In his article, “American Technological Sublime,” David E. Nye discusses the history of the American sublime. One of his more notable points is Kant’s distinction between two kinds of sublime. Nye explains that the mathematical sublime is “the encounter with extreme magnitude or vastness,” and the dynamic sublime is “the contemplation of scenes that arouse terror… seen by a subject who is safe from immediate danger” (Nye, 7). The dynamic sublime would thus include natural disasters such as tempests or volcanic eruptions. The mathematical sublime, however, has more versatility. Nye uses the example of a mountain range or the Grand Canyon. More notable for us is the mathematical sublime paired with technology. It is this type of sublime that makes Every Icon and Sea and Spar Between subliminal works.
These two works become sublime because of their seemingly infinite possibilities. Every Icon can generate every possible black and white image within a 32×32 grid. Sea and Spar Between takes fragments from Moby Dick and poems by Emily Dickinson and combines them into generated stanzas. The authors, Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, explain that the work has approximately 225 trillion different stanzas. However, it seems that their value as an artistic work comes from their ties to the sublime. Essentially, they are great because they are vast and that vastness is incomprehensible. Does the content itself actually matter? Every Icon will inevitably make interesting images, but mostly it appears as a random pattern of black squares. Similarly, the stanzas in Sea and Spar Between are created the same way as combinatory poetics, with no authorial intention.
These technological forms of the mathematical sublime are contrasted with natural occurrences. The Grand Canyon is still beautiful even when separated from its sublime qualities. Nye discusses at length that because of expectations, often the feeling of sublime is not fully realized until spending a fair amount of time with the object/scene. People still visit natural wonders without feeling the sublime; however, I would argue that there is little to keep the viewer engaged with Every Icon and Sea and Spar Between for more than a couple minutes. The content is not enough. Should the content itself have artistic value or is the sublimation of the number of outcomes enough for the work to be deemed important on its own?