We are the scanners now. We are the Tumblr-users. We are the shareable concepts. We see what our machines see because we are synonymous with our machines, because we created them. New Aesthetic points us only towards ways of understanding and seeing a world that has become aestheticized by the very presence of our phenomenological movements within an object-oriented universe of our own design.
Humans have a tendency to see faces where there are none. So do computers. Are they more like us in their flaws?
Wikimedia Commons
This rocky hill in Ebihens, France, is, well, just that -- a rocky hill in Ebihens, France. But to pretty much any human observer, the assemblage of meaningless angles takes on a familiar appearance, that of a human face in profile. It has a distinct nose, eyes, lips, and chin, capped off with some foliage as hair. From the perspective pictured above, it's impossible not to see a man in a mountain.
This is an example of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, the human tendency to read significance into random or vague stimuli (both visual and auditory). The term comes from the Greek words "para" (παρά), meaning beside or beyond, and "eidolon" (εἴδωλον), meaning form or image. Though animals or plants can "appear" in clouds and human speech can do the same in static noise, the appearance of a face where there is none is perhaps the most common variant of pareidolia (this includes the subgenre of spotting Jesus or Mary in anything from toast to a crab).
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Pareidolia was once thought of as a symptom of psychosis, but is now recognized as a normal, human tendency. Carl Sagan theorized that hyper facial perception stems from an evolutionary need to recognize -- often quickly -- faces. He wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, "As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper."
Humans are not alone in their quest to "see" human faces in the sea of visual cues that surrounds them. For decades, scientists have been training computers to do the same. And, like humans, computers display pareidolia.
Though there is something basely human about the tendency to see faces in the non-human shapes around us, to anthropomorphize odd pieces of hardware or rocks on a hillside, that computers see humans where there are none should not be all too surprising. Facial-recognition software is a tough technological feat, and in the process, computers are bound to come up with false positives. Does this make the computers more like us? Have they taken on our most human cognitive errors? In a superficial sense, yes, computers do make errors that are similar to pareidolia, and this seems very human. But as you look into these computer false-positives a bit more, you find a different story.
In an awesome little creative trick, New York University researcher Greg Borenstein applied open-source software FaceTracker to a Flickr pool of examples called Hello Little Fella. In some instances, FaceTracker found a face just where you or I would:
Like a human, the computer has found a false-positive. That humans and computers share some instances of pareidolia seems to underscore the human-like nature of those computers, brought about by their human-led training. In that sense, a computers' errors make the computers seem somehow more human.
But maybe the reason a computer "sees" a face in that key is very simple: Things around us do sometimes actually have the shapes that constitute a face. How can we say this is pareidolia, a strange phenomenon that is supposedly the byproduct of millions of years of evolution, and not just the basic truth that sometimes shapes do look like things they are not?
A project from Phil McCarthy called Pareidoloop pushes us to think about these questions. By combining random-polygon-generation software and facial-recognition software, McCarthy's program builds its own series of randomly generated faces. Out of layers upon layers of mish-mashed shapes, the software "recognizes" the faces, and the fine tunes them into human likenesses. (McCarthy notes that a lot of them kind of resemble old pictures of Einstein.)
The computer is "seeing" faces where there are just random shapes! But wouldn't anyone? The results are clearly faces, so much so that recognizing them as such cannot be labeled pareidolia any more so than recognizing faces in a painting of a face is pareidolia. Where is that line? If it's pareidolia to see a face in the two windows and door of a house, why not in a sketch of two eyes and a nose? Faces are, after all, just a series of well arranged polygons. We'll see them in the world around us because sometimes, inevitably, shapes will be arranged in the formation of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. How can we identify pareidolia in a way that is distinct from the "accurate" identification of an artistic representation of a face? How can we say pareidolia is a phenomenon of the human mind at all?
Borenstein's work with computers provides a way out of this, answering a most human question by looking at the idiosyncrasies of algorithms. He writes:
Facial recognition techniques give computers their own flavor of pareidolia. In addition to responding to actual human faces, facial recognition systems, just like the human vision system, sometimes produce false positives, latching onto some set of features in the image as matching their model of a face. Rather than the millions of years of evolution that shapes human vision, their pareidolia is based on the details of their algorithms and the vicissitudes of the training data they've been exposed to.
Their pareidolia is different from ours. Different things trigger it.
In Borenstein's sample, FaceTracker found faces in only seven percent of the images, meaning that even though the program did display this human tendency, it did so at a rate much lower than the human judges who created the Flickr pool. That said, we do not know how many false positives the program would spot in the world around us that humans didn't include in the pool, though we get a sense from the "mistakes" the program made, sometimes missing the obvious "face" and spotting another. Such mistakes are useful for seeing just how particularly human pareidolia is in the first place. Here's an example:
The computer's false-positive is, as any human could tell you, wrong -- the wrong wrong answer, selecting B where a human would say A, and the answer is actually D, for none of the above. The mistakes of a computer are so other, so less-than-human, that we can see that pareidolia is not the recognition of just any old assemblage of eyes, nose, and a mouth, but specific ones, ones that must come from within the human observer, that are not inherently available in the shapes as they appear in the world.
And it shows us something more. Although a computer may, like a human, find false positives in the world around it, its sensibility for what makes a set of polygons a face is still, somehow, off. On its surface, a computer's a tendency to pareidolia, this very human phenomenon, seems human-like. In a strange echo of the tendency to see human faces in random shapes, we see our reflection in a machine's cognition -- a sort of pareidolia of the mind. We look at a computer's pareidolia and think, We make those very same mistakes!
But, in fact, we don't. The mistakes are different. A computer's flaws are still very machine -- and ours are very human.
That insight is at the heart of a new kind of thinking about music—one built on the idea that by taking massive numbers of songs, symphonies, and sonatas, turning them into cold, hard data, and analyzing them with computers, we can learn things about music that would have previously been impossible to uncover. Using advanced statistical tools and massive collections of data, a growing number of scholars—as well as some music fans—are taking the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies that make up the music we all love, crunching them en masse, and generating previously inaccessible new findings about how music works, why we like it, and how individual musicians have fit into mankind’s long march from Bach to the Beatles to Bieber.
Computational musicology, as the relatively young field is known within academic circles, has already produced a range of findings that were out of reach before the power of data-crunching was brought to bear on music. Douglas Mason, a doctoral student at Harvard, has analyzed scores of Beatles songs and come up with a new way to understand what Bob Dylan called their “outrageous” use of guitar chords. Michael Cuthbert, an associate professor at MIT, has studied music from the time of the bubonic plague, and discovered that during one of civilization’s darkest hours, surprisingly, music became much happier, as people sought to escape the misery of life.
Meanwhile, Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga who specializes in music cognition, and Christian von Scheve of the Free University of Berlin looked at the composition of 1,000 Top 40 songs from the last 50 years and found that over time, pop has become more “sad-sounding” and “emotionally ambiguous.”
New Aesthetic New Anxieties is the result of a five day Book Sprint organized by Michelle Kasprzak and led by Adam Hyde at V2_ from June 17–21, 2012.
Authors: David M. Berry, Michel van Dartel, Michael Dieter, Michelle Kasprzak, Nat Muller, Rachel O'Reilly and José Luis de Vicente.
Facilitated by: Adam Hyde
You can download the e-book as an EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.
