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Abstract
The appearance of cyberspace in the 1960s and their ongoing development nowadays, has posed questions and theorisations of various types about its nature and future progression. This paper proposes the sublime as a crucial and valid concept to comprehend both the theoretical and aesthetic development of this phenomenon. In so doing, this research looks back at the origin of the sublime. Thus, Longinus, Burke and Kant's considerations about this concept are the main grounds upon which this investigation stands. Likewise, historic Romanticism and an iconic painting by Caspar David Friedrich serve to shed light on the aspects that cyberspace takes from a worldview that struggled with the surrounding in manners not so different from ours.
Keywords: sublime, cyberspace, Romanticism, technoromanticism
Introduction
The aesthetic concept of the sublime has been profusely employed to understand the romantic landscape painting of the nineteenth century. It is, in effect, a term customarily employed to expound Caspar David Friedrich's paintings and, in general, to refer to everything that is beyond the scope of beauty. The sublime entails powerful conceptual associations such as the infinite and the limitless, together with a series of overwhelming feelings that they can elicit in those who experience it.
It was Pseudo-Longinus, in the 1st century AD, who first coined the word that led to what today we understand as sublime: the Hypsos (Peri Hypsous).1 Such a construct implied evocative ideas related to "the highest" and to a degree of spiritual "elevation", a feeling akin to "transcendence" (Doran 27). In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) proposed, among other things, that the sublime can be suggested or even created by the succession of elements in the space. He called it "the artificial infinity" (Burke 119). Little after Kant added more components to the sublime by proclaiming the existence of two types of sublimity: one dynamic and the other one mathematical (Kant, Critique of Judgment 101). Likewise, Kant appealed to the "immaterial" and "formless" (das Unform) as conditions of the sublime (Kant, Critique of Judgment 105).
In the nineteenth century, Romanticism built its lines of reasoning on the sublime mostly backed on this triumvirate. Their influence steadily continued in the twentieth century....