AESTHETICS OF [NON-] VANISHING EXPERIENCES: DEEP SEMIOTICS OF MODERN SCREEN ATTRACTIONS
Aesthetization is the concept of the theory and practice for understanding reality through non-utilitarian perceptions and experiences that go beyond ordinary experience. This is what the attractiveness of artifacts of both artistic creation and art as a whole as a socio-cultural practice is based on. The twentieth century has brought the expansion of aesthetization into the sphere of everyday experience up to mass consumption and public policy. However, today the situation has changed radically: the everyday practice itself has appeared defamiliarized on the screens of computers and gadgets. Contemporary screen culture contributes heavily to a further radical transformation of aestheticization. This involves two interconnected processes. The first process is associated with a changing emphasis in the translation of the artifacts content: from translating a stable social significance to fixation and translation of fluctuating personal emotions and experiences. The second process is related to the acceleration of such translations, which are hard to be comprehended and reflected. As a result, the presentation of social life experience, its understanding and comprehension is reduced to processing of digitized data streams. Therefore, the interpretation of aesthetization is a real challenge today: it is either these data streams on the screens of computers and gadgets that make our reality “defamiliarized” is aesthetization; or de-subjectification of such data streams eliminates aesthetization. Thus, on the one hand, a complex humanitarian expertize becomes urgent for analyzing these processes. On the other hand, if the whole world is a field for artistic comprehension, then the current life presentation technologies allow us to raise the question about the revival of the parrhesia institution as a personal responsibility for participating in such a stream of presentations.