EPUB: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-epub
MOBI: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-mobi
PDF: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-pdf
Annotatable online version: http://www.booki.cc/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties/_draft/_v/1.0/preface/
The New Aesthetic was a design concept and netculture phenomenon launched into the world by London designer James Bridle in 2011. It continues to attract the attention of media art, and throw up associations to a variety of situated practices, including speculative design, net criticism, hacking, free and open source software development, locative media, sustainable hardware and so on. This is how we have considered the New Aesthetic: as an opportunity to rethink the relations between these contexts in the emergent episteme of computationality. There is a desperate need to confront the political pressures of neoliberalism manifested in these infrastructures. Indeed, these are risky, dangerous and problematic times; a period when critique should thrive. But here we need to forge new alliances, invent and discover problems of the common that nevertheless do not eliminate the fundamental differences in this ecology of practices. In this book, perhaps provocatively, we believe a great deal could be learned from the development of the New Aesthetic not only as a mood, but as a topic and fix for collective feeling, that temporarily mobilizes networks. Is it possible to sustain and capture these atmospheres of debate and discussion beyond knee-jerk reactions and opportunistic self-promotion? These are crucial questions that the New Aesthetic invites us to consider, if only to keep a critical network culture in place.
James Bridle's Tumblr site: http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
On the generational issue, there's some anxiety among the aging that people under 30 actually think like Tumblrs nowadays - that they're unmotivated and diffuse, or in the shallows, or mentally crippled by too many pixels - allegations along that line.
We are the scanners now. We are the Tumblr-users. We are the shareable concepts. We see what our machines see because we are synonymous with our machines, because we created them. New Aesthetic points us only towards ways of understanding and seeing a world that has become aestheticized by the very presence of our phenomenological movements within an object-oriented universe of our own design.
We are the scanners now. We are the Tumblr-users. We are the shareable concepts. We see what our machines see because we are synonymous with our machines, because we created them. New Aesthetic points us only towards ways of understanding and seeing a world that has become aestheticized by the very presence of our phenomenological movements within an object-oriented universe of our own design.
An electrified array of nearly 2,000 fluorescent lamps sweeps over an expanse equal to 8 football fields.
Luminous Earth GridSolano County, California© Stuart Williams 1993. All rights reserved.
Luminous Earth Grid, an array of 1,680 energy-efficient fluorescent lamps, swept over an area equal to 8 football fields, 50 miles north of San Francisco. Said the artist, “I see the project as a poetic statement on the potential harmony between technology and nature.” Over a five year period, Williams launched a rigorous fund raising campaign throughout Northern California, and raised nearly half a million dollars to realize the massive project. It was widely acclaimed by critics around the globe and drew tens of thousands of visitors. For a sense of scale, note the herd of cattle grazing just above the grid.
Cosponsored by:The New York Foundation for the Arts & Intersection for the Arts, San FranciscoMajor Funders & Contributors:
LEF Foundation, St. Helena, CA; Rene and Veronica Di Rosa Foundation, Napa, CA; Sylvania; Pacific Gas & Electric; Express Lighting Supply; CC Electric; Calistoga Mineral Water; Anheuser Busch; The Cockayne Fund, New York City & Louisville, Kentucky.“It is unquestionably the most ambitious work of environmental art in the San Francisco Bay Area since Christo’s Running Fence. It is a joyful thing.”
—Allen Temko, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, San Francisco ChronicleAll photos © Craig Collins unless otherwise noted.
Douglas D. Prince_
"My creative evolution in photography is driven by my observations, my response to the environment, seeing things, and a need to manifest this vision into a tangible form. Another motivation is my curiosity about image processes and how these processes affect my perceptions.I’ve been working to build a personal vision where craft and content fuse, teaching me to see the world photographically. Photography is the tool I use to search my environment. For me, the medium is as important as the content in making an image and it is an integral part of the image making process. I have explored traditional and alternative processes with the same passion that I‘ve explored my environment. Whether I’m working with the camera, in the darkroom, or on the computer, I’m looking for juxtapositions, relationships and transformations that create new perceptions, fostering an insight into the elementary nature of things. I strive to make images where the ordinary is elevated to the extraordinary. I’m looking for things that I haven’t seen before." - Douglas D. Prince. See more;
Epidermis
Tired of hearing about the New Aesthetic yet? No? Great! Then we've got the post for you.
Tired of hearing about the New Aesthetic yet? No? Great! Then we've got the post for you.
Tired of hearing about the New Aesthetic yet? No? Great! Then we've got the post for you.
The New Aesthetic Revisited: The Debate Continues!
An image from the Depth Editor Debug series by James George and Alexander Porter.
Over the course of the past month, a certain corner of the internet has been ablaze with heated discussion about the New Aesthetic. It all started with a Tumblr from designer and author James Bridle, but things didn’t really get going until an essay from Bruce Sterling catalyzed the conversation. The essay prompted dozens of responses, including a few of our own, all attempting to suss out just what, exactly, this “New Aesthetic” was, how much attention it deserved, how seriously it should be taken, and what, exactly, it all meant, if anything.
We’ve been following the conversation closely, which has spanned everything from feminist critique of the machine gaze to electric anthropology to alien toaster pastry to cats (this is the internet, after all). Point is, the dialog is varied and is drawing in voices from a diverse range of disciplines that includes artists, designers, technologists, science fiction writers, philosophers and art historians. That in itself seems to lend the topic some semblance of significance.
If nothing else, I think one thing that’s clear about the New Aesthetic is that it is a thing that is happening in popular-tech culture today, whether or not we want to call it such. As technology evolves, our visual language evolves along with it, and as such, the New Aesthetic isn’t necessarily something located within this particular moment, but more so a moving target that seems to have gained some sense of cohesion at this particular moment thanks to the rapid pervasiveness of computing devices in our daily lives. The visual language that it puts forth will become engrained in our cultural lexicon and will inform our understanding of the world around us, as well as the way we shape that world moving forward. Movement or not, that much we can be certain of.
And so, in light of the New Aesthetic debates that continue to wage on all over the web, we’ve once again assembled a chorus of voices to weigh in on the matter—this time, with an eye towards demonstrating the conversation’s diversity. From serious to snarky, they’ve all got something smart to say. Enjoy and check out our previous posts on the New Aesthetic here and here. Track the conversation on Twitter with the #NewAesthetic hashtag.
Carla Gannis, “A Code for the Numbers to Come”
Jamie Zigelbaum and Marcelo Coelho, “The Rasterized Snake Eats Its Analog Tail”
Rahel Aima, “Breaking the Fourth Wall: Duende and the New Aesthetic”
Madeline Ashby, “Surveillance is Symptomatic of Magical Thinking. So is Anthropomorphism.”
Hrag Vartanian, “A Not-So-New Aesthetic, or Another Attempt at Technological Triumphalism”
Salvador Dali, Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1976A CODE FOR THE NUMBERS TO COME
By Carla GannisI own a robot and four computers. I check out news on Kurzweil and the Singularity every couple of days. When James Bridle posts voxels and render ghosts and glitch photography and 8-bit GIFs as signifiers of a new lens through which we see and negotiate “reality,” I get it and I like it. Although I am too old to qualify as a digital native, Bridle’s “state of things” feels natural to me, more natural in fact than mosaics made with tesserae, points made with paint, and looms operating via binary punch cards, i.e. some of the historical aggregates of the New Aesthetic. The multiplicity of voices arising in recognition of NA’s legitimacy encourages me, more than most trending topics, to join the dialogue, contributing my voice as an artist and educator focused on digital media, and a thoroughly bionic woman.
