sublime

My first encounter with the word was in the dentist's office. My brother had an extra tooth. Its surgical removal was painful and grotesque, as was the small bit of bone extracted from his jaw. It made sense to me in some way, that this disgusting bit of flesh was a part of my brother, whom, for “psychological” reasons, I suppose, I had already associated with deformity.

I'm sure that this all makes very little sense. But sense making is a struggle doomed to failure, and that is the point of this whole endeavor anyway. I'm not trying to be arch-ironic or anything, rather, just the opposite. Perhaps it is OK to flail earnestly against the sublime of the material other?

The range of cultural enterprises which depend on the computer for conception, construction, storage, and display, share with that device — as if by an intrinsic and fractal reciprocity of structure — a parametric ontology that imbues them with an aura of the sublime. Attention to this quality of the sublime that adheres to digital projects promises to link the quidity of the computer with aesthetic philosophy and a history of modernist and post-modernist artistic practice.