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How can I convey the deep thundering bass which is felt more than heard? The mass of bobbing bodies: blurred, colour, dimly outlined and unceasingly in motion? The space itself, which fleetingly seems as though it has no edges, no end in time or space, yet at the same time only stretches as far as you can see into the lights, the black walls, the heaving dancing masses? The sensation of dancing of moving without thought, of moving beyond thought, of just letting go, letting it all out? Words fail me; words become redundant and unnecessary, words become pointless.
(Malbon, B., 1999: xii-xiii, quoted in Bolt, B. 'The Techno-Sublime', unpublished paper)
Dance and movement, drugs and alcohol, screen and colour, performance and paint. These are the shifts that polka across Barbara Bolt's painterly explorations into the technosublime. lt is a subject Bolt has explored previously in her research and academic writing in which she examines the impact of technological change on our understanding of the sublime.
While traditionally used to describe 18th century landscape painting and its evocation of something other-worldly, the sublime is, perhaps, closer to the dance party experience than it may at first appear. lt may take us out of body into the world of the spirit - a rare enough experience in 2002 - and one more likely to be attractive outside the sanctified institutions than within. And while the dance behaviour is at first glance more profane than sacred, consider King David of old who 'danced before Lord with all his might' (11 Samuel 7, 14).
In October 2002 the technosublime became the subject of an exhibition of paintings at Noosa Regional Gallery. lt drew