DIGITAL DIONYSUS

Pleased to have my illustrated art essay Aesthetic States of Frenzy: Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetic philosophy and the Odyssey Palimpsest here in THE DIGITAL DIONYSUS at Punctum Books
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https://punctumbooks.com/titles/digital-dionysus
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Abstract
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Aesthetic States of Frenzy explores the role of art in Nietzsche’s philosophy and relates it to the curative nihilistic thinking behind a series of noisy mesh artworks by Joseph Nechvatal entitled Odyssey Palimpsest; a series that returns us symbolically to ancient Homer’s lost hero, placed now on an inner voyage afloat against the tide of our tragic post-modern carnival.
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Aesthetic States of Frenzy builds upon Nietzsche’s philosophy to theorize a new contemporary aesthetic labor based in an exquisite unseeablity and disconnectedness that is directed against our contemporary surveillance state as it now exists in the network-centric condition.
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The author frames this aesthetic labor of masquerading in terms of a monster sacré affinity for a materialist nihilism of no that (if it goes far enough) can transform an artistic metamorphosis of emergence into an all-embracing yes. This yes-full nihilistic frenzy is theorized as the energy of unleashing forces of racket reverberation directed against the figure-ground actions of power surveillance so that a nimble art may emerge and resonate in a web of inter-connected, molecular and viral relational affects and intensities of noise, dissonance and deviation.