#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #sublime

In one of my earliest posts, I analyzed the weirdcore aesthetic and claimed that it represents a type of immanentized sublime produced by capitalism. More fully, I said:

“In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened 'outsideness.'(...) The outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.”

I encourage you to read the full article if none of this is making sense to you. https://nathaniel-metz.writeas.com/weirdcore-and-the-eerie-atmospheres-of-postmodernity

Recently, I was listening to a weirdcore music playlist on YouTube. However, the playlist was not simply weirdcore but incorporated other related aesthetics, such as kidcore and traumacore. The connection between traumacore and weirdcore struck me as interesting, and I realized that my previous theory about weirdcore as an immanentized outsideness of a postmodern sublime might explain the relationship.

On Aesthetics Wiki, traumacore is defined as follows: “Traumacore is a type of aesthetic imagery that delves into the themes of abuse and trauma (particularly sexual trauma or CSA) along with cute visuals to give the whole aesthetic a 'bittersweet tragedy' feel. Mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse are also common themes in traumacore. Traumacore in general tends to be more focused on trauma experienced in childhood, explaining the cute visuals, although adult trauma can also be covered. Many people turn to these images to help them cope with the pain they suffered in the past.”

Full article. Warning: topics of abuse, PTSD, and other trauma-related topics: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Traumacore

In many spaces throughout the Internet, traumacore and weirdcore often bleed together, so much so that different weirdcore forums now have strict policies against posting anything traumacore related. The relationship is born, on the one hand, from their similarity in form. Both utilize a type of haunted, surrealist, dreamy nostalgia permeated by an early-2000s cyber-surrealism. In the case of traumacore, the content within the form, such as the text or images, takes on themes of traumatic experiences. Imagine a glitched-out gif of a CRT television displaying Halo 1 footage with text that reads “Mom isn't coming back.”

In addition to the similarities in formal quality between weirdcore and traumacore, I think there is also a connection via the haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime. An experience of the sublime is an experience of something that combines beauty and terror in such a magnitude that the excess of experience has difficulty being fully registered within one's consciousness. The example I always turn to is that the sublime is like standing on a cliff looking down at the Grand Canyon. It's overwhelmingly beautiful, but there is also a fear that if you fell, the canyon would kill you — not to mention the feeling of finitude compared to the massive size of the Canyon. Weirdcore separates the sublime from its often theological or natural components and instead places the sublime within postmodern capitalist landscapes, such as a McDonald's play place.

Similarly, traumatic experiences bring when them an “excess” that the brain has difficulty integrating. In many ways, trauma can 'break apart' the brain. Or, put another way, the brain breaks apart the registration of the experience into smaller chunks and then 'tucks them throughout one's unconscious and body so as to avoid experiencing the excess of horror all at once, which would be too overwhelming. This is why many individuals struggle to fully remember all the details of their trauma encounters and why many go into the freeze response during a traumatic event. Likewise, this gives trauma a feeling of both outsideness (via the external event of trauma) and insideness (the trauma lingers within oneself). In a way, it's a haunted outsideness of an immanent sublime, albeit a dark and horrific one.

The way in which weirdcore is a surrealist non-sequitur art form, or 'breaking apart' of narrative and coherent meaning, coalesces with the feeling of 'breaking apart' experienced in trauma. This is not to say that people with PTSD or who undergo traumatic experiences are intrinsically broken people or damaged goods. Rather, trauma has a way of disrupting our cognitive faculties and resisting integration into the psyche, which is captured surprisingly well by traumacore's utilization and appropriation of the weirdcore aesthetic. Traumacore shows how these weirdcore spaces are not only found within dead shopping malls and abandoned indoor parks, but also haunt our own psyches as well.

Finally, I will end on a positive note. I want to reemphasize that trauma does not make one intrinsically broken or damaged goods, despite how one might feel. Given my theological background, I will end with a quote from chapter 3 of Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconophilia and Iconoclasm by one of my favorite theologians, Natalie Carnes:

