You know the image before you can name it. A polished surface. Metal, glass, lacquer, graphite, beige, black. A room almost empty. A curtain filtering cloudy light into the air. A light so controlled that nothing seems accidental. No bodies, or few stylized ones. No bodies, or only a few stylized ones. No dust, no clutter, none of the awkward liveliness, cheapness, or color of everyday life. The space looks abandoned, but not dirty; post-human, but not ruined; absolutely melancholic, but perfectly composed.
It could be an installation shot, a fashion campaign, a design render, a gallery documentation image. But really, you probably saw it first as a screenshot in your feed.
These images have become familiar. It appears across contemporary art, fashion imagery, architecture, object photography, and interface culture. Not always in its purest or most extreme form, and not always consciously. More often, it appears by degrees: as an influence, a mood, a visual habit, a tendency we fall into even when we do not fully endorse it. It gives the impression of depth without demanding duration, of mystery without disorientation, of objecthood without resistance. It feels withdrawn, but remains immediately legible. It looks as if it had escaped the noise of the present. I call this sensibility technoromanticism.
AI generated image: technoromanticism
By technoromanticism I do not mean a romantic fascination with technology, nor simply an aesthetic produced by technological media. I use the term to describe the technical stabilization of a romantic structure: exteriority becomes a reproducible scene of subjective intensification. Where historical romanticism often found its privileged scenes in nature, night, ruins, infinity, or the sublime, technoromanticism finds them in interface, surface, polish, emptiness, controlled darkness, and the highly legible object.
Its promise is simple and powerful: the world has depth again. Matter returns. Objects return. Silence returns. Space returns.
After decades in which language, signs, and the margins of representation occupied the center of critical experience, technoromanticism seems to give things their gravity back.
But the question is not whether the object returns. The question is how it returns.
Technoromanticism is not a movement, a school, a manifesto, or a style in the narrow sense. It is better understood as a distributed regime of appearance: a convergence of formal traits, modes of circulation, and effects of meaning through which objects, spaces, surfaces, atmospheres, and images come to look meaningful, deep, and desirable under contemporary conditions of circulation.
A work, campaign, render, or installation view can participate in it without being reducible to it. Therefore, we should not ask whether something “is” technoromantic, but how it organizes appearance: what counts as presence, what is filtered out as noise, and how depth, opacity, and objecthood become legible within contemporary visual circulation. [1]
At its most visible level, technoromanticism has a formal grammar: polished surfaces, metal, glass, lacquer, modular structures, controlled light, empty rooms, dark or muted palettes, graphite, silver, black, beige, desaturated brown, cold cream, sometimes a softened pastel detail.
It often removes signs of ordinary use: no dust, no clutter, no badly placed cable, no chair being used rather than displayed.
The scene is composed, quiet, frontal.
It appears serious before it says anything. It asks to be looked at as if something had withdrawn from the everyday and returned in a more concentrated form. 
stage design
This grammar can take different tonalities.
Sometimes it appears in a curatorial or high-design register: minimal, selected, expensive-looking, severe.
Sometimes it becomes a softened dystopia: cold, monumental, but strangely comfortable.
Sometimes it becomes a kind of languid, overcast domesticity: a bed, a cable, a curtain, a glass, a garment, a table, a notebook, slow experimental pop in the background.
Sometimes it turns nocturnal or melancholic, where darkened nature functions less as danger than as mood.
Sometimes it becomes almost techno-gnostic, as if technical materiality promised access to a hidden order.
But these variations share something: they make depth recognizable. They do not hide depth; they present it. Its spaces tend to be empty, but this emptiness is not neutral. It is not simply absence. It is a technique. By removing bodies, secondary objects, traces of work, and signs of daily friction, the scene becomes easier to read, easier to frame, easier to circulate.
Emptiness reduces contingency. It turns space into display.
languid, overcast domesticityAnd yet the subject does not disappear. The human figure is often absent, but the scene is never without a viewer: it is organized for an ideal gaze, frontal, silent, contemplative, photographic. The world appears with no one there, but always for someone. One does not participate through action, use, or conflict, but through perceptual recognition. Technoromanticism intensifies the subject precisely through apparent depopulation: the viewer returns as the condition of reception, as someone capable of appreciating distance, opacity, seriousness, materiality, and restraint.
