Technical terms*
Terms in the Context of Art Criticism
Anima – Term for the soul, or in Jungian psychology, the feminine aspect of the male psyche.
Anthropocene – Geological epoch proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000, in which humans have become the dominant geophysical influence on Earth. The Anthropocene would succeed the Holocene (the last 11,700 years).
anthropomorph – human-shaped or human-like.
aporia – a philosophical term for an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical impasse in a text, argument, or concept.
Appropriation – Deliberate adoption and reuse of existing images, objects, or styles in a new artistic context.
auratic—according to Benjamin, aura is the unique, irreplaceable presence of an artwork—its “here and now.” It’s the special atmosphere or radiance that surrounds an original and is lost in reproductions.
Bucolic – Describes an idealized rural-pastoral world that stages Arcadian shepherd idylls, peaceful nature scenes, and a romanticized simplicity of country life.
Chronophotography – Late 19th-century photographic technique that makes movement sequences visible by capturing multiple phases of motion in rapid succession.
Coda – Concluding, often independent part of an artwork that points beyond the formal ending and resonates: an epilogue in music, text, or image.
Conditio humana – The fundamental, inescapable conditions of human existence, the existential constants that define and limit being human.
Corvidae – Ornithological family of crows and ravens, highly intelligent songbirds that function in mythology, art, and science as symbols of wisdom, death, and transformation.
Dark Art aesthetic – Art movement that deliberately explores dark, disturbing, and taboo themes, often probing the boundaries between beauty and repulsion, fascination and discomfort.
Data-moshing – digitale Videotechnik, bei der die Komprimierungsartefakte von Videos absichtlich manipuliert werden, um künstlerische, surreale oder glitch-artige Effekte zu erzeugen.
Digital apotheosis – Deification through digital transformation, the conversion of people, objects, or concepts into supposedly immortal, perfected digital entities.
Digital entropy – Progressive decay, disorder, and information loss in digital systems and data.
Digital readymade – Found digital artifacts declared as art through contextual shift.
Divine Providence – God’s caring guidance and preservation of the world.
Emanation – The flowing out or radiating forth.
Ephemeral – Describes the fleeting, transient, briefly existing—that which appears only to disappear.
Epitaph – Grave inscription, memorial plaque, or artistic memorial form that mediates between personal mourning and public memoria.
Epiphany – Appearance, revelation.
Error Art – (also Glitch Art or Datamoshing) Digital art movement that uses technical errors, disruptions, and digital artifacts as aesthetic material and conceptual statement.
Fan Art – Artistic works created by fans as homage to existing media products.
Glitch effect – Expression of an aesthetic that transforms technical errors and malfunctions into artworks. Glitch Art deliberately uses induced disruptions to create new visual experiences, often featuring pixelated structures and destabilization effects.
Glossavision (Arslohgo)—Neologism combining glossa (language) and vision (sight): An artistic method for visually representing multilingual layers of meaning, where linguistic ambiguities serve as a design principle.
Gothic aesthetic – Style and expression complex that has evolved from the medieval Gothic concept through the 18th-century Gothic novel to contemporary subculture.
Hieratic – Stiff, solemn, ceremonial mode of representation that, especially in sacred art, deliberately maintains distance from naturalistic depiction.
Homography – Words spelled the same with different meanings and/or pronunciations, the visual counterpart to auditory homophony.
Homophony – The identical sounding of different entities—in music, language, and extended meaning as a principle of cultural resonance.
Liminal – Describes threshold states, transitional phases, and in-between spaces—moments of “no longer” and “not yet” where established orders are suspended.
Lohgorhythms (Arslohgo) –Art term for a conceptual methodology for digital transformation that employs multilayered wordplay between lohgo, rhythm, and logarithm, exploiting German-English linguistic ambiguities for art production.
Machine aesthetic – Artistic fascination with the formal language of industrial production—the beauty of functional geometry, repetitive precision, and technical rationality.
Memento mori – Philosophical and artistic concept reminding us of death’s inevitability and life’s transience.
Mise-en-abyme – Recursive structure in which a work contains a miniature representation of itself.
Mono no aware – Aesthetic-philosophical concept in Japanese culture describing the bittersweet awareness of the impermanence of all things and the gentle sadness over their fleeting beauty.
Mythological gravitas – The way a work takes up the weighty, portentous quality of mythic narratives.
New Topographics movement – Photographic movement that from 1975 documented human-altered landscapes without romantic idealization or apocalyptic exaggeration.
Nocturne – Artistic works that not only depict night but evoke its specific atmosphere, temporality, and states of consciousness.
Obsolescence – The becoming outdated, unusable, or deliberate wearing out of products, technologies, and systems; a core mechanism of capitalist production cycles and digital culture.
Oscillate – To swing, vibrate, move back and forth between two states.
Ouroboros – an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, forming a closed circle.
Palimpsest – Work in which multiple layers of meaning or visual strata overlap, with earlier layers remaining partially visible or showing through.
Petromodernity – Historical epoch and culture fundamentally based on fossil fuels, a modernity whose aesthetic, social, and material forms are inseparably interwoven with oil, coal, and gas.
Pastoral – An idyllic representation of shepherd and country life that oscillates between idealized nature romanticism and coded social critique.
Polysemy – Multiple or manifold meanings of a word.
Posthuman condition – State in which traditional boundaries of the human are transcended, dissolved, or fundamentally redefined through technology, biotechnology, and theoretical reconceptualizations.
Post-Internet Art – Describes a condition in which the internet has become as taken for granted as electricity.
Psychopomp – Mythological beings or deities that guide souls of the deceased to the afterlife, boundary-crossers between life and death, this world and the next.
Rhizomatic – Describes decentralized, non-hierarchical network thinking (alternative to traditional tree structures).
Semiotic order – Structured system of signs, codes, and meaning relations through which a culture organizes, interprets, and makes its reality communicable.
Spectral realism – Theoretical concept combining elements of hauntology (ghostly ontology), speculative realism, and spectral aesthetics.
Sublime – Elevated, awe-inspiring.
Submersion – Immersion, going under, or sinking into a liquid.
Technical abbreviation – Systematic shortening of technical terms into acronyms, codes, and abbreviations (like SIM).
Tessellate – To cover a surface seamlessly without overlaps using repeating geometric shapes, similar to a mosaic or parquet floor.
Thanatopoetics – Artistic engagement with death, dying, and transience as creative principle.
Translucent – Light-permeable or see-through.
Trichromatic – Ability to perceive colors through three independent color receptors, the basis of human color vision.
Trompe-l’œil – (French: “deceive the eye”) Painting technique that simulates three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface through perfect illusionistic representation.
Tropes – (Singular: trope) Recurring motifs, modes of representation, or rhetorical figures that convey specific meanings.
Truth arbitrators – Entities, mechanisms, or actors that claim or are designated to decide between true and false, the authority for determining truth.
Vanitas painting – Baroque still-life genre (especially 17th century) that stages the transience of all earthly things and the vanity of worldly goods through symbol-laden arrangements.
Vaporwave – Digital music and art genre of the early 2010s, characterized by nostalgic appropriation of 1980s/90s aesthetics, slowed music samples, and anti-capitalist irony.
Vexation picture – Image with hidden or ambiguous visual content that challenges and deceives the viewer.