In my attempts to thread an opinion into the discourse spooling around the New Aesthetic—a disappointingly stuffy name for a potentially vanguard development in the tweeted and post(ed)-Modern world—I find I am most fascinated by the porous relationships between artificial & natural, digital & analogue, systematized & hybrid created by and living within the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has the potential not only to confound, but collapse these binaries, and others, completely. It is that potential that excites me, as a citizen of the 21st century, and a feminist who rejects the essentialism of that ism’s second wave.
Which leads me to, glimmering from my bookshelf in its metallic dust jacket, cyber-feminist Sadie Plant’s book Zeros + Ones, Digital Women + The New Technoculture (1997). In Zeros… Plant recounts the life of Lady Ada Lovelace, notable for writing the first computer program in 1842. Lovelace is far too often, in some circles, a starting point for conversations on the history of digital culture, but the apposite Plant/Lovelace quote below forecasts some potentialities I see in the New Aesthetic:
“She knew her work might have some influence inconceivable to her own time: ‘Perhaps none of us can estimate how great,’ she wrote. ‘Who can calculate to what it might lead; if we look beyond the present condition especially?’ And when she reflected on her own footnotes, she was ‘thunderstruck by the power of the writing. It is especially unlike a woman’s style surely,’ she wrote ‘but neither can I compare it with any man’s exactly.’ It was instead a code for the numbers to come.” (p 256)
At the moment, however, New Aesthetic seems to be all potential and style. When Bridle speaks of styles that didn’t exist in the previous world, patterns on clothes that are now pixilated when once they would have been gingham for example, I react with a flat “gee wiz." More interesting to me than fashionability is the neutrality of those pixels. They are dislocated from culture, gender and race.
It is hard for me to imagine a Hindi farmer wearing gingham, for example, or a Western hedge fund manager wearing a Dashiki. And if these two are male I don’t see either of them in a Laura Ashley floral pattern, but I can see both of these humans wearing pixels in the not so distant future, because pixels are ubiquitous and functional patterns embedded in the operations of our daily lives, crossing class lines, borders and most other divides. Pixels aren’t even age appropriate these days. So in “waving to the machines” and seeing through their objective eyes, perhaps there is something more humanizing than dehumanizing in the endeavors of the New Aesthetic, something finally equalizing.
I also suspect many mid-career “new media” artists who have suffered dislocation anxiety particularly embrace NA’s main premise, the “eruption of the digital into the physical," as it shatters a false dichotomy—object vs. screen—that many have been grappling with in their studios for at least a decade or two. Or three or four. Artists have been making art on computers inside and outside of the mainstream art world for some time.
This leads to other events on the horizon, artists working not only between the gaps of art and life but in between the gaps of ones and zeros and not being disenfranchised for doing so. Although there is the danger of the New Aesthetic representing only so much cool digital eye candy, NA being more than screen deep is significant, and necessary.
In order for the New Aesthetic to reach its vitalistic potential, it is incumbent upon its creatives—artists, designers, developers, et al—to keep their human skins on. Janet Murray, an early developer of humanities computing, first made the case for the expressive potentials of computing in 1997 with the publication of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.
“We must return to the question raised by Aldous Huxley at the moment movies began to speak: Will the stories brought to us by new representational technologies ‘mean anything’ in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays mean something, or will they be ‘told by an idiot’?” (p 273)The incomprehensibly vast fields of data we can lay claim to as creative fodder, by manipulating or in collaboration with machines (depending on your point of view) can result in the metaphoric wasteland or garden. Neither outcome will be engendered by our “new” technologies failing, but in our losing touch with our “old” biological technologies, the human brains (and bodies) that have given birth to ideas, constructions and sentiments for aesthetic reflection.
However, and by no means am I the first to point this out, it is problematic, at least in its manifestation at this point, to stake claims on the New Aesthetic as some sort of “revolutionary movement” heroically, defiantly, or nihilistically. Kyle Chayka articulates this point in The New Aesthetic: Going Native, “[it] is not yet an actual aesthetic movement. It’s just reality.” It is embedded in who we are. We live it. Chayka points out that unlike past revolutionary art movements, the New Aesthetic is not “shocking society” but is a response to a “shocked society.”
I agree with Chayka, there is very little shock factor in the New Aesthetic. Perhaps because I am a Gen X’er steeped in post-modern irony and deconstruction, it doesn’t shock me to not be shocked. But “shocked society” as a new defining aspect of the 2010s? We are overwhelmed, hyper-mediated, simultaneously more epistemologically connected and ontologically isolated than in past epochs, yet are we more shocked than, say, society at the turn of the 20th Century? Mary Flanagan in her essay “Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges” summarizes the shock and awe of the 1910s: “in the midst of war-torn Europe, these (Dada) artists shared a belief that such a culture that originated the horrors of war could not appreciate, indeed, did not deserve art.” (p 90)
Dada shocked a shocked society.
Glitching internet urinal by cityofsound and Marcel Duchamp, Urinal, 1917
Margot Lovejoy in Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts writes, “artists, then in the context of that epoch, were driven by a multitude of larger questions and goals:” and she quotes Lev Manovich, “[T]hese represented absolute values and spiritual life…representing the dynamism of the contemporary city and the experience of war; representing the concepts of Einstein’s relativity theory; translating principles of engineering into visual communication; and so on…” (p 22)
Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism all represented a “new” aesthetic influenced by science, psychology, optics and metaphysics, and their assertion on the world was steeped in revolutionary zeal.
But the 20th Century authentic shock of the new seems to not have carried over into the 21st. Perhaps shock is no longer a variable in the art and cultural equation, no matter how nostalgic some of us still are (myself included) for artistic subversion as revolution.
My point is, as creatives, as those who dally in first world problematics like NA, are we still capable of being shocked or shocking? The intersections of art & technology, the combined forces of “natural” human beings and “artificial” intelligent operators creating a hybrid world of novel experience thrills me.
Of the specific genres that Bridle selects as examples of NA, data visualization feels the most like a new(ish) aesthetic to me. But I have specific determinants for data vis being a visionary form from a humanities perspective. Can it be more than interestingly aggregated information? Does it make me feel something, think something I really have never thought before, care about its existence on the planet, as messenger, harbinger or as a beautiful wondrous resonant thing?
As it stands, the New Aesthetic succeeds in keeping us up-to-date, but there needs to be more. In 1976 Dali’s Lincoln expressed a pixellated future Dali had not seen. A movement can not merely catalogue what currently exists, it is defined by the future(s) it envisions.
Carla Gannis is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Chair of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. @carla_gannis
Pulp-Based Computing, developed at XS Labs.THE RASTERIZED SNAKE EATS ITS ANALOG TAIL
By Jamie Zigelbaum and Marcelo CoelhoOur studio operates from the perspective that all things are both digital and analog, equally existing in a sea of experience and agency. The new artworks piquing our interests today don’t do so because of false dichotomies, but rather because they let us experience the world in revealing and new ways.
We make art to understand, embed, and communicate contemporary experience. Recently, we’ve been evaluating the differential absorption of IR light by hemoglobin to infer respiratory cycles; controlling twisted nematic liquid crystal from Arduino; designing touchless interfaces using transparent conductive coatings; and developing software and techniques for ablating micron-scale graphics using an Excimer laser. Operating at this scale, where the naked eye is rendered useless by the precision of our machines, it becomes clear that we are poised for a future where the analog and digital dichotomy is nothing more than an exercise in perspective taking.
