Defamiliarisation and Abstraction
A Comparison of OOO-Influenced Architectural Strategies of Saturation under a Neo-Baroque Aesthetics of Openness
in Postdigital Neobaroque: Traits of Postdigital Neobaroque, edited by Marjan Colletti, Peter Massin, Laura Winterberg, and Viktoria Hörtenhuber, 3:222–33. Rome: D Editore, 2024.
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The neo-baroque stands within a particular historical trajectory that manifests and informs socio-cultural dynamics by challenging the normative regimes of experience. Saturated articulations have been a means to this end, constituting an aesthetic of openness insofar as these expressions induce non-predetermined interpretations and modes of action. Within this framework, this article identifies two architectural approaches — defamiliarisation and abstraction, reconsidered today under the philosophical current of Object-Oriented Ontology — to compare them from a neo-baroque perspective. Both converge in a shared interest in formal excess as a mechanism to account for the work’s abundance of effects, a neo-baroque disposition that first requires disrupting pre-existing categories of valuation. On the other hand, divergences arise in their methods to this end, determining the work’s degree of openness. Resorting to the distinction made by the neobaroque theorist Omar Calabrese between strategies that ‘stretch the limit’ and those that ‘exceed it’, defamiliarisation is linked to the former as a technique that works with deformations and recompositions of everyday objects to irritate their presuppositions and open up new understandings. However, the object’s surplus is restricted: the experience of the defamiliarised form pushes, but never abandons the initial category in which the familiar object is situated. Alternatively, the technique of abstraction operates outside the limit: the abstract form is anti-categorical by presenting formal features unrelated to any known phenomena. For this reason, abstraction is considered preferable to defamiliarisation for the question of openness, since it mobilises large areas of the surplus of things.