Metroblossom is a collaborative online space for exploring the interaction between humans and the nonhuman world run by David Schalliol. He says that we humans have:

transformed our physical and cultural environments to suppress spontaneous, creative uses of space. The private and public, local and global, commercial and nonprofit -- our divisions and methods of discourse and action -- combine with the pickax and petrochemicals to impose our vision on the world around us. Nonhuman life bears the brunt of this domination. Unnecessary, illegible, invisible. If it cannot be harnessed, it is ignored or suppressed.

The name I have given to this is the aesthetics of decay or ruins. The decay or ruins stand in this tradition signify, or stand for human history understood as death, ruin, catastrophe. This is the aesthetics of the modern or neo-baroque.

Schalliol goes on to say that:

.. Herein lies a paradox -- what we do not see is as important, if not more important, than what we do see. In the superimposition of the gnarled grid of the city onto the even more twisted root structure of the earth, the unplanned, often nonhuman, world reacts to and acts on us.

This aesthetic recovers the historical baroque's alternate, pre-Enlightenment modernity that is not reducible to the quantifying rationality that gained ascendancy in the eighteenth century. This alternative rationalityis understood by Walter Benjamin as a world of twists and folds, undulations, and fractured planes; a world in which the unexpected and multivalent has supplanted the predictable and repetitive. This disorderly and highly uncertain state of affairs is not without strains of the apocalyptic.