Materiality plays a crucial role here. Technoromanticism often privileges materials culturally associated with objecthood and technical seriousness: metal, glass, industrial surfaces, synthetic structures, modular components, reflective skins.
At first glance, this seems to mark a return to the object against the image. But the way this materiality appears is decisive. Metal rarely confronts us through weight, temperature, danger, or resistance; glass rarely appears as fragility or risk; industrial surfaces rarely carry labor, exhaustion, or historical use. These materials arrive already coded: metal means coldness, seriousness, futurity; glass means separation and control; darkness means depth; emptiness means intensity. Matter becomes sign. The experience is one of materiality without difficult contact.
This logic also belongs to a wider chromatic drift: the neutralization of color. Gray minimalism, beige interiors, desaturated clothes, matte cars, white devices, and low-saturation worlds have become visual signs of calm, intelligence, distance, and contemporaneity. Not every gray or monochrome aesthetic is technoromantic, but the affinity is hard to ignore. The future imagined by dystopia often arrives like this: gray is a device of purification.
This is where technoromanticism becomes more than a formal tendency. It organizes a relation between materiality and image. It offers a material world that has already been translated into visual value.
That is why the second layer of technoromanticism is circulation.
These images are not only made and then distributed. They seem made for distribution from the start. Their economy of color, their frontal legibility, their atmospheric coherence, their lack of narrative clutter, their compact symbolic charge: all of this makes them compatible with the feed. They are images that can travel without explanation. They do not require long apprenticeship, social context, or slow looking in order to be recognized as intense.
The lookbook, the installation shot, the design render, the gallery image, the fashion campaign, the architecture photograph, the object close-up: these formats begin to speak a shared language. Art does not simply borrow from fashion or design; fashion and design do not simply imitate art. They participate in a wider infrastructure of presentation. What circulates between them is not only a style, but a cultural grammar of appearance.
This grammar is particularly effective because it turns “looking deep” into a social form. In platform environments, aesthetics does not operate only as private taste. It becomes a shared social language of belonging, recognition, and self-presentation. A way to indicate sensitivity, distance, intelligence, seriousness, melancholy, refusal, refinement.
The scene no longer points toward a hidden outside; it increasingly functions as an operational surface.[2] Technoromanticism gives visual form to the desire to appear as someone who has not been captured by the obvious, even when the image itself is perfectly optimized for capture.
Isn't this the very epistemological gesture of Romanticism? Isn't it therefore romantic?
The romantic element lies in a familiar structure: exteriority becomes a scene for subjective intensification. In historical romanticism, nature, night, ruin, infinity, or the sublime often served as surfaces through which the self deepened itself. In technoromanticism, those scenes are replaced by interface, polished matter, empty space, technical darkness, artificial calm, and the aestheticized object. The outside remains important, but less as a true interruption than as a stage for self-experience.
The techno- prefix does not mean that this is simply romanticism with machines. It does not mean technological content, digital media, or a cybernetic style. It names the technical stabilization of a romantic structure. What was once episodic, excessive, dangerous, or tied to singular experience becomes reproducible, shareable, and compatible with the infrastructure of platforms. Exteriority becomes format. Depth becomes atmosphere. Alterity becomes an experience one can recognize, enter, and circulate.
This brings us to the third layer of technoromanticism: its implicit ontological function. It does not merely organize what we see. It organizes what counts as depth.
Opacity appears as an aesthetic quality.
Distance appears as mood.
The object seems to withdraw, but in a way that remains compatible with access.
The object returns, but as an impeccable presence, without asking us to lose our frame.
The central question, then, is not whether the object is present.
The question is what kind of presence is being produced when depth is already image, when opacity becomes style, and when withdrawal itself becomes something we can consume.
The Return of the Object, or Its Simulation?
Technoromanticism seems to promise a return of the object. After years of frictionless images, symbolic play, dematerialized experience, and platform circulation, realism seems to strike back. Metal. Glass. Weight. Silence. Space. Distance. Objects that do not explain themselves immediately. Rooms that do not seem designed for everyday use. Surfaces that appear to hold something back.
