Exercise 1.6 The Contemporary Abyss

"Beauty itself doth of itself persuade, The eyes of men without an orator." (William Shakespeare)

"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt." (Immanuel Kant)

This exercise is in two parts: To read Simon Morley's essay 'Staring into the Contemporary Abyss' available from http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/staring-contemporary-abyss, and secondly choose a body of work that I feel explores the sublime and write about 300 words as to how it explores the sublime.

Simon Morley: Staring into the Contemporary Abyss

'Sublime' has an archaic ring to it; nowadays it is used more as an adjective describing something favourable:

"In common use, sublime is an adjective meaning "awe-inspiringly grand, excellent, or impressive," like the best chocolate fudge sundae you've ever had." (source: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sublime)

Morley points out that there is a confusing mismatch between the word's common usage and its artistic use; sublime was adopted by Romantic artists seeking to produce for their audiences:

"emotions of a decidedly irrational and excessive kind, emotions seemingly aimed at evicting the human mind from its secure residence inside the House of Reason and throwing it into a boundless situation that was often frightening". 

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog 1818 is a fine example:

This attempt to get the artist's audience out of its comfort zone was  reincarnated by the likes of Newman and Rothko as an antidote to what they saw as shallow European art (despite  the modernism of Picasso and others) wedded to ideas of beauty and aesthetics.

Further, one can see that the term was used slightly differently in literature than in art as discussed in the post on the BBC podcast hosted by Malvyn Bragg.

There have been further movements to reassess the nature of sublime, such that Morley adduces five different uses of the word: 'the unpresentable in art, [and] the experiences of transcendence, terror, the uncanny and altered states of consciousness.' The link of these perspectives is:

"a desire to define a moment when social and psychological codes and structures no longer bind us, where we reach a sort of borderline at which rational thought comes to an end and we suddenly encounter something wholly and perturbingly other."

I am not sure about this. Our senses of what is perturbing have been dulled in recent decades by changing social norms, and the availability through digital means of hard core sex and violence as well as hard hitting news events. Only just over 50 years ago D H Lawrence's  Lady Chatterley's Lover was nearly banned for writing about an affair of a woman with her gardener. I would make three suggestions about the use of 'sublime in an artistic sense:

• It has appeared as a vogue word at different times and taken on a different context;
• It has different contextual overtones depending on the artistic medium;
• To a degree. it can mean more or less what its author wishes it to mean. 

Despite this lack of specificity in the use of 'sublime', there are perhaps twofold commonalities to its use:

• An attempt to woo the audience out of its comfort zone, to consider exciting things out of most people's day to day existence whether that be artificial or natural; perhaps the closest adjectival simile to sublime is 'awe-inspiring';
• As the antithesis to 'aesthetics' and 'beauty', those concepts commonly associated with calm pleasure and harmony.  

Morley argues that sublime now is more about 'immanent transcendence', a here and now experience. He puts in the context of Wordsworth's 'blank abyss', an example being Balka's huge steel structural work How It Is:

This is typical of what Morely terms 'negative sublime' and of the tendency for the sublime these days to be large installations; it has become more difficult for painters to adduce sublimeness, perhaps because of the points made above about changing social norms and the ascendancy of  digital media. He argues that many artists have adopted photography. The Düsseldorf school of photographers use the sublime to mean blandness - to challenge our concept of beauty and aesthetics. One of their students - Andreas Gursky - sold Rhein II for $4.3m in 2011: 

Andreas Gursky Rhein II, 1999. Accessed from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/Rhein_II.jpg

To conclude, Morley points out that our strongest sense of the sublime is provided by technology, and the limits of human understanding. The proof made public in February 2016 of the existence of gravitational waves was news all over the world, opening up the prospect of learning about the 'dark universe'. We may not understand them, but we do feel the excitement of learning more about the origins of the universe. Science fiction has existed to fill us with the sense of the possible if not yet achieved - to fill us with the sense of wonder. Our understanding and knowledge progresses such that yesterday's sci fi is today's mundane and ordinary. I explore this in the second part of the exercise by discussing the sci fi movie Ex Machina. This fits in the genre of the sublime as the possible but not yet achieved; the conceivable but not realised.

Ex Machina

Taking Morley's argument that it is technology that produces our strongest sense of sublime, Ex Machina is a 2015 sci fi movie on that takes the Turing Test of artificial intelligence ('ai') as its reference point. Turing devised the 'imitation game' as an alternative objective method of testing the efficacy of ai: can computers imitate the human mind rather than can they be a surrogate. The plot of the movie is that Caleb, a programmer  wins a contest to stay for a week with Nathan, the owner of the company for which Caleb works. Nathan is a very forward individual who needs an individual with the intelligence and wherewithal to put a creation of his through the Turing Test. Nathan wants to see if the simulacrum he’s created is actually intelligent. The simulacrum is named Ava (played by Alicia Wikander), and Caleb is going to interview her.

The movie plays with our sense of understanding firstly what is happening and, secondly, our innate sense of who to sympathize with and who not: who is the bad guy who is the goodie? Ava gets the trust and sympathy of Caleb, who works out how to overcome Nathan for Ava's sake. In the climax, Ava receives help from Kyoko to kill her creator, locks Caleb in Nathan's room, dresses herself in skin and accoutrements from another machine, and escapes into humanity.

The real sense of sublime emerges as our initial natural instinct to feel sympathy with Ava (and Kyoko, another female robot) as humanoid slaves to Nathan's obsession is steadily eroded as we realise she is cleverer and more manipulative than at first sight.We can wonder at the intelligence of Nathan to design a humanoid, immerse ourselves in the reaction of the hapless Caleb, and work through conflicting emotions adduced by Ava. Our we, in the end, pleased that a humanoid escapes slavery, or are we shocked that Ava finds killing Nathan and locking Caleb in a perfectly logical response to her plight? In that sense, is it a chilling outlook on what things could turn out like as ai advances? Kant's quote above comes to mind.

Postscript: As this post is being written, AlphaGo, an ai system developed by Google DeepMind is playing against a leading world player in the second of a five match series of Go, the highly complicated Asian board game that many thought would never be conquered by ai. In an article reminiscent of the emotions evoked by Ex Machina, the reporter surprises himself by rooting for the human opponent.