The Banality of The New Aesthetic
[img]http://www.furtherfield.org/sites/furtherfield.org/files/robert_jackson/tumblr_m0eyilx2iy1qjjis9o1_500.jpg[/img]
By robert jackson.
It's a bizarre thing when you stumble upon the "new art movement" filtering through discursive chatter. Is it actually a movement, or is it simply a bunch of like-minded individuals telling me its a movement?
Behold The New Aesthetic then - a new art meme in visual culture whimsically constructed by James Bridle, which manifests itself in a Tumblr blog, a presentation for Web Directions South, Sydney and an original blog post. Recent attention to it has reached feverish proportions coming off the back of a SXSW panel in March and a generally positive endorsement by Bruce Sterling in Wired, plus some group responses on the creators project. More recently, the computational media scholar and philosopher Ian Bogost has posted his own thoughts for The Atlantic.
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/reviews/banality-new-aesthetic
The Banality of The New Aesthetic
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Type: discussion
Comments
an excellent article in furtherfield. great summary of the discussion, with links to relevant parties/view-points.
i'm definitely sympathetic to bridle, his project, and the language which is accumulating.
a language which seems to be developing beyond simple nouns, and verbs– although the work has been structured around digital "found-objects", the project's basic value/orientation seems to be: an exploration/exposition of the relational and qualitative aspects of these works to the context of our pervasive experience of an evolving digital medium.
and that is the key thing– the development of a new structure of discourse of our experience in the medium, about the medium.
the vast vacuuming database of the internet has provided us with the nouns, verbs, and basic adjectives.
social media/ubiquitous technology is providing us with the basic pronouns, yes? i, you, me, we.
now we need: prepositions, complex adjectives and adverbs, auxilary verbs, negations, conjunctions, quantifiers.
language that will define rich and highly ambiguous relationships, in terms of digital information and experience.
language that will be capable of expressing complex propostions and moral and poetic metaphors.
of course, all arts has always been about the invention and reinvention of language, through rich, specific, and highly ambiguous experience. painterly dissolution; harmonic dissonance; keat's negative capacity. so it goes.