“The cross breaks brokenness by showing that brokenness—sin, violence, torture, death—cannot exclude God’s presence. At one level, the cross announces an absence. It sounds an absence of health, vitality, power, and, in the case of Christ’s wounds, an absence of flesh. Crucifixes, having a dead corpus, even declare an absence of life. Yet by these publications of absence, the cross makes, at another level, a powerful proclamation of presence. Churches, homes, and individuals fill their lives with crosses to mark the ubiquity of divine presence in the world. To put a cross on an altar, whether by painting one on it, like Grünewald’s Christ, or setting one nearby, as Catholic canon law requires, identifies the cross with the proclamation of Christ’s presence in the liturgy of the mass. The cross’s status in the Eucharistic liturgy underscores the way divine absence is bound to divine presence. On the cross, where the negation of the Image would seem to go too far—to overtake and vitiate, rather than unlock, presence—that negation is itself negated. The negation of negation celebrates a new presence, whereby God is present even in death.” (Carnes, page 88)

#AndyWarhol #aesthetics #art #Icons #postmodernism #atmosphere

Intro

Andy Warhol's life was often shocking, uncanny, and bizarre. However, a fact that seems to shock people most of all is that Warhol was Catholic. And not simply nominally Catholic. He attended Mass multiple times a week, prayed frequently, and, according to the priest giving his Eulogy, is responsible for at least one conversion to Catholicism.

More specifically, Andy Warhol was a form of Byzantine or Eastern Catholic, being common in many Eastern European countries, from which the Warhola family immigrated. Eastern Catholicism is known for its blend of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox theology and worship. Eastern Catholics remain in communion with the Vatican; however, their theology and liturgical practices — especially their art — is heavily influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy. Warhol's upbringing was conditioned by regular church attendance within this setting. Thus, he spent hours immersed within the sacred atmospheres of Byzantine chapels coated with icons of Christ, angels, and saints.

A Brief Theology of Icons

Within the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox tradition, icons are not merely images, but rather windows into heaven. The presence of icons is not the exact presence of Christ or the saint per se, but rather an appropriate representation or communication of that saint's life in heaven, where they are worshiping God. By having a space filled with icons, the congregation is reminded of how Sunday Services are moments in which worshipers cross the threshold into Heaven and participate within the perpetual worship carried on by the angels and saints who have gone before us.

If one looks at Eastern icons, and then examines some of the work in Warhol's Pop art, it seems as if Warhol's art becomes a type of iconography of Mass (pardon the pun) commercial media culture, such as the fetishization of commodities (parody of sacred relics and venerated objects) and especially celebrity culture (the 'saints' of our culture). But instead of providing a glimpse into the spiritual and heavenly realm, Warhol's Pop art icons act as a window into the broader virtual sphere and hyperobject of commercial culture.

Cyberpunk Asgard

Warhol understood this virtual media landscape quite well. He (or his ghostwriter) directly addressed the virtual space of commercialism in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

“Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they’re actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, […] on the telephone and […] on television. […] If you were the star on the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody’s living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel?” (Warhol, pages 146-147).

In today's world, the virtual cyberspace of commercial media saturates our environments even more than in Warhol's time, remaining present all around us through our smartphones, computers, televisions, etc. It's difficult to carve out spaces that haven't experienced a type of digital transubstantiation. Though it might remain invisible, it surrounds and haunts at every moment. Warhol's Pop art is a window into that landscape that seeks to be invisible.

Whereas the 'other side' of sacred icons is the spiritual and heavenly realm, full of the splendor, beauty, and majesty of God, the 'other side' of Warhol's art is a strange, cyberpunk virtual terrain, created simultaneously by both humans and machines. There is work created by real humans (actors, musicians, 'content creators,' etc.) but is also given animated power and transformed through digital technology, algorithms, cybernetics, the internet, etc. It is never merely human, and it could not be what it is without the magic of technological forces and machines. In a sense, it is a type of Asgard or Olympus populated by Freud's prosthetic gods.

In “Prosthetic Gods, Projected Monsters: Imagination and Unconscious Projection in Narratives of Technological Horror,” Filip Andjelkovic summarizes the prothetic god as follows:

“Technology is a means through which uncertainty is harnessed, a means through which 'man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.' The telephone serves as an extension of the ear, the television as an extension of the eye. Technology is the material product of an ideal omnipotence and omniscience, an imaginary extension of identity impressed onto the world and operationalized as an actual extension of the body – the realization of the human subject as a 'prosthetic God.'” (Andjelkovic, page 21). Full article here: https://godsandmonsters-ojs-txstate.tdl.org/godsandmonsters/article/view/19

Within the Asgard of cyberpunk virtuality, we experience what Andjelkovic calls a “technologized transcendence” (Andjelkovic, 19). As he describes it, “The unseen, supernatural forces of the divine and demonic have migrated from a spiritual and immortal pneuma to a personal and mortal psyche. [...] the popular, literary imagination became the new nexus through which old narratives of transcendence were transmitted and maintained – but with a reworked relationship regarding the human subject” (Andjelkovic, 19). The virtual space of commercialism creates a seemingly infinite immanent plane, which preoccupies hours of our time and energy in an ecstatic waste of consumerism.

