New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

3. INTRODUCTIONIt's 2011, and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore. (Taylor, inBridle 2011c)How do we think about media art aesthetics and the production of critical knowledgeas the creative industries paradigm consolidates around us, amidst ongoing financial,environmental and political crises? Can we still claim a special place for media artgiven the increasing ubiquity of informational technologies in everyday life and theintensification of cultural distribution through social media platforms? This bookreflects on these questions through the recent New Aesthetic. More specifically, weare interested in reflecting on why a notion developed by the British designer JamesBridle caused such a reaction across multiple contexts, sectors and segments ofnetwork culture. Pitched as a highly-curated batch of crowdsourced visual and textualcontent on the commercial microblogging and social networking platform Tumblr, theNew Aesthetic was presented as a 'shareable concept', a 'theory object'. Thiscollection, moreover, was delivered with a message: the machines were telling ussomething, trying to speak to us, and we just need to return their affectionate,surveillant gazes, and communicate with their program languages.The term New Aesthetic felt the full force of love and hate from a disparate crew ofwriters, media art theorists and practitioners, designers, object-orientedontologists and curators in an outpouring of frenzied attention and criticism. Ironically,even ambivalent responses were well documented. Since its explosion online, manyhave relegated the phenomena of the New Aesthetic to the status of a 'non-event.'But how could such a thing be both phenomenal and superfluous, attracting so manycontributions, sightings, parallels and revisionist accounts, including from new mediapractitioners themselves? The question of how and why the New Aesthetic becameemblematic of a particular kind of sensibility, one arguably characteristic of adisruptive network culture, is the subject of this book.Approaching this topic, we want to think through the anxieties, misunderstandings,arguments, bruised egos and skirmishes the New Aesthetic generated. We attempt tomove beyond lazy thinking, positions of pious indifference or naive enthusiasm, andask what the New Aesthetic might tell us about this juncture in which find ourselves,as curators, critics, artists theorists and creative workers. We especially want toexplore the discomfort and challenges of the New Aesthetic for a number ofcommentators working in proximity to 'new media aesthetics.' Somehow the NewAesthetic as a point of conversation seemed to generate strong boundary anxietiesat a time when media art and the cultural sector in general, here in the Netherlandsand across Europe, are having serious difficulties conceiving of present conditions andfuture visions of their own. Especially considering this fact, the sense of beautificsentimentality and foreboding captured by its images, along with the distributiveattention it attracted, raises interesting questions for the future of new media art.The first section of this book provides some definitions and introduces key themes.11