Introduction

"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, The Critique Of Pure Reason (1781)

The sublime is a point of both confusion and resolve; confusion as it is the when the imagination is stretched to the edges of reason, unable to process the information in front of it, and resolve, in that in the face of this misperception, it is possible to admire the abstract nature of the object and the thought.

When talking of digital technology or the digital realm within this document, the term is used as an umbrella for anything created and displayed via a computer, without tangibility, as opposed to analogue methods, be it paint or film. For example, a projection from a film reel has a physical element, as it exists as a reel displaying each frame on a film strip, as opposed to a projection from a computer, where although the computer is concrete, the data which is being projected is not.

Through this investigation I hope to gain a full understanding of the sublime, in order to evoke it through the digital medium, exploring abstraction as a link between the romantic period and digital age, whilst finding, if there are, the aesthetic values of a sublime piece of art. I intend the end of this investigation to result in a piece of digital artwork evoking the sublime, with the theoretical framework informed by my on-going investigation into the sublime and digital technology.