Ruin porn

One of the blogs that I read, and was instrumental in working towards a minimal but highly functional design framework, is Roles, Rules, and Rolls, by Roger G-S.  He just linked to Joseph Manola's post on the LotFP circle, as well as a number of other, linked writers, game designers, and thinkers, and one of the common aesthetics they share - the idea of ruin.  The essay is absolutely worth reading and connects to a number of much older artistic models for this fascination with ruins (Zdzislaw Beksinski and Hubert Robert, for example).

However, there is also a modern fascination with ruins beyond 18th and 20th c. artists, namely that of ruin porn.  I first came into contact with the concept at a presentation on the birth of techno, which happened toward the end of the 20th c. in Detroit, which opened discussing this art installation.  In photography and sculpture, ruin porn can be highly exploitative - because such works are intimately linked with a geographic area, the images of ruin come to represent the whole area, regardless of whatever action is being taken to remedy the lives and communities actually damaged by the ruin.

I think that it is highly interesting that in this post-Soviet era, where the myth of American Exceptionalism is no longer taken as literal truth by many, where small groups of individuals can wield tremendous power in global geopolitics, and democratic governments stagnate and fail to govern while the electorate that could drive positive change simply sits and simmers we find not only ruin porn, but also people choosing to create and inhabit fantasy worlds filled with dead and decaying things, through whose remains they pick.