Aura in the Storm
Johannes Kreidler
The triumph of algorithms does not lead to total dematerialization. On the contrary. In a dialectical twist, it brings about the return of the material world with redoubled force, conjuring physical reality as the new gold standard. In clubs, DJs once again stack mountains of analog gear, wiring dozens of devices into labyrinthine setups. A single MacBook could replicate all these sounds with more precision and far less effort. But that’s no longer the point. What matters now is the spectacle of the physical: an aesthetic of effort—of force, matter, time. Sound is not just vibration; it is resistance. Even the war in Ukraine bears the face of World War I—trenches, artillery, and now drones; bodies sinking into mud.
In a world where digital abundance renders everything instantly trivial, it is only through material embodiment that meaning regains its weight.
So it goes with art. In the age of synthetic reproduction, anyone can walk through an exhibition, snap a few photos, and let an AI generate a million variations—some of them arguably better than the original. But the real question becomes: what actually stands there? What has been made real, materially present, and resistant enough to infinite variation that a viewer might still assign it value? Art demands materialization—and with it ever stronger mechanisms of exclusivity, akin to Bitcoin, whose value is propped up by algorithmically enforced energy consumption. The more electricity the blockchain devours, the more precious the coin becomes. Artificial intelligence calls for artificial scarcity.
The value of the original is reversed. No longer is the first copy prized, but the last one; not fleeting ideas, but what has hardened into matter—what can no longer be clicked away or endlessly replicated, shielded by its irreducible physicality. Matter is persistence in the face of the digital flood. The algorithm pulls us back into the world of things.
At the same time, matter forces itself upon us. Nature rises as subject, with unprecedented might. The pandemic was just a prologue. The battered proletariat of ravaged resources, clear-cut rainforests, and poisoned oceans (storming the Bastille) retaliate through the guillotines of weather: drought, heat, flood—violence without emotion or ideology. Virtuality was a brief episode. The world never stopped being hardware.
So here we stand amid the ruins of reproducibility, faced with the uprising of the real. Climate change is Benjamin’s aura speaking in the voice of catastrophe. Every forest fire is an original without a copy, every hurricane a singular monument, and every flood a one-off devastation. Now that algorithms celebrate their victory, nature launches its counterstrike. And the last glacier, the final coral reef—they will become the new Mona Lisas: contested, guarded, preserved behind armored glass. The museums of the future will not exhibit images but stone, water, air.
In this inferno, the one weapon we possess is science. Science is our finest tool when the world begins to burn.
We are surrounded by the masterpieces of science—pocket computers, wireless data, vaccines—yet take them for granted, while denying the very principles that made such comforts possible. This gives us climate-change deniers, pandemic belittlers, nostalgists, Sunday fundamentalists.
Too much tolerance is granted to collective irrationality. In private, one may believe in horoscopes, angels, homeopathy or energized water. But when collectives—when politics, when masses—cling to afterlife fictions, national myths, divine consolation, the result is irrational, anti-modern, authoritarian politics.
At scale, religions function like cults with PR departments. Fake news factories in the garb of transcendence. Politics must recognise them for what they pose: a risk to reasoned public life. When irrational beliefs become collective and institutional, the damage becomes unacceptable.
When we humans today face nature’s violence, we understand it, yet ignore it—even though this unnatural nature is nothing but the result of our own interventions, and even though we have been trained to consume violence in disaster films, panic-inducing video games, and sublime images framed in museums.
We are aesthetically equipped, but existentially unprepared. These forms of representation teach us to watch, not to respond.
The aesthetic crisis in the face of thunder, this dissonance between passivity and imperative, our flawed watching as floods approach—these too must be brought into view.
Art takes its place alongside science. Does it want to decorate the apocalypse, or be part of reality processing? Does it want to cast light or induce fog? The search for better building materials, more efficient batteries, and innovative cooling systems is not a purely technical task, but a cultural and ethical challenge. Art is needed as a laboratory for reality under other conditions, as a sensorium of the coming, as provocation of perceptual crises, as repertoire of thinking’s cunning. Art is reason’s radical supplement, as sensual epistemology; it claims human imagination for dense experience, for forms for the formless, and creates meaning through the argument of beauty. Its essence is: insistence.
Biography
(1980, Germany) lives in Berlin. His work is described as conceptual music and often employs multimedial elements. He is Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Basel.