Part of its attraction is that it seems to inherit the contemporary materialist reaction against the dominance of language, sign, and symbolic construction. It appears to echo the desire to move beyond passive matter by insisting on the vitality of the material and on forms of agency not reducible to the subject. [3] It seems to say: matter acts again, objects matter again, the world is not exhausted by discourse.
But this promise needs to be treated carefully. The question is what kind of appearance the object has.
This is where I made a distinction between ontological withdrawal and aesthetic opacity.
In Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), withdrawal does not simply mean that an object looks mysterious, dark, difficult, or inaccessible. Withdrawal is not a mood. It is not an aesthetic effect. It names the fact that no object is exhausted by its relations, uses, appearances, or effects. An object is never fully identical with the way it appears to us, with the way it functions, is described, or enters relation. [4]
Aesthetic opacity is different. It belongs to the order of experience. It can be staged, intensified, designed, photographed, circulated, and recognized. A room can look opaque. A surface can look enigmatic. An atmosphere can feel liminal. But none of this guarantees that the object is actually resisting the conditions under which it appears.
Technoromanticism operates precisely in this gap.
organic and technology, depth as adscription
Its objects often look autonomous. They seem distanced, self-contained. Yet this autonomy is frequently arranged for an ideal spectator, already calibrated for perception. Its autonomy becomes theatrical in a very precise sense: it is staged as autonomy.
This is why Michael Fried’s old problem of theatricality is still useful here, even if it needs to be displaced. In a theatrical work, the viewer is not incidental; the work is organized around the situation of being beheld. [5] Something similar happens in technoromanticism, but in a more contemporary and platform-compatible form. The human figure may be absent from the scene, but the spectator is structurally required. The image says: no one is here. But everything has been arranged for you.
This is not the same as saying that all relation is bad, or that art should return to some fantasy of pure autonomy. [6] The problem is not that the work is seen, mediated, photographed, or circulated. The problem is that its apparent alterity is preformatted as experience. This is what I call a simulation of withdrawal.
A simulation of withdrawal happens when what should function as a limit to access becomes an aesthetic quality of access. The object seems distant, but the distance intensifies the experience rather than interrupting it. The surface seems opaque, but the opacity becomes seductive.
In this regime, depth is not absent. On the contrary, depth is everywhere. But it appears as atmosphere rather than difficulty, as mood rather than resistance, as visual value rather than transformation. Everything seems to exceed, but nothing really overflows. This is why technoromanticism produces a very specific sensation: intensity without friction.
The room may look post-human, but it is rarely hostile. The darkness may suggest danger, but usually it remains habitable. The scene may feel dystopian, but in an elegant, desirable, almost comfortable way. It is not Lovecraftian strangeness. It is not the terror of an unthinkable outside.
Depth appears, but safely.
In fact, this also explains why technoromanticism is so compatible with the feed. True interruption is difficult to circulate. Real friction slows down recognition.
Here, opacity becomes a social signal. To recognize the image is also to recognize oneself in relation to it. The viewer becomes someone who understands restraint, distance, coolness, material seriousness. The subject does not simply consume the object; the subject is refined by the object’s apparent refusal. This is the paradox: the object seems to withdraw, but its withdrawal returns as an elevated image of the viewer.
That is why the simulation of withdrawal prepares a broader regime, which I call Ego-Oriented Ontology.
The term may sound provocative, but it is not meant as a moral accusation. It does not mean that artists are narcissistic, or that viewers are vain. Ego-Oriented Ontology (EOO) names something more structural: a regime in which objects appear primarily as interfaces of self-inscription.
So, while OOO insists that the object exceeds any relation, perception, use, manifestation, or access, EOO describes the opposite cultural operation: not the disappearance of the object, but its return already formatted for subject-centered experience. The real counts insofar as it deepens the subject’s experience; alterity matters insofar as it allows the subject to feel refined, distant, sensitive, or critical.
This is no longer simply philosophical correlationism, but a designed correlationism: the object returns already formatted for subject-centered experience.
Matter is not denied. Space is not dissolved. The object is not erased. But all of them return through a structure that confirms the subject as the one capable of perceiving depth.