Ours are not the materials and tools that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. They are the product of new information technologies that are giving rise to new aesthetic experiences. Materials available to artists today include wood, CR-39, ribosomes, 4chan, natural language processing, and self-assembly. The possibility space for experiences emanating from this palette far surpasses that of the space predisposed by Jacquard’s textile arrays.
Two years ago we made an interactive lighting installation called Six-Forty by Four-Eighty. We made it for a very specific purpose: to communicate the potentials for visual representation in a world of amorphous computing. Our future is a place where computation will break from the golden jails of laptop and mobile phone and seep chaotically into every corner of the world around us until it is so diffuse that we realize it was actually there the whole time. We could have communicated this speculation by making a film, writing a story, painting a canvas, or choreographing a ballet, but we didn’t. Instead, we used consumer electronics—the same media that is giving rise to the very future under examination. We used this media not because it is new, but because we wanted to do more than just describe our vision: we wanted to manifest it so that people could experience it firsthand.
Crafting contemporary experience requires the combined efforts of all of us: scientists, designers, philosophers, engineers, artists, etc. If artists don’t learn how to actually implement technologies, such as machine learning or hydraulic fracturing, they will not be able to manipulate and understand them deeply enough to reveal their farthest edge states. Without the artist, our culture cannot metabolize the latent possibilities inherent in the world around us.
New Aesthetic brands experiences emerging from the interplay between pixel, bitmap file format, charge-coupled device, machine vision toolkit, networked computer, human, and drone. An interesting palette by any right, but if it will serve to define our current moment we must expand it beyond shared images. And we should do that since there is indeed something new happening worthy of a better understanding.
Sixty years have passed since Shannon and Tukey coined the word bit at Bell Labs down the hall from where Bardeen and Brattain invented the point-contact transistor. These innovations mark the origin of a bubble of alterity that has only now begun to recede. As computers have pervaded deep into our daily lives, our culture has embraced them. It has taken time, but we are now getting comfortable enough with computing that we can see past our own reflection in it. What’s new is that our prostheses have stopped chaffing and we can finally enjoy stretching them, and as we do, all the materials within our grasp are rendered anew.
It’s not only that humans and computers are combining agencies and creating interesting new images, it’s that an inchoate realization is in process: there is no dichotomy between human and machine, analog and digital.
Zigelbaum + Coelho is a studio founded by Jamie Zigelbaum and Marcelo Coelho. Operating at the intersection of design, technology, science, and art, their work utilizes physical, computational, and cultural materials in the service of creating new, but fundamentally human, experiences.
The Infinite Cat Project, Cat #1721.BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL: DUENDE AND THE NEW AESTHETIC
By Rahel AimaAs the furor around the New Aesthetic unfurls, one of the more common gripes has been that there’s nothing very new about it. That its objects, while native to the last few decades, are not new so much as just newly catalogued. That it’s just another emergent movement or technological development that claims to have reinvented the wheel and created new ways of seeing—immaculately, as if from Zeus’ own forehead—yet mostly rehashes what has come before.
In a way, I agree. The cast of characters has rotated, but the New Aesthetic is undeniably a continuation of cinematic and literary tradition. This is not a bad thing.
In an early response, Matthew Battles compellingly framed the New Aesthetic in terms of ‘pathetic fallacy,’ or an attribution of human-like emotions to inanimate objects. It’s hard to argue with, yet equally applies to our relations with just about any technology. Just look at the way we baby our laptops’ temperature tantrums, ascribing nuance to each sulky bleep and whir. As a literary device or effect, then, it seems fairly bankrupt. Instead, perhaps we should compare the New Aesthetic to the ceremonial breaking of the fourth wall. It happened with Brechtian theatre, and later Godard and the New Wave of French cinema. A few decades later, the age of confessional media and YouTube rants dawned, and what was once a radical rupture of boundaries began to feel pretty old hat. But then the New Aesthetic and the machines got involved.
First, however, rewind back to that moment in Annie Hall that everyone loves to cite. You know the one: Woody Allen, sick of hearing a man prattling ostentatiously in line just ahead of him, gets into an argument about Marshall McLuhan, who just happens to be loitering conveniently at set left. Allen pulls McLuhan into the shot to back up his point, and then turns to the audience to complain and kvetch. The cinematic spell is broken, and our relation to the medium is laid bare. Immersion within the narrative is replaced by an awareness of watching, and being watched. Reached out and spoken to, even.
Today, machines and other unknown objects are similarly breaking the fourth wall and shattering the artifice of seamless technology. They’re turning to face us, and making pidgin efforts to communicate—with strangled sounds and cryptic markings—and waving like a Sims character who wants, no, needs something from us. Windows OSes have arguably been doing it for years, with modal dialog boxes that are swatted away as quickly as the spambots who really, really want to sell us Viagra. And these new performers have made a further leap to a new kind of reality media: a curated Tumblr. As with the technique’s previous iterations, the New Aesthetic’s breaking of the fourth wall forces us to reevaluate our tenuous relations with the characters and performers featured onscreen.
Yet somehow people don’t seem to get as excited about pictures of machines looking at things as they do about pictures of Kim Jong Il doing the very same.
Let’s return to the paradoxically endearing Woody Allen. He’s all awkward elbows and insecurities: neurotic, crotchety, and above all, credibly vulnerable. People feel like they can empathise with him. Or consider the responses to the Mew Aesthetic—surprisingly heavy on the relief. Cats with interior monologues, interacting with technology? Endearing and relatable. Less welcomed are the New Aesthetic’s drones, chatbots, and other digital analogues. Rather, its featured performers seem to produce an uneasy discomfort in many. Their inner lives are inaccessible to us, rendering them cold, alien, inhuman. Suspicious, untrustworthy, and as Bruce Sterling insists, never our friends. Perhaps it still boils down to a distrust of the possibly sentient machine.
Accordingly, we keep these new objects even closer than friends—intimately in our pockets, and always within sight. Their biggest crime just might, however, be a lack of soul and authentic-feeling feelings; a lack of the curious quality that Federico Garcia Lorca termed duende.
In On the Theory and Play of the Duende, Lorca identifies three forms of inspiration: the muse, the angel and the duende. Of these, the duende is the form most identified with death. It is variously understood as a visceral realization of mortality, a primal charismatic force that inhabits the performer, and the most authentic, heightened expression of human feeling. It’s there in the motions of bullfighters and flamenco dancers; as well as in the “black sounds” of Leonard Cohen or swampy blues or sullen Bay Area punk. Or in Goya’s bitumens and the frenzied Sufi mystics’ cries of ‘Allah! Allah’ which whirls into the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and might be one and the same. Raw and fragile, and a little crushed. As described by Lorca, it is ‘the buried spirit of saddened Spain,’ and ‘all that has dark sounds, has duende.’ He says:
“The great artists of Southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of the duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, without possessing duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.”
While all nations and arts—visual as well as sonic—are ostensibly capable of duende, it requires living flesh. It’s essentially an embodied force—the soul in combat with bodily mortality. It’s also inextricably linked to a very human vulnerability: Lorca maintains that the duende only approaches when it senses the possibility of death. Moral and sexual transgressions have lost their cache; to transgress the human today would be to attain some kind of transhumanist mortality, become a machine. All of which is to suggest that duende is something that these new inhuman actors are, by all appearances, incapable of.
