New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

objects, the politics of their management and so on, seem to circulate everywhereacross various academic and artistic scenes that are literate in computation andpolitics. In our current conditions, these questions of medium-specificity, materialaccess to devices and techniques of interrogability that support the development ofmedia art practice themselves face new challenges. Processes of obfuscation, therefrain of efficiency, intellectual property regimes, built-in obsolesence, censorshipand surveillance form part of a wider constitutive context through which thesepractices become politicized. In V2_’s recent publication Vital Beauty, Dutch media artcritic Arjen Mulder makes explicit the stakes of this scenario,All the signs indicate that technological art will succumb to current socialpressure and becoming something useful to people and the economy. Inthe process, we will lose part of what I will call the intellectual life of ourtimes: the extent to which we are able to be conscious of the present.Artists are not creative in the sense of constantly coming up with newcontent. Rather, they change the form, the medium, the framework. In theirhands, form is elevated to method, media become cocreators, andblueprints turn into diagrams. (Mulder 2012)What is interesting about creative experimentation which is conscious of tools andpolitics is what new forms of critical art try to gather up and deal with: the complexityof our incontrovertibly aesthetic negotiations of things.Whether radical, formalist, corporate or fascist, aesthetics compose subjects in acontract with technological, political and economic realities. In this way, new forms ofsense and perception offer up different ways of thinking about our intimateattachments to the historical specificity of the world. In this sense, they are also formsof publicity for specific kinds of comportment. Already with Futurism and the historicalavant-garde, artworks’ proximity to publicity worked to disrupt and deregulate culturalvalues through the shocks of modernity. The New Aesthetic, however, does notpresent a modernist manifesto, nor invent an autonomous aesthetic grammar. Rather,the New Aesthetic exists as a Tumblr that evokes particular subjectivities; a cascadeof images, a collection, an archive, or more specifically, a database that attempts todocument a certain unfolding condition.This condition in question is precisely the age of the algorithm, or the regime ofcomputation (Golumbia 2009). For Sterling, it captured “an eruption of the digital in thephysical”, (2012b) for David Berry, this was an attempt to “see the grain ofcomputation” (2012a). The New Aesthetic signifies the digital and computationthrough image files. That is, the Tumblr accumulates representations of pixels,standardized objects, calculative operations and other instantiations of appliedmathematics.Somewhat paradoxically, however, as the New Aesthetic attempts to document the'reality' of this condition - the ubiquity of computational processes - it remains caughtin the computational regime itself. This is most obvious through the emphasis on visualknowledge and in the tension that exists between representation and mediation insoftware (Chun 2011). The New Aesthetic attempts to represent the condition ofcomputationality, but does not reflect on its own status as media. This is why the New15