William Davies has written a fascinating piece about our relationship to 'Big Data':
"Common to both the charismatic leader and smart technology is their ability to evoke what Immanuel Kant described as the “sublime,” which, he argued, arises as a result of human cognition being utterly overwhelmed by an aesthetic experience. First we cower in terror, but then we quickly realise that everything is still okay. The discovert that the individual can survive, in spite of being overpowered, brings intense pleasure."
He also quotes
"...historian Julian Stallabrass in “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography,” a 2007 article on photographic portraiture. Noting a trend towards blank, expressionless but technically awe-inspiring photographs of human subjects, manifest in the work of Rineke Dijkstra among others, Stallabrass argues that:
subjective, creative choice has been subsumed in favour of greater resolution and bit depth, a measurable increase in the quantity of data. The manifest display of very large amounts of data in such images may be related to a broader trend in contemporary art to exploit the effect of the ‘data sublime’. In providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a chaotically complex and immensely large configuration of data, these photographs act much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers."
I know this makes me appear terribly crass but that instantly struck me as a tremendous explanation of the appeal of Bayhem:
Michael Bay - What is Bayhem? from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.
That's what a Michael Bay film is : "human cognition being utterly overwhelmed by an aesthetic experience"