The Industrial Sublime

The idea of the sublime have been around for centuries, starting with the association made from Romans with rhetoric, and the later - and the most popular – association of this idea with the frightening beauty of the natural landscape from Burke to Kant, then briefly passing to culture with Lyotard. After two centuries of industrialization we can clearly state that the aesthetic of the sublime first overlapped and then decisively shifted over the aesthetic of the technical (the industry) and trespassing to the technological (digitalization); where, in my opinion, being power plants the most representative artifact of the technical category of the sublime and its engagement with landscape. Those artifact and technologies although hided from the “general gaze” become very important, with foreign energy policies grounding most of the major global disputes and discord of the last decades: from the Gulf War to the Afghan and Iraqi War the entire global geopolitics have been deeply remodeled.