Contact aesthetics and digital arts: At the threshold of the Earth

This article critiques arguments about the aesthetic autonomy of digital arts, recently proposed by art theorists Anna Munster and Mark Hansen. It argues that digital arts are not unique artistic forms, but an extension of modern artistic practices, requiring a more general critique of art as aesthesis, or sensory experience. Through a deconstructive reading of Kant's concept of the sublime, the article proposes that modern art including digital art can be relocated in terms of a 'contact aesthetics', that is, an aesthetics based on the way the abstractions of art offer the potential to make contact with the materially experienced world (earth). The article draws on the work of poststructuralist theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard to support its claims.