metamodernism

Duel is not a ‘gimmick’

In the late 1980s, Joost Zwagerman’s (1963) debut novel Gimmick[1] caused a sensation in press and public as a novel that defined the Zeitgeist and spoke for a generation, the postmodern generation.  Recently he wrote Duel[2]  (2010), a shorter novel published as the traditional gift of the annual week-of-books, which can be considered as a …

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Architecture’s New Terrain

Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain documents the influence and manifestations of both landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice that is resulting in not simply a “cross-disciplinary phenomenon” but new design techniques and formal strategies. It is edited by Stan Allen, Dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture and practicing architect in New York who …

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Some thoughts on the metamodern museum

As a lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, I recently taught an undergraduate course on Modernism. In addition to a class discussion on the discourse surrounding the museum of modern art, the participating students also visited the Van Abbemuseum

The Awesome, or the metamodern sublime

Under postmodernism, cyberspace served as the most prominent cultural example of the sublime. Today, however, the concept of opacity has emerged which negates the corrosive effect of web links, providing a way “out” of the otherwise never-ending link labyrinth. Moreover, this opacity provides us with a notion that negotiates between beauty and sublimity – the …

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