The object appears autonomous, but its autonomy functions as a mirror.
The harder question, then, is not whether technoromanticism is beautiful. It often is. Nor whether it is intelligent. It can be. Nor whether artists, designers, curators, or viewers should simply reject it. That would be too easy.
The harder question is this: what happens when the desire for depth is captured by the very systems of visibility it seems to resist?
Depth Without Friction
The experience of technoromanticism is not shallow.
This is important. It would be too easy to dismiss it as superficial, as mere taste, or as luxury minimalism. But technoromanticism works precisely because it produces a real sensation. It gives the viewer something to feel: a mood, a density, a peace, a promise that something lies behind the surface.
The problem is not that there is no depth. The problem is that depth has become safe.
Technoromanticism does not give us flatness in the obvious sense. It gives us depth without friction. A kind of intensity that does not require disorientation. A kind of opacity that does not block access. A kind of distance that does not exclude. The image appears withdrawn, but it never becomes truly unavailable. It withholds just enough to feel serious, but not enough to become difficult. It suggests excess, but prevents overflow.
Everything looks profound, but nothing weighs.
This is why the technoromantic object often has such a strange phenomenology. It can look serious, cold, autonomous, even severe, but rarely truly threatening. It may suggest an unknown function, but this unknown function does not disorient the viewer. It may appear post-human, but not hostile. It may appear abandoned, but not truly ruined.
The world has ended, but the lighting is perfect.
Never disorienting, never hostile
This is not the classical sublime. In the sublime, at least in its Kantian and modern philosophical formulation, the subject encounters something that exceeds ordinary perceptual measure: magnitude, force, abyss, storm, mountain, power. The experience involves a break. Something in perception fails or reaches its limit. The subject may later recover itself, but only after a moment of inadequacy.
Technoromanticism offers a different structure: the attenuated sublime.
Solitude becomes grandeur. Distance becomes elegance. Darkness becomes visual code. The subject does not suffer a crisis of perception. It is not overwhelmed, wounded, or reorganized. It is given the aesthetic signs of crisis without the crisis itself. The sublime becomes habitable. The abyss becomes a set design.
Not all darkness works like this.
Lovecraft or Ligotti, as well as certain approaches linked to black metal theory, allow us to think darkness, emptiness, noise, or negativity not as atmospheres of refinement, but as experiences of dispossession, impurity, horror, or exposure to an outside that does not immediately return an ennobled image of the subject. In that register, darkness touches the silence of the incomprehensible and opens a dark, fearsome, dispossessing and yet strangely pure, strangely reparative horizontality.
In this sense, it belongs to a broader contemporary culture of smoothness. As Byung-Chul Han says, the polished surface is not simply an aesthetic preference. It is a promise: nothing here will cut you. [7] Nothing here will resist you too much. Nothing here will force an encounter beyond the frame. Metal shines, but does not injure. Glass separates, but does not break. Darkness surrounds, but does not blind. Emptiness suspends, but does not abandon. It offers the emotional reward of depth without the cost of transformation.
The object keeps its distance, but the viewer remains safe.
But this safety is not only perceptual. It is also social. Technoromanticism provides a way of appearing deep. To share, enter, display, or identify with these images is to participate in a recognizable economy of seriousness.
The image seems to say: I am not obvious. I am not ordinary. I belong to a colder, more refined, more withdrawn world. And because this withdrawal is legible, it can circulate as a sign of distinction.
Opacity becomes a value.
In older aesthetic and philosophical contexts, opacity could mark a limit, a resistance, even a failure of comprehension. In technoromanticism, opacity becomes attractive because it is already coded as meaningful. The dark surface no longer says “you cannot enter.” It says “this is depth.” The empty room no longer says “something is missing.” It says “this is intensity.” The silent object no longer says “you do not know what I am.” It says “you know enough to recognize that I am serious.”
Here the Benjaminian problem turns inside out. Much contemporary art tried to stay ahead of reproduction: the performance, the installation, the conceptual or political gesture, the contextual work could be documented, but the document was never enough. It was a remainder, a proof of loss. Technoromanticism changes the balance. Its aura no longer precedes the record, the shot. It is produced by it; more intensely than by the work’s physical presence.