Concluding Thoughts

My general approach to Andy Warhol is to see him as, whether intentionally or not, the greatest performance artist of all time, who holds up a mirror to society as it transforms into a postmodern consumerist cyberpunk terrain. He is Duchamp taken to his logical extreme. Or, in this case, he is an iconographer, showing us what we worship. Some people hate Warhol's art, but what I think what they truly hate is the reflection of society depicted by Warhol. Though we cannot separate ourselves from the cyberpunk postmodern world of techno-fueled consumerism, we can find ways of mitigating its effects and rediscover a sense of true humanity in the process. If anything, Warhol's art, and the inverted religion of Pop art, challenges us to rediscover a more authentic notion of the sacred, propel toward seeking out truly sacred spaces, and create new imaginations fueled more by prayer than by Netflix.

#postmodernism #aesthetics #capitalism #atmosphere #NickLand #Kant #Lovecraft #liminal #space

The Backrooms is a popular short story that went viral on the Internet with endless adaptations, memes, games, and short films. I think it's an ingenious bit of short horror fiction that sounds like something from the Twilight Zone. The story postulates that, at certain points in our world, one can make a wrong step and accidentally “no clip” out of reality. This language of no clip or clipping out is borrowed from video games in which there are certain points within a map where the game developers forgot to add barriers. If the player reaches those points, he or she “no clips” out of the map and into undeveloped digital landscapes (or perhaps falls into an infinite void).

The original post that created the basic lore is as follows: “If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it (...) has heard you.”

Creepy, right? Most people think so, which is one reason why it went viral online. The basic structure allows for a lot of creative reimagining, and the liminal aesthetics allows for plenty of interesting artwork. But I also think the story's popularity rests in its ability to capture something about our postmodern condition. I'm not the first to point this out. In fact, there's a great video essay by Clark Eleison that talks about how the Backrooms captures our fear of loneliness and isolation (especially when considering how the story took off during the pandemic).

[Link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonsUaFURPI)

But I also think the story presents a fascinating illustration of the postmodern and capitalist material environments, landscapes, atmospheres, and architectures that we now inhabit. It shows the horrifying artificiality of these material environments, revealing how our spaces are constructed for the flourishing of capitalism itself rather than God's Creation.

The Backrooms represent a terrifying “outsideness.” What if, behind the borders of your house, workplace, and city, lies an infinite expanse of burning fluorescent lights, musky carpet, and ugly office hallways? It's like being trapped in the waiting room for a doctor's office from hell.

When I think about this outsideness, I'm reminded first of Immanuel Kant and his distinction between how we perceive the world and what lies beyond that perception. According to Kant, when we perceive the world, we do so according to internal categories and schematisms of the psyche, which arrange the raw sense data of experience into categories of understanding. When I look at a desk, I do not see the individual particles and atoms, but instead, I experience the desk according to how my brain is wired to recreate the input of visual stimuli. An entirely different creature, like a bat, might have an entirely different mental representation of the desk. Kant called this sort of stuff “phenomenal” experiences.

But what about the stuff that lies beyond, behind, or “outside” of the phenomenal? This stuff would be the thing-in-itself, and Kant called this the noumenal or noumenous. Our brains, rationality, and cognitive capacities are wired for decyphering phenomenal categories, but we cannot speak with any certainty about the noumenal realm other than to say it's out there. I can talk about, for example, my desk — its design, colors, and object parts — but I cannot talk about what the desk is like, in-itself, outside of my experience—according to Kant; of course, this is philosophy, so that has been subject to much debate. And even if we talk about the atomic structure of the desk, that is still talking about how the atoms appear to us, not necessarily the atoms in themselves.

In recent times, the professionally insane philosopher Nick Land has coined the term “fanged noumena.” Working under the influence of Kant, Deleuze, and Guatarri (and methamphetamines), Land used “fanged noumena” to refer to that “outsideness” which breaks into our world and rearranges things—sometimes in catastrophic ways.