But this is where I want to disagree. The glitches, pixelation, errors, Blue Screens of Death and other slippages characterised by the New Aesthetic? They are signs of machines decaying, breaking down, and above all showing us their vulnerable side. We’re invited to question their and our own mortality, and to interrogate the blurry line between human flesh and machineflesh (and comparative corruptions). Which is to say, these eruptions of duende just might be the closest that machines can get to an almost human emotion in the age of mechanical reblogging. We might never understand or share their experiences, but the unknown objects of the New Aesthetic are doing their earnest best. The question is whether we’re willing to listen.
Rahel Aima is a co-editor at THE STATE, and currently based in Dubai. Her research focuses on the intersections of magic, radical politics and future technologies. She can also be found at Twitter, Tumblr, and Wordpress.
Harvey Nichols, Woman, 2SURVEILLANCE IS SYMPTOMATIC OF MAGICAL THINKING. SO IS ANTHROPOMORPHISM
By Madeline AshbyA while back, I wrote a post called The New Aesthetics of the Male Gaze, a feminist critique of the New Aesthetic. The central point there was that it has apparently taken the recent ubiquity of surveillance technology for some men to feel the pressure of constant observation that women have always been under. Later, I wrote about my own experience creating art about ubiquitous surveillance technology, and the magical thinking that conflates “surveillance” with “security”. What these posts shared in common, beyond my individual perspective, is an understanding that surveillance is about looking, and looking is powerful. As Rahel Aima wrote in her response:
The New Aesthetic is about looking, undeniably. Yet as a paginated yet endlessly scrollable tumblr, is in itself a thing to be looked at. It is about being looked at by humans and by machines, about being the object of the gaze. It’s about the dissolution of privacy and reproductive rights, and the monitoring, mapping, and surveillance of the (re)gendered (re)racialised body.Aima further suggests that the allure of the New Aesthetic might be that it offers (frequently male) artists and observers the opportunity to inhabit a traditionally feminine subjectivity: the subject of another’s penetrating gaze. But I’ll go one step further and suggest that while ubiquitous surveillance does offer that opportunity, it also creates a new dialectic of subjectivity altogether. Namely, it plays with what social neuroscientists call “Theory of Mind.” ToM is the ability to attribute mental states to others. We observe others and theorize what’s going on behind their eyes. Humans have a whole sensorium devoted to just this: hearing tones of voice, perceiving the motion of eyes and lips, smelling changes in pheremones. But it’s all organic. When confronted by a machine, that system goes haywire and we start either anthropomorphizing to compensate, or tumbling down into the Uncanny Valley. The New Aesthetic seems to be an attempt to generate a third response by re-inscribing both human subjectivity and that of the machine eye.
I say this because not only does the New Aesthetic take as given a heretofore-feminine vulnerability among the humans being surveilled, but also treats the surveilling machine eye as technologically immature and therefore morally innocent. By returning to the blocky, colourful 8-bit world that informed the childhood experience of so many artists of the New Aesthetic, they imbue the surveilling eye with a similar youthful innocence. They have looked into the black dome, and seen their own naiveté reflected in its gleaming surface.
This is another example of magical thinking at work. The same thought process that encourages us to conflate surveillance with security also encourages us to ascribe agency to machines that have none, a habit that Bruce Sterling decried at length in his original critique. As Sterling pointed out, machines are never our friends. But not, I would add, for lack of trying. Adopting the idea that “they’re not bad, they’re just programmed that way,” is a very cute way of eliding the programming itself, which is human, and is rooted in a human agenda. The Celts created art about Orna, the magical talking sword; our development of an aesthetic that does the same for twenty-first century weapons is just the next step in that tradition.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. Her debut novel, vN, will be available this summer from Angry Robot Books. Her other writing has appeared at BoingBoing, io9, Tor.com, and WorldChanging.
Detail of tiles from the Kalon Mosque in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and a detail of a 19th C. Amish quilt.A NOT-SO-NEW AESTHETIC, OR ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT TECHNOLOGICAL TRIUMPHALISM
By Hrag VartanianThe concept of a “new” aesthetic is arcane. Nothing is new anymore or can ever really be—and by “new” I don’t mean an invention (like an iPhone or translucent concrete) but the sense of something coming before another, something replacing something else in a progression that charts history as a forward thrust in society. The “new” is a refugee of the Modernist era, which hints at some of the flaws of James Bridle’s “New Aesthetic.” But before I get into specifics about this Nouveau—I’m sorry, I mean New Aesthetic, let’s get a few things straight.
Bridle is not a historian, and his memory is short — though to be fair, his own URL, shorttermmemoryloss.com, suggests as much. I don’t know if he lost his memory through smoking weed (I’ve heard this happens, but don’t ask me how, I forget) or perhaps a head injury (walking while precariously texting?), but either way, when he cites sources for the New Aesthetic, he doesn’t look back very far, preferring to see the contemporary through the lens of the recent past (which is easily Googled, I guess). In that way, his New Aesthetic is an updated sense of retro, though retro-present may be more fitting. Joanne McNeil tries to look back beyond the internet for sources for Bridle’s big, nebulous idea, but her history is highly selective and very Western.
The concept of retro is extensively explored by Elizabeth E. Guffey in her book Retro: The Culture of Revival, where she explains:
“Retro’s translation of recent history into consumable objects suggests how previous periods of popular culture and art and design can be used to characterize ourselves as distinct from the recent past.”
It’s a provocative idea, but one that highlights the weakness of this new “new.” The fact that most of Bridle’s examples tend to be products (pixel-covered pillows, planes, umbrellas, shoes … ) is telling, and even when he uses contemporary art, his choices tend to be weak and marginal examples, though with a few exceptions. Gerhard Richter’s stained glass windows at Cologne Cathedral are a standout, but Richter’s work is as much about his own body of art as any digital realities.
Bridle admits his discomfort with the label of the New Aesthetic, but it has stuck—and for good reason, I believe. The term captures the anticipation of the new that drives our consumer culture, as we wait for it every day with bated breath. Even if the New Aesthetic is “real” (whatever that means), it can only ever be one of many parallel ways of seeing, thinking and understanding.
It’s rather telling that Bridle is a designer. Designers are communicators, but not in the way that fine artists are (I don’t believe in strict divisions, but there is a divide nonetheless); they’re communicators in the way marketers are, in that they package the world for ease. Don’t get me wrong, I like easy, but the aesthetic here is one mostly of style and not content. The world they imagine already exists, and it doesn’t look forward but back. Unlike the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, who took the science of optics and color and used it to transform art, imagining a world that others didn’t see, the New Aesthetic and its acolytes (if I can call them that) don’t look forward or transform. Instead, they appear to mimic and quote — cough retro cough.
What’s more, to call something a “new aesthetic” would suggest that it supplants something that already exists, but our world is too fragmented for this to happen. To project our visions onto machines is to erase our differences. To allow machines to see us without acknowledging our biases, since we’re the ones who made them, would suggest that identity doesn’t matter. And yet, I would argue it matters more than ever. Nowhere in the discussion of the New Aesthetic does identity play a role. Perhaps those pixels Bridle sees everywhere evoke Islamic tile work, or Appalachian patchwork quilts, or the mosaic of multiculturalism (I’m Canadian, so I had to throw that in). Bridle, by his own admission, is obsessed with the Telehouse server farm in the UK, which is decorated with a pixelated wall. It’s an example of form following function … where have I heard that before?
