In an endeavour to cultivate as many regions of what Marcel Duchamp called 'the planet of aesthetics' as possible this issue of The Nordic Jour­ nal of Aesthetics opens with two media archaeological or archaeo-acoustic, to be more precise, investigations. They both stem from an acousticalarchaeological research expedition undertaken in 2004 by members of the Humboldt University in Berlin and organized by Wolfgang Ernst on the initiative of Friedrich Kittler and Christian von Borries. The purpose of the expedition was to explore the sonosphere of the Li Galli islands off the Italian Amalfi coast and thus to measure the sonosphere of the acoustic theatre where the Sirens of Homer's Odyssey are supposed to have sung. Based on the Li Galli case in his article 'Towards a Media-Archaeology  of  Sirenic  Articulations:  Listening  with  Media-Archaeological Ears' Wolfgang Ernst argues that media archaeology is not just a methodological claim but primarily a research practice of media culture and demonstrates that archaeo-acoustics can also be applied to what he terms 'cultural aesthetics'. Media archaeology enters into a dialectical relation with aesthetics, he thus claims. The case of the uncovering of the actual acoustic conditions behind the myth of the Sirens demonstrates that new evidence against the philological tradition can only be produced through the application of positivistic acoustic measurement technologies while this positivistic data at the same time only make aesthetic sense by being coupled with cultural knowledge. Ernst's article is supplemented by the research report 'The Song of the Sirens' by Karl-Heinz Frommolt and Martin Carlé. Frommolt and Carlé explain how the actual acoustic investigations of the landscape were undertaken and how the results support the myth of Homer while also discussing their findings in relation to leading acoustic theories.

Moving from Antiquity to the contemporary the third article 'The Liquid  ation of Art in Contemporary Art' by Wolfram Bergande reactualizes Hegel's philosophy of art as an adequate theoretical framework for the analysis of modern, especially postmodern and contemporary art. Bergande reconstructs Hegel's concept of liquidation from The Phenomen­ ology  of  Spirit in  order  to  deconstruct  the  systematic  transition  from sculpture to painting in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art claiming that such a deconstructed Hegel shows postmodern and contemporary art to be liquid or liquidated. In particular he discusses Damien Hirst's For the Love of God as evidence of discursive reflection as the necessary supplement of modern art.

Zoltán Somhegyi's article 'Eternal Distance: On the Significance of Window- and Cave Representations in Northern Romanticism' is an art historical analysis of window and cave representations in Romanticism with a particular focus on the North. Somhegyi's point of departure is the assumption that it was only with Romanticism that art started to question the accessibility and the possibility of a direct understanding of nature, which in many ways can be seen as a reaction to the belief in domestication and domination of nature characterizing the Enlightenment. He connects the Romantic representations of windows and caves to a differentiation between inside and outside, which he sees as an emphasis on the inaccessibility of nature influencing the composition, appearance, and interpretation of the images.

In the review essay 'Art History in Its Image War' James Day dis  cusses ten recent publications on image-politics in relation to the possibility of art historical analysis while Kalle Puolakka closes the issue with a review of  Nicholas Davey's Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer .

Jacob Lund