Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Vista and the Sublime

Microsoft's “Wow” campaign for its Vista operating system has much in common with the concept of the “Sublime,” propagated by the statesman and writer Edmund Burke in 1756. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful argued that both beauty and the awe-inspiring experience of the sublime were perceived emotionally. The experience of the sublime is marked by awe, grandeur, vastness, incomprehensibility, and the power to cause an intense pleasure in the observer, a pleasure that has transcendent qualities. To Burke and other eighteenth century Romantics, the sublime was the representation of a spontaneity that had been lost in an enlightenment world of calculation and disenchantment.

Microsoft's Vista commercials involve a series of “wow” moments: a man sees a deer in his neighborhood; a boy is amazed by a blanket of snow; a young woman is awed by a view of misty mountain peaks. The voiceover: “Every so often you experience something so new, so delightfully unexpected, that there is only one word for it. Wow. Introducing Windows Vista.”

What's interesting here is the emphasis on the natural world and the implication that technology has the power to bring about a kind of aesthetic experience grand enough to transport us to virtual Elysian Fields. Despite our cyberpunk fantasies of neural jacks and cybernetic implants, I suspect we harbor a subconscious desire for an online experience grounded in the natural, organic world because we ourselves are products of it.

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