It’s a tad bizarre that Bruce Sterling, in his much-quoted Wired essay, “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” compares this idea manufactured by British media designers to those of the Futurists, Impressionists and Cubists. He writes, “There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period.” Modern? Even the usage of the word feels like a throwback to another era. Sterling places the New Aesthetic in London, though Bridle never couples geography with the idea. Sterling’s biggest contribution to our understanding of the New Aesthetic is his suggestion that the Modernist project is for the New Aestheticians (can we make it a noun?) “like their Greco-Roman antiquity,” by which I assume he means what Greco-Roman antiquity is to the foundations of Western Civilization, or maybe Euro-American civilization. And, he adds, it’s a generational thing — a young, Western one, it seems.
Where Sterling really goes off the tracks is in his characterization of the New Aesthetic as some sort of avant-garde, while almost apologizing for the oddness of the term to our contemporary ears and eyes. Avant-gardes don’t exist anymore and haven’t for decades. Sterling is a difficult writer. His ideas meander, much like Bridle’s notion of the New Aesthetic. Maybe, in fact, there is no meaning, because it’s only a style; not an aesthetic in the broader sense, but one limited in scope to what has already happened and lacking an ability to dream into the future.
Which brings me to my final point: the false bravado of the New Aesthetic. It’s making a splash but why? Eight-bit looks back to an era where that level of resolution was cutting-edge, pixels highlight the shortcomings of some machines now that we have better ones, blurred objects on digital maps don’t do anything more than fences and barbed wire circling forbidden zones do, and angular camouflage doesn’t really have anything to do with the digital (something McNeil and Sterling both admit). So what’s left?
What if pixels — to take one aspect of the New Aesthetic — today are what chrome and plastic were to the 1960s or the ship-inspired Art Deco of the 1930s? What if the Hawk-Eye analysis in Cricket matches what Bridle cooed about in his talk during Web Directions South 2011 isn’t really any different than photo finishes in horse racing? What if his Where the F**k Was I? book is just tedious and not really very interesting, because I don’t really care where his phone thinks it was?
This repackaging of the digital into the next hot thing echoes our pop-tech culture that promises another life-changing device, app or service every month. It’s this month’s Tumblr, which is last month’s Instagram, or was it next week’s Pinterest? I don’t mean to be flip—wait, I do mean to be flip, and, to quote Gertrude Stein, who wrote about her experience looking for her childhood home in Oakland, California: “there is no there there.” I consider the internet my home in a way that no place has ever been. Looking closely at the New Aesthetic, I’m not sure where the “there” can even be.
Hrag Vartanian is the editor of Hyperallergic and the owner of a brand new tumblelog called The New New Aesthetic that will begin making fun of, he means critiquing, The New Aesthetic on May 6, exactly one year after that tumblelog began.
The next wave of digital products won't just be about archiving the web; they'll be about destroying the archive.
Snapchat is an iPhone app that, fascinatingly and maybe even usefully, lets you apply a time limit to the photos you share with friends. You can decide whether your recipient (or a group of recipients) sees a photo for 2 seconds, or 5, or 10 ... before what they see disappears entirely. Think Path, with a focus on photos. Think Instagram, with an expiration date.
Since Snapchat allows users to send pictures to each other with minimal slightly less fear of those pictures being seen by the wrong people, its most obvious use, Nick Bilton pointed out today, is -- yep -- sending suggestive photos. But the app's blink-and-you-miss-it UI speaks, even more broadly, to a market for something much broader than just sexting. Snapchat is a silly entry in a burgeoning genre: products that harness the power not of memory, but of forgetting.
Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, "save all" is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers. And that doesn't just mean that the comment you left on that Joss Whedon fan site that one time is still sitting there, emoticon-ed and gif-ed and captured for posterity within the all-knowing neurons of Google. It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die ... there, still, we are.
So when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents -- things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers.
![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/rapids615.png)
And: That's great! It's what makes the Internet the Internet! The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically. We wake. We sleep. We have beginnings. We have endings.
Which means that, to the extent that the web is a realization of Wells's World Brain, it suffers from a congenital defect. Its capacities and ours are misaligned. We little humans are defined by our (sometimes painfully) selective memories; the web is defined by its promiscuity. It doesn't sleep; it doesn't process; it never, never rests. And while we humans can control our experience of the web -- just because everything's archived doesn't mean that we're forced to consume it -- its own lavish memory changes the way we users think about remembering itself. We become cavalier about preservation, not just because Google serves as an outboard brain, but because we are conditioned to assume that the stuff we care about will automatically stick around.
You'd think that would be liberating. And, for the most part, it is. (The history! The timeline! The cloud!) But there are also drawbacks to digital omniscience. It's telling that people diagnosed with hyperthymesia have described their limitless memories not as blessings, but as burdens -- ones that are "non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting." Near-perfect recall of their experiences doesn't make these people smarter; it makes them miserable.
Same deal, to a large extent, with the web. That's one reason people decry "information overload," not to mention a reason for proposals of digital sabbaths and the like. The web may be, in the broad cybernetic sense, a brain; as a user experience, though, it has some faulty wiring. When we disparage the digital environment as "overwhelming," what we're also faulting it for is its lack of a narrative. The Internet moves, but it doesn't necessarily move forward. It expands, but it doesn't necessarily follow any particular trajectory. It lacks, in that sense, a purpose. It lacks a plot. Men die, the Greek physician Alcmaeon believed, "because they cannot join the beginning and the end."
What we're beginning to realize, though, is that the World Brain, like our own comparatively fragile version, can be subject to neuroplasticity. We can change the web's wiring. We can make it more hospitable to the way our minds are programmed to work. The proposed legal principle of le droit à l'oubli -- the "right to be forgotten," but also, tellingly, the "right of oblivion" -- will likely find its replication in the U.S., if not through the courts, then through the architecture of the web itself. Silly little products like Snapchat are part of that -- not just because they give us new filters to help us grow and make sense of the digital world, but because they help us to reclaim the productive limitations of the analog.
Snapchat
And those products won't just become increasingly common; they'll also become increasingly valuable. Just as limitation itself -- through social filters, through editorial filters, through acts of extreme curation -- will likely become increasingly valuable. Just as the textual limitations of lists and the visual limitations of memes hold sway, organically, over the sharing economy of the web, we'll keep coming up with creative ways to curtail the web's impulses toward continuity. And that, in turn, will allow us to re-appropriate remembering -- not just as a passive assumption, but as a deliberative choice. And not just as an act of preservation, but as an act of love. Last week News.me, Betaworks' social news service, launched Last Great Thing, a time-limited version of Getting the News that asks participants to share just one worthy thing they've found on the web that day -- permalinks not included. The product's point is awesomeness-without-archive. But it's also ephemerality-as-service. It allows us to do what our minds are, actually, optimized to do: to experience, to forget, to remember, and then forget again.
People once took photographs so they could capture a moment for themselves and keep it forever. Then digital cameras and cellphones turned photos into something more ephemeral and more easily shared. But as the case of Anthony Weiner demonstrated, photos that are shared but are not meant to last, sometimes stick around.
Mr. Weiner’s downfall does not seem to have discouraged people from sharing risqué photos. According to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project that is due out later this year, 6 percent of adult Americans admit to having sent a “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video” using a cellphone. Another 15 percent have received such material. Three percent of teenagers admit to sending sexually explicit content.
All of this sexting, as the practice is known, creates an opening for technology that might make the photos less likely to end up in wide circulation.
