## INTRODUCTION

As is often the case, the articles collected in this issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics are not brought together by a shared theme. What -accidentally -is  a  common denominator of the articles, however, is the fact that they are all written by authors based in a Nordic country. One possible way to read the present issue would, therefore, be to see the independent articles as testimonies to the great diversity and variety in current aesthetic research in the Nordic area, in terms of theoretical frameworks, historical periods, and objects of analysis -ranging from classical sculpture over modern high rise architecture and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odessey to contemporary digital music use.

In the opening article 'Winckelmann's Apollo and the Physiognomy  of  Race,'  Lasse  Hodne  responds  to  parts  of  Nicholas Mirzoeff's article 'Empty the Museum, Decolonize the Curriculum, Open Theory' in NJA no. 53. The purpose of Hodne's article is to challenge the view in a number of recent articles that Johann Joachim Winckelmann's glorification of ancient Greek and Roman marble statues of white male bodies may be seen to promote notions of  white  supremacy.  Hodne  does  so  by  examining  theories -especially climate theory -that were prevalent in the eighteenth century and which affected Winckelmann's views on race. Based on an investigation of different types of classicism, the article furthermore argues that Winckelmann's aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic understanding of ancient models that characterised fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

Jacob Wamberg's article 'Monolith in a Hollow: Paleofuturism and Earth Art in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ' is an analysis of Kubrick's 2001 from 1968 in terms of what Wamberg proposes to call 'paleofuturism,' which not only fuses deep future and deep past but also reconciles rational machinic intelligence with diverse cultural, biological, and geological temporal layers. In  Wamberg's reading, in 2001 paleofuturism is nourished by Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch of the future, reborn as a child, and by Carl Gustav Jung's notions of individuation and his idea of a reconciliation with the shadow of the collective unconscious leading to the black cosmos itself. The article investigates further paleofuturist  contexts  for  Kubrick's  film  in  science  fiction, speculative  science,  and  pseudo-science  and  demonstrates  a structural parallel to 2001 's  bypassing of the organic body in minimalism and earth art of the same period.

Wamberg's extensive reading of 2001 is  followed by an article by  Anders  Troelsen,  'The  Vertical  City.  Approaches  to  the Skyscraper City as Phenomenological Space and Semantic Field,' in relation to an ongoing research project at the Aarhus School of Architecture. As the project is a work in progress, the article is more of a 'project essay' that proposes different approaches to the study of skyscraper cities. Departing from a distinction in the Danish language between buildings that are lying and buildings that are standing Troelsen sketches what he sees to be the most important phenomenological and discursive perspectives in the study of skyscraper cities and high-rise structures. He also makes the point that such an analysis of contemporary skyscraper cities can shed new light on more traditional cities in a way similar to how new media illuminate the characteristics of old ones.

The last article, 'Digital Music Use as Ecological Thinking: Metadata and Historicised Listening' by Andreas Helles Pedersen, is a media theoretical examination of how the digitalisation of music impacts listening. Pedersen analyses digital music use as an aesthetic situation informed by what he calls 'potentialities of  becoming.'  Claiming  that  metadata  are  capable  of  putting historical  awareness  into  the  act  of  listening  he  argues  that the  inner  workings  of  digital  music  use  constitute  an  ecology within which recorded music moves and reconnects whereby its historicity becomes fluid and listening is turned into a historicised action. Pedersen exemplifies and discusses these points in relation to the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, which is constructed on top of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcast Corporation (Danmarks Radio), as well as through an analysis of sampled music.

In  the  review  section  Alex  Fleck  reviews  Christian  Ulrik Andersen  and  Søren  Bro  Pold's The  Metainterface:  The  Art  of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds ; Jan Løhmann Stephensen reviews the anthology Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art edited by Tanya Toft Ag; and finally Zoltán Somhegyi reviews François Jullien's Living Off Landscape or The Unthought-Of in Reason .

Painfully aware that this issue of NJA has turned out to only include articles by male authors, I would, on a final note, like to remark that we are of course attentive to the gender balance of the journal's authorship. Given the limited number of articles in a single issue, it is, however, not always possible to strike such a balance but we do aim to do so across every two-three issues.

Jacob Lund