Wajid Khan

PERCEPTIONS OF SUBLIMITY

The project explores our perceptions of the sublime and the sublime encounter in a post-apocalyptic world. A future in which humankind has exhausted almost all of the planet’s natural resources in a bid to rapidly develop its civilisation. I draw from scholarly texts and studies on cognitive responses to human attractions as well as vivid themes in science fiction films presenting the natural and digital sublime. It is the response to that form of sublimity that I want to explore, its modern day representation and its catastrophic future equivalent, a sublimity found in catastrophe itself. The project is situated in a place between the legible and illegible, between reading and un-reading. I analyse the imagery in a creative medium, to further explore the ideas of sublimity in this respective aesthetic. This project considers the relationship between humans and intrigue, catastrophe and the sublime, or rather the sublimity of a cataclysmic event; in other words, the seduction of Armageddon.

Hidden within the unconscious, there is an insatiable desire for the unknown. The desire to journey beyond the sensible given, towards the oncoming storm, and the dread of night.