This is where a free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat comes in. Snapchat allows a person to take and send a picture and control how long it is visible by the person who receives it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture disappears and can’t be seen again. If the person viewing the picture tries to use an iPhone feature that captures an image of whatever is on the screen, the sender is notified.
The app’s description in the Apple App Store does not mention sexting. But the accompanying images are of scantily clad women, and Apple has designated the app as being for users 12 and older, warning of “mild sexual content or nudity.” Mentions of the app on Twitter indicate that many young people use it for photo-based banter with friends, though there are references to its less innocent potential.
So does Snapchat really allow people to safely share their bare essentials without fear of ending up in the tabloids?
Evan Spiegel, a Stanford University student who built the application with a friend, said in an e-mail that he was “completely absorbed with end-of-year projects at school” and unable to comment.
So I asked Michael Fertik, chief executive of Reputation.com, an online reputation management service, if people could feel secure on Snapchat. He noted that it adds hurdles for those who want to breach the confidentiality of an image exchange.
“We know that friction is a very powerful tool to deter people from taking things that are meant to be private and sharing them,” Mr. Fertik said. “It’s probably impossible to completely deter people, but adding friction in a second-to-second environment — like sexting — can be very powerful.”
But even if a Snapchat image is set to vanish after a few seconds, there’s nothing to stop someone from taking a photograph of his smartphone screen with another camera.
And there is also the issue of whether Snapchat itself is trustworthy. Snapchat’s privacy policy says that while it tries to quickly erase photos from its servers, it “cannot guarantee that the message data will be deleted in every case.” It adds: “Messages, therefore, are sent at the risk of the user.”
Snapchat isn’t the first app to help people do things they probably shouldn’t on a smartphone. After Tiger Woods’s texting habits got him in trouble, a company called Tigertext offered an app that would delete text messages after they had been read.
People often believe that texts they share with friends and lovers will be kept safe. But on Twitter, some people are posting their Snapchat usernames so anyone can send them photos. Many of them appear to be quite young.
When asked about sexting among teenagers, Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with the Pew Research Center, said: “What motivates teens is what motivates anyone who does this: You want to be in a relationship, you want to be desired, you want to be cool, or wild.” She added: “Solving the problem is always a bit of an arms race; we have technology that allows us to do something, then we have to create the technology to help protect us.”
The New Aesthetics: Problems and Polemics
(Author’s note: the sand under my feet is shifting as I write this. Was in an exhibition with Marius Watz and was at the Center for 21st Century Studies with Ian Bogost between start and finish, and their articles are great commentaries. Therefore, while I am going to mention them, I’m going to stop reading and finish this essay lest I get bogged down in a textual version of Watz’ “perpetual newness”.)
In a 2012 issue of WIRED, writer and arguable futurist Bruce Sterling wrote on a panel at SXSW about “The New Aesthetics”, where he painstakingly deconstructed it through an art historical context for 5000 words, for which I am grateful. He took the panel by James Bridle quite seriously, and found it as a bright point in the wilderness of digital art, but also felt it was only a good first step (which Ian Bogost also thinks, in his article for The Atlantic). Merely stating the existence of The New Aesthetic and giving some examples/contexts for it (low-rez graphics, glitch, drone surveillance photography, and so on) doesn’t seem to be enough for Sterling. Stating it represented a silicon aesthetic of how machines see tripped the idea up in its displacement from humanity itself as if the machine aesthetic is a happy artifact of human innovation. I agree with Bruce that the New Aesthetic as presented at SXSW 2012 missed some parts to the flying drone being built in midair, and that having humans as collectors rather than curators misses the point of a movement. Some of these assertions put forth in the panel (according to my documentation first simply lack some key parts to a movement, and secondly, forgets the anthropomorphic nature of machines, a fact that McLuhan reminded us of so well.
What I mean when I say that I agree with Mr. Sterling about the proposition as presented about The New Aesthetic is that Bruce brings up some historical movements, and most of them had something or else in common. Most of them had several aspects; they had an ideology, politics, an ontology, and agendas behind them. Even in the Postmodern Age, or even if we are in a Trans-Modernist era or some such, Bourriaud and Relationalism had its observations and agendas, some of them lovely, some of them cynical. We could say the same for FLUXUS, Performance Art, Gutai, and many others in the late 20th Century, even Dirtstyle digital art.
I feel like The New Aesthetic is still forming, and is so broad (including things like Glitch Art, Pixellization, machine vision, and the such that it seems that we have a problem with lack of granularity of practice the leaves the “movement” in a state of diffusion. In The New Aesthetic, what seems to be said is “We’re seeing a digital optic aesthetic. Huh, that’s cool, but what does it really mean?”, as we have the pool party with the artifacted Styrofoam drone. Statements like “Oh look. Here’s something cool a computer did. I’ll leave it here.” seem to be without meaning but still, there is a person choosing to leave it there, and what does it mean to do so? I think that this is the question, along with, “What does this say about society?” Yeah, what does it mean, and what are we trying to say through its emergence? Being that that The New Aesthetic is a digital hydra with many threads to the conversation, it forces us to zoom back a little to put things on context.
One thing that Bruce Sterling does in his essay that’s of great interest in his analysis of the New Aesthetic panel is to compare it with other major movements, like Futurism, Situationism, and Surrealism. We have to remember that Surrealism and Futurism were largely revolutionary groups, as well as the Situationists. During the first showing of Clergyman and the Seashell, Antonin Artaud was so furious about Dulac’s treatment of the screenplay that he started a riot the night of the screening, after which Dali/Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou replaced Seashell on the docket. People were outraged at the Dada soirees, and the Surrealists wanted nothing more to rip your sensibilities out of your head through your optic nerve. And stomp on them.
Sterling aptly notices that much of the ideology in much of New Aesthetic work is lacking or absent. He describes it as if it is a British design curiosity. Even in its more extreme progeny, such as glitch, many of the artists are corrupting files out of technofetishism, because they can, or for “the lulz”. This is not to say that there aren’t some artists like Menkman, Satrom, and Cates who are interested in how culture disintegrates with the injection of noise in a milieu (the digital) where noise is supposed to be absent. Or another instance might be the street artist Space Invader, with his little invading aliens in the street. It seems as if The New Aesthetic is working hard to evolve out of the “Ain’t it cool” locus, but maybe this is just a point of development.
Tagged as: aesthetic, Auto, Draft, human innovation, mr sterling, panel
Dmitry Itskov, founder of 2045 Initiative, with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, at his Dharamsala residence.
Apparently and a bit oddly the immortality project to transplant people’s brains into robots has received the blessing and support from the Dalai Lama. Dmitry Itskov, founder of Russia 2045, met His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in his residence in Dharamsala, a small mountain town in northern India.
They discussed the three major steps of 2045 Avatar Project.
- First, the creation of a human-like robot dubbed “Avatar A,” and a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface system to link the mind with it.
- Next, it be created a life support system for the human brain, which connects to the “Avatar A,” turning into “Avatar B.”
- The third step, named “Avatar C”, is developing an artificial brain in which to transfer one’s individual consciousness with the goal of achieving cybernetic immortality.
Creating the “Avatar C” through developing an artificial brain and understanding the nature of human consciousness, says the Dalai Lama, could be attainable, and would be a great benefit to future development of science.
