Timotheus Vermeulen, with his colleague Robin van den Akker, wrote the 2010 essay “Notes on Metamodernism” that effectively kick-started contemporary discourse on the post-millennial aesthetic sensibility characterized – in Tim and Robin’s words – by an oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”
In this discussion with Tim, we share perspectives on the major causative factors in the metamodern turn, and on which qualities might be found at the “heart” of metamodernism. We cover topics ranging from the playful and innovative architecture of Bjarke Ingels to “dark metamodernism” and the gothic/quirky music of Billie Eilish, with many stops in between.
