sublime

Life with computers has changed the way we see and think. A thorough understanding of the import of that change is difficult to attain. We tend to focus on the epiphenomena rather than the deep structure of computational culture. We are immersed in brands, in products, in the spectacle and the experience mediated by computers and screens, but we rarely consider data as such, or what a system is. And yet, data and system are the concepts that affect our way of seeing and thinking and make them radically different after the recent ubiquity of computers.

The parametric sublime is an aspect of the mathematical sublime. Computation operationalizes the contradiction between the symbolic specificity of a parametric system and the infinitude of its possible instantiations. And while the profundity of remarking on this contradiction may seem to decline as the wonder of thinking machines wears off, that they reproduce the trick we manage and find pleasure in–containing the infinite in the finite–will in some way always be that from which digital art derives its impact and its effects.