, etc.) and geological (the Anthropocene and global climate change). With this in mind, we will analyse the work of several artists whose careers reflect their commitment to these issues. If we, and our bodies, are constantly translated into data, can art and design reverse meaning and make our data transform into bodies in such a way as to produce an aesthetic (sensible) experience of them? Can this help us to understand digital infrastructure and its materiality in a more intuitive and approachable way so that a body can imagine and/or visualise it? Can these actions encourage the production of collective emancipation strategies that allow us to be active agents when reconfiguring the governance and algorithmic regulations imposed on us?