“In the last few years, scientists now begin to show an interest about consciousness, as well as brain specialists, neuroscientists, who also begin to show interest about consciousness or mind. I feel that over the next decades modern science will become more complete,” said the Dalai Lama. “So up to now the matter side of science has been highly technical, highly advanced, but the mind side has not been adequate. This project, definitely, is helpful to get more knowledge.”
Several months ago, DARPA – the Pentagon’s research arm – announced their own plans on creating a militarized avatar project, serving as a soldiers surrogate on the battlefield.
“My project has very different, humanitarian goals – it involves technologies that could mark a transition for humanity, with endless benefits in the future. But already in the next few years, we will be able to enhance the life of those who are disabled, radically improving their living standards. This is just the beginning. It’s my goal to ensure it is affordable and accessible for all people – not just for the elite and the military,” said Itskov.
The Dalai Lama also agreed that it is crucial to discuss the ethics behind these types of progressive technologies. “We should carry out these experiments with a full sense of responsibility and respect for life that will only benefit humanity, benefit others.”
Itskov has been reaching out to spiritual leaders to start a dialogue about how they could reach harmonious integration with scientists. “It’s important to establish a bridge between scientists and spiritual leaders for a successful transition to a new phase for humanity,” he said.
The 2045 initiative held its first Global Future 2045 Congress in Moscow, in February 2012. There, over 50 world-leading physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers met seeking to develop a strategy for further development of the humankind. The initiative’s goal is to create a network with the world’s leading scientists who are focused on the development of cybernetic technology with the ultimate goal of transferring human’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier. The network will act as an investment hub, contributing to various projects around the world.
The next Global Future 2045 Congress will be held in June 2013, in New York City.
Source: 2045.com
By and large, The New Aesthetics seem to have a weird friendly aloofness not seen in previous generations. This is described by William Deresiewicz in the New York Times article, Generation Sell. He describes the affective foundations of beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers, but he describes the current generation’s lack of affect as being “post-emotional”. However, when looking at a “movement” considered as being post-human, would it make sense that its progenitors be post-affective as well? Perhaps, but this may also be another methodology to further distance the artist (and the viewer/participant) from any emotional attachment to the work at all? If one is allowed to be cynical about the neo-automatic era as expression of late capitalism and the related agendas of control, could it be said that the elimination of emotion and humanity is implied in The New Aesthetics? Not quite. As with some of Deresiewicz’ previous movements like the Beats, there is a cool detachment that strains against the demons of affect. In the case of The New Aesthetics, the qualitative aspect of the work struggles against its own humanity, but it has to embrace it as much as one has to accept the aesthetics of the image made with a camera lens. The New Aesthetics is not random; it is the reflection of a fascination with a gestalt born of new technologies, which in itself is not a new phenomenon. The New Aesthetics must allow and understand that artists choose the images from drones and algorithms they wish to show, or at least an understanding of the images that their algorithms will create. Therefore, with the rise of The New Aesthetic, the machine gestalt is still central, but the images are still curated by humans.
Where Sterling makes a very sharp distinction is by citing movements that were bound by strong political ideologies. While The New Aesthetic uses imagery from politically charged sources like drone cameras, and in its methods resembles Futurism most closely in its centering practice on the machine, it seems relatively free of ideology and politics. Perhaps it is not just an outgrowth of technophrenia but a movement in its infancy that is considering what its politics are as it sifts through the data. This is contrary to other movements such as Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and Situationism, or even FLUXUS, which had a clear ideology or agenda at its onset.
But that was in Modernist times, and we are in a sort of trans-modern time that is incredibly disperse and integrative of the Modern, Post-, and this weird post-affectivity, even non-humanism, and perhaps this is what makes The New Aesthetic a grain of sand in the shell of culture. The “movement” is likewise disperse and encompassing, and perhaps represents a gestalt/trend rather than a movement, as it includes low-rez, glitch, machine vision, and probably algorism. But for now, I will accept The New Aesthetic as a potential movement in that it represents a number of approaches as Dada encompassed performance, assemblage, collage, and criticism. The “movement” so it seems in its framing at SXSW, is announcing itself as it self-reflexively considers its form.
This is a weird moment in time, culturally speaking, as theorists are deep into writers like Whitehead and “Object Oriented Ontology”, that flattens human notions of being in reference to all other “objects” like cats, rocks, and even ideas. This might fit well with the non-humanity of the robot eye, but everything is in a network of relationships to one another according to both Whithead and Latour. But I don’t want this to become a philosophical thesis; I am suggesting that perhaps the “ontology” of The New Aesthetic is to consider the eye of the machine less subordinate to the human. However, it does not seem that the machine is totally in control yet. The Aesthetic seems to have a machine paradigm with a flattened ontology between man and machine, but this is not stated at all in the panel.
Two last points I’d like to address are comments that came about since I began writing this, leaving me in what I call a state of “real-time criticism” by Marius Watz and Ian Bogost. Watz states that there is a danger of perpetual newness in this New Aesthetic, and I agree in the frame of two different readings of the term. First, in relation to movements like Weimar Germany’s New Objectivity/Neue Sachlichtheit, and even New Media, neither are particularly “new” any longer. New Media, in terms of the blogosphere, is pretty old, with movements like public practice being a bit newer (See Creative Time’s great catalog for the “Living as Form” show.). But perhaps Watz might be getting at is that The New Aesthetic positions itself as merely riding on the leading edge of technology without ever driving a stake in the cultural soil, or meaning to. “Oh, here’s a new thing that looks sort of cool – that looks cool.”, The New Aesthetic seems to say. I would like to drop a mock-hysterical polemic by saying, “HEY! LOOK! The goddamn robots are looking back at us! PAY ATTENTION!” Maybe it’s that sort of hysteria that might help set a frame for The New Aesthetic.
I also agree with Ian Bogost’s article in The Atlantic in that The New Aesthetic needs to get a whole lot weirder. We need people with big mustaches with bizarre floating camera pods trolling offshore, or people ideologically droning the landscape, like The Bureau of Inverse Technology did in the 90’s with their BITPlane (Hey kids! I said the NINETIES!), or even Jordan Crandall’s machine vision work. As an aside, I want to mention that Crandall and BIT were in the New Aesthetic corner a long time before this year’s SXSW; just sayin’. But The New Aesthetic seems to have its preternatural coolness that preclude it from interventions, manifestoes, or the customary driving of sports cars into ditches, followed by artistic epiphany. What we have now is the equivalent of bemusedly watching Predator video feeds at our desktop, once again saying; “Hey, that looks cool. Let me capture a frame of that…”
In the end, perhaps what The New Aesthetic needs is a good old-fashioned manifesto, as in all reality, it seems to be closest to Futurism in its focusing on the aesthetic of the machine eye, and the Futurists were wonderful with manifestoes. Or perhaps we are seeing the manifestation of Vertov’s Kino-eye, which reflects itself in the Yes lyric, “I am a Camera.” What seems to be obvious is that The New Aesthetic represents an awareness of the dim mirror of our machine progeny beginning to look back at us with the vague fuzziness of a newborn. With the Dalai Lama himself accepting the impetus for the creation of synthetic humanity in endorsing the Avatar2045 Project, and with Moravec and Kurzweil’s ongoing assertions of the Singularity, I believe that The New Aesthetic requires a position; a locus to hang its hat on. Or perhaps it is an aesthetically-based proto-awareness of the early sparks of the Singularity as the initial emergent flickerings of machine intelligence blinks its eyes at us for the first couple times.
Tagged as: aesthetic, late capitalism, movement, york times article
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