New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

inevitably affected - maybe derailed - when Sterling posted his essay to Beyond theBeyond blog at Wired.com on April 2, 2012. Many of the answers and additionalcommentary, while insightful, ignored that this notion was a work in process, anatmosphere or mood, a temporary litany of findings, and not a final and definitivestatement.Sterling's initial post set the tone for the considerable debate that followed, by bothclaiming this project as a 'serious' avant-garde arising from British media designers,while acknowledging its shortcomings on a theoretical level. Of course, Sterling sharesan investment with Bridle in science fiction and future-thinking, and there was morethan a little wish-fulfillment here, although expressed in a satirical register.Nevertheless, the urgency of the New Aesthetic was the major aspect of the essayitself:I've seen some attempts along this line before, but this one has muscle.The New Aesthetic is moving out of its original discovery phase, and into aevangelical, podium-pounding phase. If a pioneer village of visionarycreatives is founded, and they start exporting some startling, newfangledimagery, like a Marcel Duchamp-style explosion-in-a-shingle-factory…Well, we’ll once again be living in heroic times! (Sterling 2012b)Other positive attributes were listed: that the New Aesthetic is 'telling the truth','culturally agnostic', 'comprehensible', 'deep', 'contemporary', 'requires close attention','constructive' and 'generational' (2012b). His piece worked hard to mythologize the'movement' through the legitimacy of a modernist canon, citing RussianConstructivists, French Impressionists, Italian Futurists; even adding a comparison ofBridle to Andre Breton-style Pope of this emergent scene.However, Sterling also noted a number of considerable downsides or troublingaspects. Beyond recognizing the messiness of the accumulative Tumblr format, thesemainly revolved around the lack of rigorous theoretical analysis and comprehension. Inparticular, the fact that many of the images refer to radically different phenomena andissues - splinter camouflage, for instance, is not about computational vision, but thephysiology of human perception - and almost none of these can be easily indexedback to a Turing notion of artificial intelligence or thinking machines. On the contrary,the imagery generated by the machines is a profoundly human problem:I hasten to assure you that I’m not making lame vitalist claims that ourhuman reactions are mystical, divine, immaterial, timeless or absolute intruth. I am merely stating, as a stark and demonstrable fact, that ourmachines have no such reactions. To rely on them to do that for us isfraudulent. (Sterling 2012b)The real trouble here, as Sterling notes, is that this conceptual framework hinders thedevelopment of an aesthetic agenda grounded by the specific material workings ofthese technologies. More concerningly, as we also observed in the introduction, itobfuscates the political problems perpetuated by these digital and networkedsystems. These critical comments, in any case, were for the most part lost in thediscourse on the new aesthetic that followed his essay, which tended to follow the'heroic' narrative. If the new aesthetic is 'collectively intelligent', then Sterling's essay19