Baroque

An era and an aesthetic, a way of knowing?

The 17th and early 18th centuries? A time of cultural transformation in Europe and its colonies, marked by intense cross-cultural exchange. Birth of modern science.

Exuberant and ornate styles. An embrace of complexity, ambiguity, hybridity, passion, excess, formlessness.

• Straightforwardly, the baroque recognised different kinds of realities.
• Those realities often had to do with the spiritual life.
• They belonged to a world that was extra-ordinary and only partially fitted with mundanity. — John Law, “Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque” (2016)

Theatricality? Boundlessness and folding? (eliding/troubling the division of inside and outside)

• [⎈] Consider how a “Baroque sensibility” invites us to embrace ambiguity, to question assumptions, and to seek out the hidden meanings and power dynamics encoded in our technical systems and cultural artifacts.

Backlinks

: Ferality