This is where the politics of technoromanticism begins.
Not in an explicit message. Not even necessarily in the intentions of artists, designers, curators, or viewers. The politics lies in the kind of world the images make desirable. And what kind of world is that?
A world without residue. A world without maintenance. A world without clumsy bodies, awkward furniture, bad lighting, practical repairs, aging materials, visible labor, social conflict, or everyday noise. A world where everything has been cleaned before appearing.
This is the “too-clean” world of technoromanticism. It is not simply minimal. It is not simply elegant. It is purified. Its surfaces filter out what does not fit the atmosphere: dust, fatigue, warmth, mess, use, contingency, the ordinary marks of inhabitation. Even melancholy appears cleaned. Even sadness becomes stylized. Even darkness becomes breathable.
This matters because the removal of friction is never only formal. When an aesthetic repeatedly presents the world as valuable only once it has been emptied of conflict, residue, and difficulty, it also trains desire. It teaches us what kind of world deserves to appear. It suggests that intensity requires purification and that depth requires the removal of the ordinary. The social world becomes noise.
Of course, technoromanticism does not explicitly say this. It does not announce: remove conflict, remove poverty, remove awkwardness, remove exhaustion, remove the badly lit, the badly shaped, the unpolished, the unresolved. It does not directly reject the world. It simply produces a more desirable image of the world after the unwanted parts have been filtered out.
This is what makes the regime politically delicate. It does not necessarily produce exclusion by statement or representation. It produces exclusion aesthetically, by defining what counts as presence and what counts as visual disturbance. It offers a distribution of the sensible: some things appear as depth, others as noise; some materials appear as serious, others as vulgar; some forms of emptiness appear profound, others merely abandoned; some bodies and traces belong to the image, others must disappear for the image to work.
The too-clean world is not empty. It is selective. It is full of decisions about what can appear.
This is why the regime can be so seductive. It offers real relief. In a world of overstimulation, the clean scene calms. In a world of noise, silence may attract. In a world of overexposure, opacity feels protective. In a world of endless content, the serious object feels like a refuge. Technoromanticism is compelling because it answers genuine exhaustion.
But it answers exhaustion by aestheticizing withdrawal.
The question is not who is to blame. The question is what forms of experience become easier to desire. Technoromanticism makes it easy to desire a world without friction: a world where matter has no dirt, depth has no danger, distance has no rejection, silence has no loneliness, and alterity has no demand.
This is why the critique should not be understood as a moral judgment on artists, institutions, scenes, or individual intentions. Nor does it ignore the material and economic conditions under which contemporary art is produced. The point is not to accuse particular works of being guilty, but to examine a regime of appearance: its conditions of circulation, its effects on perception, and the forms of desire it makes available. In that sense, critique should be understood as a form of care: care for art, for its conditions of possibility, and for its capacity to do more than reproduce the grammars through which it becomes recognizable.
The Silver Mirror
We are used to thinking about the screen as a black mirror.
The black mirror suggests threat. Alienation, technological enclosure, surveillance, addiction, narcissism, the cold glow of the device returning our image under the sign of capture. It is the mirror of digital suspicion.
Technoromanticism offers a different mirror. Not black, but silver.
The silver mirror does not confront the subject with technological horror. It does not return the self as damaged, addicted, exposed, or manipulated. It returns the self as elevated. Beautiful. Quiet. Profound. It reflects a subject who appears to have escaped noise, vulgarity, excess availability, cheap visibility, ordinary social exhaustion. It gives back an image of the self as someone who belongs to a more serious world.
But the mirror becomes more than a metaphor. The silver mirror names the affective structure of technoromanticism: a surface that does not simply reflect the subject, but refines the subject.
But the silver mirror can return the self as authentic and profound only because the surrounding world has already been emptied of friction. No clutter, no residue, no labor, no awkward body, no unresolved conflict, no banal object left in the wrong place. It depends on prior cleaning. Everything that might complicate the subject’s elevation has been removed.
It is an operation. Through a cleaned world it produces a refined subject.