Fanged, here, is to be taken in a Marxist-Lovecraftian sense. For Marx, capitalism is vampiric: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters exist in a manner that is beyond the comprehension of humans, leading to madness, destruction, or both. Land combines these notions and thus theorizes capitalism as a type of Lovecraftian monster rearranging our world in order to be devoured; it is fanged noumena.

In my previous post, I talked about something similar to this fanged noumena in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri in their conception of time. Here is what I said:

To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

Notice how this Aeonic time is like a ghost (or even a Lovecraftian monster) sitting just outside our periphery, occasionally breaking into our world and leaving haunting traces of itself. The Backrooms seem to have a similar function. It is a realm of pure liminal space that is outside of our periphery or perception, and yet something about this reality conditions our world — or at least what the Backrooms represent conditions us.

The Backrooms are the pure form of a capitalist atmosphere that is devoid of subjectivity, existing neither from humans nor for humans. Indeed, it doesn't really exist for anything so far as we can tell. It is a material environment devoid of telos. It is artificial and yet not generated solely by human effort. This aspect of an artificial material environment without a telos or sole human origin is similar to Nick Land's famous description of capitalism in his famous essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

The Backrooms spatially represent this noumenal or transcendental quality of capitalism as an alien force conditioning our world and vampirically sucking Creation's lifeforce to empower itself— a type of spiritual warfare if you will. And we see quite well in the Backrooms meme how this noumenal capitalism manifests itself in space: through the desubjectivizing atmospheres of postmodernity, such as office spaces, shopping malls, Time Square, and suburban sprawl. In a sense, all of reality is now suburban sprawl, and the Backrooms are the horrific psychogeography of that labyrinth that pushes us toward alienating individualism rather than communal flourishing.

Of course, much of what I've written in this post is imaginative speculation and intellectual experimentation. I'm not exactly convinced that this is the best way to understand the ontology of capitalism. But at the very least, I think the Lovecraftian lens of Land is an intriguing perspective because it would potentially allow for Christians to view capitalism as a “principality and power” (Ephesians 6:12) and thus under the category of spiritual warfare.

#aesthetics #atmosphere #postmodernism #weirdcore #liminal #sublime #artandtheology

As someone who is interested in contemporary art, I often explore the aesthetic wiki website in order to learn about new art movements. While on one of my adventures, I came across weirdcore. Weirdcore is defined as follows:

“Weirdcore is a surrealist aesthetic centered around amateur or low-quality photography and/or visual images that have been constructed or edited to convey feelings of confusion, disorientation, dread, alienation, and nostalgia.” [link] (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore)

Usually, the images convey a sense of vague, quasi-nostalgia—lost memories from childhood and dreams you can only half-remember. Or even better, a half-remembered dream about your childhood. But in contrast to pure nostalgia, the images often lack any recognizable “brand” iconography (there's no Surge soda or Lunchables), and the images contain an eeriness that many find unsettling—and yet slightly comforting as well.

Formally, weirdcore borrows many elements from liminal aesthetics. Liminal is a term that refers to an “in-betweenness.” Liminal spaces are often “non-spaces,” which forego a unique identity of their own, such as the interior of a public bus, hotel rooms, office spaces, hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, and abandoned malls. The liminality can also be found in spaces where normal activities are absent, such as shopping centers or worship spaces during after-hours.

Liminality likewise holds a vague quasi-nostalgia. When you look at a picture of a hotel pool, it feels like you've been there before, but the memory lies just outside of your grasp. There's a combination of pain and sorrow: You remember the fun adventures you had on that playground and realize that you perhaps made a friend for that brief hour, and you will never see them again.

Weirdcore picks up on some of that formal liminality but then saturates it with the weird and eerie qualities of postmodern capitalism. Weirdcore conveys the strange sensation of stepping into the Twilight Zone of capitalist hyperreality.

Within our culture, we are increasingly disconnected from the sorts of material environments in which humans evolved, and we have replaced those material environments with increasingly “plastic” surroundings. Natural materials have a way of generating their own sorts of energetic atmospheres. As an extreme example, imagine sitting in a cabin made of wood compared to that same cabin made of artificially colored plastic. Increasingly, our material environments mimic the plastic cabin more than the wooden cabin, which is why office spaces and Walmart shopping centers are so displeasure to inhabit. Likewise, the intentions of design behind the material environment are to create an atmosphere that pushes people toward consumerism above other forms of relation. Lost in a slurry of blinding florescent lights, randomly organized plastic plants, dazzling commodities, and faintly echoed music, the shopper can experience a sense of de-subjectivization or, in extreme cases, a quasi-disassociative state perfect for consuming.

