New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

4. NEW ANXIETIESThe # tumblresque is not John Berger's Ways of Seeing but sprays ofseeing. (Wark 2012)What is it about the New Aesthetic that makes you so damn uneasy? There’s adeeply intriguing quality about the New Aesthetic that is more remarkable than any ofits merits: it cannot be ignored. Since Bruce Sterling’s first essay popularized the term,the Tumblr that stood as its main platform of communication, and the group of ideas,references and icons that its originators gathered under its umbrella have beenrefuted, dissected, mocked, celebrated or laughed at. Those who have felt obliged toenter the debate about the New Aesthetic come from philosophy, from new media artpractice and curation, from interaction design or from the digital humanities. Butalmost no one has passed on the opportunity to say something; nobody has justshrugged with indifference and said 'they can’t be bothered'. The fact of the matter is,everyone seems bothered, somehow.This needs to be investigated because, quite clearly, it says something about thestate of these disciplines and those who are working today in this cultural space. Whileit would be almost impossible to find any unconditional apologist for Bridle'sproposition, it’s even harder to find indifferent commentators. Whatever the NewAesthetic is, it's a set of ideas that can make you feel twitchy and uncomfortable, fora range of reasons depending on who you are: the academic, the digital curator, thenew media artist. Whether we call it a brand or a half-formed body of theory, it reflectsback insecurities, biases, or feelings of inadequacy as often as it attracts valid criticalresponses.But what would happen if we properly embraced the New Aesthetic as a topic fornetwork culture? It is claimed the term refers to a 'new nature', and as Harawayreminds us, references to nature inevitably raise questions of the common, "we turnto this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory ... to reinhabit,precisely, common places - locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly,enspirited; that is, topical. In this sense, nature is the place in which to rebuild publicculture" (Haraway 2004: 65). The New Aesthetic has temporarily lit up and disturbednetwork culture, not only in terms of common concerns, but as a gauge of the stateof net discourse. These anxieties, moreover, can be useful, especially in whatMatthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey describe as the collision of grey media and greymatter, where “the cracks, faults and disturbances marking our mental universes offerthe same kinds of opportunities for exploitation as do bugs in the algorithmicuniverses of software, and one stratagem is always in the position of being able toturn another to its own account” (2010: 157). Let's dig into some responses, anddiagnose the health of the current debate.If we examine the New Aesthetic as an anxious topic, the process comes with its ownperils. Whatever goal Bridle had when he opened the New Aesthetic Tumblr, it was18