World too-cleanAgain, that is purely romantic, although technically stabilized. Romanticism already turned exteriority into a scene of subjective intensification. Romantic figures of the sublime did not simply confront the subject with an indifferent outside; they allowed the subject to experience itself as deeper, more sensitive, more conscious of its own interiority, more exposed to magnitude, fate, or loss. The outside mattered because it enlarged interiority, even when it did so through danger or limit.
Technoromanticism preserves this structure while changing its conditions. The landscape becomes surface. The storm becomes atmosphere. The ruin becomes design. The sublime becomes lighting. Exteriority no longer appears mainly as nature or metaphysical vastness, but as interface, metal, glass, emptiness, polish, and controlled darkness. The outside still deepens the subject, but without the same demand of displacement: it intensifies without wounding and offers alterity as a refined condition of self-recognition.
Technoromantic depth therefore feels safe. It can appear melancholic, but the melancholy is already aestheticized. It can appear post-human, but without the discomfort of true inhumanity. It can suggest abandonment, but without the pain of being abandoned. It can stage silence, but without loneliness. It can stage distance, but without exclusion. It gives the signs of rupture while protecting the viewer from rupture.
The silver mirror is not the opposite of the feed. It is one of the feed’s most refined effects. Technoromantic images and content seem to run against platform culture: they seem withdrawn from the speed of content, emptied of noise, stripped of excessive color, and oriented toward a slower form of looking.
If Steyerl described the poor image through its dependence on circulation, technoromanticism could be understood as its polished reverse: a high-resolution fantasy of withdrawal that depends just as much on being circulated.
Here lies the point: technoromanticism is more than an aesthetic look. It is a physically present art entangled with detached forms of visualization, mediation, and circulation. From this tension emerges one of its most passionate dimensions: its aspirational force. Technoromanticism does not only show objects or spaces; it offers a way of appearing as if one belonged to them. To recognize this world properly, to circulate its images, or to imagine oneself inside them is already to participate in a selective community of perception. The desire is not necessarily to inhabit that world in its full materiality. Perhaps, at its deepest level, the desire is to be reflected as someone who could belong there: elegant, cold, serene, refined, sensitive to depth.
For this reason, the technoromantic regime should not be dismissed too quickly as a passing trend. Even when it appears as an extreme or ideal case, many of its structures operate partially across contemporary visual culture. Media culture is not external to this aesthetic; it is one of its conditions of possibility. A compensatory dreamspace.Technoromanticism may pass as a style, but the structure it names is likely to remain. [8]
The silver mirror is therefore not simply a matter of vanity. It is about the organization of desire. It teaches us to desire worlds in which difficulty has already been converted into atmosphere: materiality without labor, silence without conflict, distance without responsibility, melancholy without grief.
And it does so gently. No command is needed. No ideology needs to be announced. The image does not say what to think. It teaches perception by making some worlds feel more desirable than others.
Here is the deeper problem of technoromanticism. It does not merely produce images that look a certain way. The subject feels transformed without having to undergo transformation. Exteriority no longer interrupts interiority; it confirms it.
The silver mirror is beautiful because it has already absorbed the threat of the outside.
The key point, therefore, is that technoromanticism does not abandon alterity; it subverts it. It partially depends on the very concept of alterity and on the qualities we tend to attach to it. Technoromanticism needs the suggestion of something strange, withdrawn, inaccessible, or not fully available to perception.
But, as I have argued, this is not withdrawal in a strong sense. It is a simulation of withdrawal. It has little to do with a deep realism. There is no real feeling of strangeness, no real alterity in which objects might have dimensions, qualities, or relations that exceed human comprehension and experience. Nothing truly remains elsewhere. To put it simply, the disturbing possibility that something might be taking place in the object, in our presence, without being intellectually or sensibly graspable, is neutralized.
And this is the final paradox: technoromanticism does not only borrow the vocabulary of objecthood, opacity, and withdrawal; it reorganizes that vocabulary as a structure of self-recognition. When we relate to this supposed exteriority, we do not encounter an outside that disorganizes us. We encounter ourselves again, only refined, elevated, and aestheticized in a silver mirror.