With these interior design strategies built around unnatural “plastic” materials, postmodern atmospheres become eerie, weird, and strange — but also somewhat enjoyable. I think the perfect illustration of this eerie enjoyment is the McDonald's play place. It is a labyrinth of plastic tubes and shifting color blocks that cannot be easily navigated. And perhaps if you can remember as a kid, there could even be times in which you got lost within those spaces for a brief moment, or you were met with a sudden extreme darkness full of uncomfortable bumps as you went down a slide. The 'McAmbiance' is both eerie and enjoyable, and I think weirdcore captures that feeling within much of its imagery. The images creep me out, but I also find myself wanting to get lost inside them.

In this sense, I think weirdcore represents a new postmodern shift within the sublime. It's not the first instantiation of this shift, but I think it's a good example. In its simplest sense, the sublime is that strange combination of something that is both overwhelmingly beautiful but also terrifying. It is like standing on the edge of a cliff at the Grand Canyon: one is overwhelmed by the world's splendor, and yet one is also aware that one misstep could end one’s life. In the midst of such a vast beauty, we recognize our own finitude in comparison.

The sublime is not only a property of natural environments like mountains, oceans, or forests, but it can also inhabit architecture. Standing inside a large cathedral can be a sublime experience. However, in the case of the cathedral and natural environments, there can be a deeper spiritual and theological meaning attached to the sublime. For example, when standing inside of a beautiful cathedral, one can feel overwhelmed by its magnitude and outstanding beauty. But there is another step in which one is then awestruck by thinking about how God is even grander and more beautiful than the cathedral. It is likewise with nature: creation is vastly large and immensely beautiful, but God is even more so. One's sense of finitude turns into a religious experience of recognizing one's dependence upon the Infinite, generating gratitude toward God.

In the case of weirdcore, we see something slightly different. There is a combination of fear (eerie/weird) and enjoyment (nostalgia), but it is not the same as the transcendence of the sublime. Instead, weirdcore conveys a truncated and flattened “outsideness.”

The notion of a truncated outsideness is inspired by how the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri truncated the concept of time. To give an over-generalized summary: in a more classic theological understanding, there is a distinction between Eternity (the realm of God) and time (the temporality of creation). Eternity is transcendent to time. However, for Deleuze and Guatarri, there is no transcendent Eternity. Instead, they speak of an “Aeon,” which is a concept inspired by Kantian philosophy. In Kant's philosophy, there is a distinction between how we experience the world (phenomenal) and how the world is in-itself (the noumenal). Deleuze and Guatarri place Aeonic time into a type of material, noumenal reality that is on the same ontological status as our experience of time, “but it does not manifest itself in time. Though it is itself composed of singular events – which can be precisely dated and named – these events compose a virtual plane of intensity that positively avoids climactic actualization. Deleuze and Guattari call these Aeonic occurrences plateaus and show how they constitute an exteriority that haunts the successive order of extensive temporality” (Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine,” page 17).

I'll be upfront: I don't understand Deleuze and Guatarri, so I hope what I said makes the slightest bit of sense. Anyways...

What Aeonic time is to Eternal time, weirdcore sublimity is to transcendent sublimity. Though in this case, the outsideness creeping in on us is a hyperreality of postmodern capitalism, in which the production machine of industry, mass consumerist reproduction, and omnipresent media culture — and especially the internet — have created an eerie rhizomatic “outsideness” of space (both virtual and physical space) that conditions our material environment. Notice, for example, how often in weirdcore the image barriers bleed together, giant dark patches consume space like a black hole, singular text phrases are divorced from meaningful discourse, and objects are deterritorialized from their original context. These common elements of weirdcore art are the basic factors of postmodern hyperreality: everything is deterritorialized from its original context and placed into the organizing structure of capitalism, social media is breaking apart discourse into incoherent soundbites, and there is a looming dark presence of de-subjectivizing ambiances all around us.

As a concluding thought, I think we can see from these instances that the hyperreality of postmodern capitalism generates its own, rival forms of religious experience, space, and time. I think weirdcore has managed to do a great job of capturing the feeling. By engaging with that art and musing upon its meanings, I think we can learn a lot about our current (hyper)reality. And maybe it will also inspire us to spend some time out in God's beautiful creation.