Dirty Ruins and Their Online Afterlives 

Ruin porn proves, as the contemporary successor of Ruinenlust, that humans still share Georg Simmel’s fascination for ruins. However, modern ruin-enthusiasts of the Mediocene consume them through visual media, because “real ruins” are either musealized or too dirty to be accessed. They seem – unless staged by contemporary media – on the verge of losing their meaning. Similar to Bram Stocker’s Dracula, who lived in a Transylvanian “vast ruined castle” before transferring to Whitby Abbey, ruins seem like empty shells, gradually robbed by humans and metaphorically “eroded by time.” However, they “host” a multitude of life forms. Analogously to the simultaneously dead and alive Dracula, ruins are trapped in traditional dichotomies of nature-culture or absence-presence. Nonetheless, the doorless ruin takes dichotomies off their hinges by annulling the door as operative ontology and ceases to delimitate the inside and the outside. I argue that, either dirty crumbling objects or captured in (digital) media such as photography or film, ruins remain meaningful for both humans and non-humans. Ruin porn, which is online available, makes them everywhere accessible. Yet they objectify the ruin as their aesthetic has assimilated a universal visual grammar established by porn.