This is also why the concept should not be applied only to fully paradigmatic cases. Technoromanticism does not require a work, image, object, or exhibition to embody its logic completely. Many contemporary practices may participate in it only partially, and some may even resist it from within. What matters is not whether something is purely technoromantic, but whether it takes part in this broader operation: the apparent return of the object without a strong ontological dimension; the use of opacity, materiality, or strangeness as aesthetic value; the conversion of alterity into atmosphere; the translation of withdrawal into recognizability; the entry of this supposed exteriority into the logic of the feed, display, and circulation.
The question, then, cannot be whether technoromanticism is simply good or bad. Does alterity remain something that resists capture? Does objecthood maintain relations in which we do not participate? Or does alterity become a visual credential, a way of appearing refined, critical, sensitive, strange, or withdrawn?
The problem, then, is not how to reject technoromanticism from the outside, but how to interrupt its circuit from within.
Can There Be Another Withdrawal?
If technoromanticism turns withdrawal into atmosphere, the answer cannot be more atmosphere. This is a trap. Once opacity, darkness, silence, emptiness, and distance become recognizable signs of depth, intensifying them does not produce a way out. They may even strengthen the regime.
So the question changes. It is no longer how an object can look more withdrawn. It becomes: under what conditions can a relation fail to close immediately as recognition? This is what I call operative withdrawal.
Operative withdrawal names a change in the conditions of appearance: a situation in which something in the object, image, process, or practice refuses to be consumed immediately -as mood or self-confirming experience. What matters is whether the relation remains unfinished.
Of course, this implies a return to objecthood. It is necessary to recover something of the object’s nonhuman qualities, its real excess, its darkness, its capacity to maintain relations in which we do not participate. But this is not about a fantasy of pure autonomy. It cannot mean imagining the artwork as an isolated thing sealed off from spectators, institutions, media, documentation, platforms, or political discrepancies. I hold this to be impossible.
Art appears inside a context. But the relation between artwork and spectator need not dissolve the object into the subject; real distance can still exist. Indeed, their partial union may itself form a strange third object, irreducible to either side and beyond full human comprehension. [4] So the problem is not relation as such. The problem is relation that arrives already closed.
A relation closes when it immediately becomes recognition: I know what kind of subject I become by liking it. The image has already completed the circuit. The object has already returned me to myself. Nothing has had time to happen.
Operative withdrawal begins where this circuit slows down, fails, stutters, or becomes partially unusable.
This can happen through duration, friction, irregularity, technical disjunction, or material processes that cannot be fully anticipated. It can happen through forms of making that retain traces of decision, correction, failure, pressure, drying, waiting, repair. It can happen where the object does not appear finished once and for all as a surface of reception.
Deleuze’s thought may become useful here, not as a decorative reference to intensity, but as a way of thinking differentiation: a process through which a form changes by passing again through forces, accidents, resistances, and relations that do not fully disappear into the final image. What matters is the intensive field beneath the finished surface: the pressures, deviations, and unfinished relations that keep the object from closing too quickly as appearance. [9]
That the object is not exhausted by its local manifestation. Something of its virtual field must remain active beneath the finished surface.
When an object almost reaches operational closure, something in its interior and exterior is altered, forcing it to reflow and recompose itself again.
Installation view at La Capella, Barcelona, 2021. A possible early crystallization of the technoromantic sensibility, and a possible counterpoint to its closure.
This is why craft matters here. Not because the handmade is more authentic than the digital. That would only produce another purified myth. Craft matters because it can keep visible something of the object’s formation: memory, accident, pressure, correction, material resistance, partial failure, process. A surface can be close and visible without becoming fully available. Something in its making can remain active.
The same distinction can apply to digital, technical, or post-digital practices. Operative withdrawal is not anti-technical. A technical object can resist immediate consumption. A digital process can generate delay, opacity, dependency, instability, or non-identical repetition. A screen can interrupt instead of seduce. An interface can force negotiation instead of producing smooth access.
An operative exit cannot consist in abandoning technique. It should ask about different technical relations, different rhythms of appearing, different ways of binding image, object, viewer, and world. That is what Yuk Hui points toward with cosmotechnics. If every technical system carries a certain way of worlding, then the problem is not technology in general, but the dominant form of technical access: the one that translates everything into availability, circulation, and optimization. A different relation to technique would not mean less technology, but more plurality in the ways worlds can appear.
