Ksenia Fedorova: The Technological Sublime

Immaterial nature of most of new media art (video-, cyber-, net-, tele-art) indicates a substantial shift in aesthetic and cultural paradigm. The concept of the sublime can powerfully address the issues that concern the impacts of technological mediation in the spheres of art, communication, and culture at large, informing the debate on new "objecthood" with a specific historically grounded aesthetic and epistemological discourse. Sudden shifts of perspective, ecstasy, dismay and perplexity that are characteristic to the feeling of the sublime can be found in works of new media art which in its turn is capable of generating forms of co-existence in the real and virtual space and providing an all-sensory engagement with the reality of the unpresentable. The object here is the very gap between the subjectivity and the world through which the terrifying and stunning, but also the unpredictable and revealing may enter. Digital technology that interferes in the art's sanctum sanctorum – the aura – destroys the authenticity of the production, but transfers it to the authenticity of the beholder's perception, giving a unitary and intersubjective experience of a "stretched" identity.

The russian curator Ksenia Fedorova holds a RAVE scholarship at the ZKM | Media Museum.