German language
Published 2023 by Transcript Verlag.
4 stars
(1 review)
The aesthetics of ruins is characterised by a delight in paradox. Between nature and culture, edification and destruction, melancholy and hope, past and future, the ruins appear as traces of time in the space of the present of their aesthetic encounter. Kevin Bücking shows to what extent the aesthetics of ruins and the ruinous consists in a special interplay of bodily-sensual experiences and conceptual reflections. In an examination of different aesthetic media such as painting, photography, film, computer games, and virtual reality, it becomes apparent that the fascination with ruins and the ruinous can be understood as an atmospheric process of reflection.