Technodiversity would also imply aesthetic diversity at the level of experience. Not just different looks. Different operations.
A practice becomes interesting, from this perspective, when it introduces a mismatch with the dominant regime of appearance. It may be slow where the feed expects instant recognition. It may be repetitive without being identical. It may require maintenance rather than immediate reception. It may make material dependency visible. It may refuse the clean separation between object and context. It may produce a relation that cannot be summarized as atmosphere.
This may sound modest compared to the grand language of ontology. But perhaps that modesty is necessary. If withdrawal cannot be produced as a visual effect, then it has to be approached through practices, relations, durations, and operations. As something that happens in the way showing is organized.
This also changes the role of critique.
To criticize technoromanticism is not to demand ugliness, disorder, bad lighting, or anti-aesthetic sincerity. Nor is it to say that beauty, polish, silence, or atmosphere are politically suspect in themselves. There can be technical withdrawal.There can be beautiful withdrawal. There can be atmospheric withdrawal. But, practically, only if beauty, technique, and atmosphere do not close the experience too quickly.
The question is whether a work can sustain a delay between appearance and recognition. Whether it can make the viewer stay with something without immediately possessing it. Whether it can let materiality matter. So, it is about the organization of access.
It is about finding the moments where its promise breaks open: where depth stops being a credential, where the object stops being a mirror, where the surface stops confirming the viewer, where the world no longer appears too clean to be real.
Only there can art objects begin to withdraw again for us.
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Notes:
[1] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2004. [2] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schütze and Caroline Schütze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988. [3] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Diana Coole “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities.” Political Studies 53, no. 1: 124–42, 2005. [4] Graham Harman, Graham. Art and Objects. Cambridge: Polity, 2020. [5] Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. [6] The critique here is not directed against autonomy as such, but against autonomy staged as an immediately consumable effect. On autonomy as a social ontology of art under capitalism, see Nicholas Brown. [7] Byung-Chul Han, La salvación de lo bello. Barcelona: Herder, 2023 [Originally publised 2019]. [8] As Geert Lovink perceptively suggested, technoromanticism may be closer to cottagecore as an imaginary of escape than it first appears. I add: where cottagecore compensates technological exhaustion with pastoral warmth, softness, craft, and rural retreat, technoromanticism compensates it with coldness, rigidity, polish, and urbanity. It is all about control against chaos; and maybe ultimately, about self-composure, optimized distance, and cultural-sexual capital. [9] Deleuze, Gilles. Diferencia y repetición. Traducido por María Silvia Delpy y Hugo Acevedo. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, 2002. [Publicado originalmente en 1968].References:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
Leah Brand, “Crafting Cottagecore : Digital Pastoralism and the Production of an Escapist Fantasy.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, June 25, 2021.
Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011
Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object. Winchester, UK: Zer0 Books, 2011.
Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics.” *e-flux Journal* 86 (2017). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics.
Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image. 2017. https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image.
Quentin Meillassoux, Después de la finitud: Ensayo sobre la necesidad de la contingencia. Traducido por Ramón Rodríguez García. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015. [Publicado originalmente en 2006].
Alex B. Pablos, (2025). La categoría estética de habitus: el acto de diferenciación. Dialektika: Revista de investigación filosófica y teoría social, 7. https://doi.org/10.51528/dk.vol7.id205
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” *e-flux Journal* 10 (2009). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image
Bio:
Alex Bellido is a philosopher, researcher, and writer based in Barcelona. Trained in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, his work moves between aesthetics, technology, cognition, and contemporary visual culture. His MA thesis, on Deleuze, habit, and cognitive science, completed at the University of Osnabrück (Germany), was awarded the highest distinction and later developed into his academic publications. He currently researches aesthetics as both a theory of cognition and a theory of practice, with particular attention to perception, creation, habit, and regimes of experience. Alongside his academic work, he is collaborating as a writer and curator with artists, galleries, art fairs, and cultural projects in Barcelona and other European contexts. He is currently a PhD candidate in Aesthetics at UNED.