New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

This is followed by a series of reflections by curators on how curatorial practice andexpertise in proximity to the New Aesthetic makes sense of its objects, forms andartifacts. We then move to conceptually situate the New Aesthetic - as one kind ofemergent aesthetic form - into a broader episteme of computationality andperiodisation of neoliberal governmentality. This is an attempt to expand ourperspective on what the New Aesthetic might mean, and also consider how media artcan reimagine itself by asking some difficult new questions.WHAT WAS THE NEW AESTHETIC?Defining the New Aesthetic is necessarily problematic. It's a vibe, an attitude, afeeling, a sensibility. Posted to the blog for The Really Interesting Group - acreative design partnership based in East London - Bridle introduced the term on May6th, 2011 by stating:For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem toapproach a New Aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentousthan I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASAextropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see thetechnologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a moodboardfor unknown products.(Some of these things might have appeared here, or nearby, before. Theyare not necessarily new new, but I want to put them together.)For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satelliteimagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we're looking at theground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures. (Bridle2011a)The post contained a series of digital images documenting this sensibility associatedof the future. These visual artefacts included satellite imagery, tracking of geotaggeddata from iPhones, the location of Osama Bin Laden's 'hideout' on Google Maps froma New York Times article, splinter camouflage on military jets, the Telehouse Westdata center in East London by YRM Architects and 'low res' industrial design by UnitedNude, among others. At a glance, these appear as a random set of images. Indeed,something about it recalls what ADILKNO once described as vague media, "theirmodels are not argumentative, but contaminative. Once you tune in to them, you getthe attitude. But that was never their intention; their vagueness is not an ideal, it is theultimate degree of abstraction" (1998). However, perhaps the reference to moodboardsis more telling, a highly contemporary technique of concepting integral tocreative labour in advertising and design settings. This is a cultural technology whichinvolves creating an 'atmosphere' or context for consumption around a product(Ardvisson 2005). Explicitly for Bridle, it is something designed for network culture totake up: for him, the products are 'unknown.' In this respect, it aims purely to evoke apotential atmosphere around standard infrastructure. It performs a sense of notionalspace, but not a natural sublime. On the contrary, the New Aesthetics strives to staredown a thoroughly hybridized socio-technological world (Latour 2011).12