Five hundred years ago, modernity emerged on the shoulders of three revolutions: a scientific one, the Copernican; a technical one, the printing press; and an economic one, capitalism. The world was untouched, a place of seemingly infinite resources.

Today, we face a scientific, technical, and economic revolution far more radical and profound, while simultaneously inhabiting a planetary condition of extreme emergency. We face the extinction of the world in which we have lived for the past five centuries.

On the one hand, the exhaustion of the planet is evident—a consequence of 150 years of irrational extractivism that now appears impossible to halt. We are incapable of imagining a scenario in which the deterioration of living conditions does not lead to survival at the very limits or, ultimately, to the extinction of our species.

On the other hand, the digital and algorithmic revolution has transformed the economy, social structures, political organization, ideology, and subjectivity. These have been reshaped to such an extent that the two key elements underpinning the modern dream—autonomy and agency—have been hollowed out. Confidence in our capacity for autonomy (the ability to decide for ourselves) and for agency (the ability to act and alter our relationship to power) has vanished.

This hollowing-out carries existential consequences. Without nature, without autonomy, and without agency, there is no humanity. There is no individual. There is no collective. There is no possibility of political action. There is no possibility of progress. Ultimately, there is no future.

We live in the time of the Aesthetics of Extinction.

Never before has Wittgenstein’s remark in his Notebooks been more relevant:

“The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.”

That we inhabit a time of extinction does not mean that all aesthetics (and thus all ethics) are the same. It depends on the position and perspective we adopt, and there are at least two.

The first, dominant today, is an aesthetic that implicitly assumes the irreversibility of our condition.

Its traits are presentism; time without time; individualism; obsession with the self; the narcissism of difference; the discrediting of truth; intellectual binarism; the first-person singular; the rejection of the symbol; the exaltation of the icon; urgency that rejects reflection; immersion that nullifies critical distance; the glorification of emotion and affect; therapeutic confession; self-representation; and the elevation of individual experience to the ultimate authority of knowledge.

This is the aesthetic of the attention economy, whose algorithms optimize ever more effective doses of dopamine. Beneath its liberating appearance of spontaneity and authenticity lies a vast infrastructure of exploitation and relentless ecological destruction.

In her book Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh identifies “de-mediation” as the common thread of algorithmic culture. Mediation displaces, slows, depersonalizes, and conceptualizes; it is the cultural mechanism that complicates—and thereby obstructs—the accelerated flow of code, a fundamental requirement of digital capitalism.

Kornbluh identifies a paradigmatic cultural example of this de-mediated condition for each of the three dimensions of art under digital capitalism: sentimental emotion, the charisma of genius, and economic value.

For the new capitalism, art must be emotion, affect, physical experience, and sentimental exuberance. What better example than The Van Gogh Experience, whose organizers describe it as “a transformative fusion of movement and masterpieces while practicing yoga surrounded by the iconic works of Vincent van Gogh”? It is experiential emotion delivered straight to the vein—uncomplicated and additive-free.

Second dimension: art must be the product of unique, charismatic, inexplicable geniuses whose personalities transcend their artistic creations. The artist as brand. What better example than the transformative experience produced by Marina Abramović’s mere presence in The Artist is Present? It is aura delivered straight to the vein: a private, mystical audience with sanctity.

Third dimension: art must be an investment vehicle. And what economic value is purer than the NFT (Non-Fungible Token), where there is no object or aesthetic dimension to contemplate—only encoded metadata certifying ownership of “those very same metadata,” ready to be bought and sold with a click? Abstract value delivered straight to the vein.

Beyond these extreme examples, it is not difficult to identify contemporary artistic practices embedded in and participating in digital and algorithmic capitalism: monumental and sublime installations; exhibitions designed for their Instagram effect; exclusionary identity practices; the return to monumental painting; self-realist literature; autofiction as anti-fiction; spectacular immersive video; self-theory as anti-theory. These are predominant cultural styles that converge in a vision of a nihilistic and powerless humanity, left only with the refuge of individuality and submission to the machine.

How can an Aesthetics of Extinction be developed that resists algorithmic demands and the privatization and exploitation of nature? What should the role of the artist be? What is the social function of contemporary poiesis? How can we confront the new digital capitalism whose reactionary, feudal, and oligarchic face is now clearly visible?

Perhaps art history itself offers some clues.

In every culture, art has humble origins. It is little more than a kind of “special” craft that endows the imaginary of our desires and fears with symbolic consistency, allowing collective identification and the reproduction of social practices.

Even Western art—absurdly idealized—shares this origin. We know that the word “art” derives from the Roman ars and the Greek techné, both meaning “technique.”

The only difference between an artist, a craftsman, an architect, and an engineer lay in the social function of their work’s product. All were technicians, because technique meant specifically “the knowledge required to transform an abstract concept into something useful.” The origin of art, then, lies in knowledge, symbolization, and collective utility.

Another anchor might be found in Percy Shelley’s famous declaration in his 1821 letter A Defence of Poetry:

“Poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

Artists as mirrors. People look at themselves in mirrors; mirrors are tools of self-exploration. But not for Shelley. For him, these mirrors point beyond the self. What do they reflect? Shadows—but not just any shadows. Today is the time of gigantic shadows. And where do these shadows come from? They come from the future.

A possible answer, therefore, to the question with which I began—the question of poiesis today (that is, of the function of contemporary artworks)—might be the humble aspiration to translate the gigantic shadows that the future casts upon the present into valid collective symbols, and, in doing so, to conjure their powers, thereby helping us to better understand and confront them.

The concern with the “economy of the visible” stems from the desire to articulate a contemporary materialist artistic project.

Giorgio Agamben long ago established the conceptual link between visibility, icon, economy, and apparatus. This link is one of the keys to any project on the infrastructures of contemporary capitalism—those infrastructures that will define the twenty-first century.

The starting point of this project is that the true shadows cast by the future upon the present are being built now, in the form of concrete infrastructures. Symbolically unveiling their material nature, ideological content, and oligarchic control is an essential function of art.

In her latest book, Claire Bishop, reflecting on research-based art, makes a pertinent observation. She notes that artistic research oscillates between two dangerous poles: on the one hand, the presentation of information without a unifying voice; on the other, a single voice that cannot be contested. She suggests that research-based art can escape these two dangers through fiction, fabulation, and experience.

Aesthetics of Extinction strives to build effective symbols and fictions from technical and personal knowledge.

But this definition also highlights something often overlooked: infrastructures both enable and delimit what is possible. They affirm and deny what can be real. Infrastructures determine the conditions of possibility.

And it is precisely through fiction, through fable, that the boundaries of the possible can be probed, and where the mechanisms and language of oppression can be effectively recreated.

Jacques Rancière notes somewhere that the problem usually lies not in the message transmitted by an apparatus but in the apparatus itself.

Seen from this perspective, infrastructures are essential vehicles of ideology. Something seemingly distant from everyday life—such as genomic alteration experiments—becomes a prime example of ideology literally embodied: the biopolitics of digital capitalism.

Financial capitalism, structural inequality, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and ecological destruction are, ultimately, contemporary apparatuses through which power circulates and meaning is conferred.

Only by unveiling their operations can we construct the counter-languages and counter-images with which to confront them.