Nathaniel Metz's Blog

#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.