New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

worked to propane-fuel this intellectual discourse.The new aesthetic inevitably raised questions around its novelty, historicity,ontological basis, gender bias, politics. Here, a central concern was the 'new' in thenew aesthetic itself, what does 'newness' refer? Marius Watz, writing on the Creator'sProject in a series of responses to Sterling’s essay, argued the case that this aspectwas deceptive, "most of what NA offers up for examination is not all that new.Technologies like machine vision and geo-location are old by most standards” (2012b).In his reading, a sense of everyday practices and the ubiquity of digital and networkedsystems were claimed as distinctive instead: “what is new is their integration into ourlives to the point where we are bringing them to bed” (2012b).Moreover, if aesthetics can be taken as a sensibility related to a transition in thepervasiveness of computation, then this experience is one that is equally wraught byanxieties or disturbances. As Watz puts it,This is the new Aesthetic - human behavior augmented by technology asoften as it is disrupted. The New Aesthetic is a sign saying 'TranslationServer Error' rather than 'Post Office'. The New Aesthetic is faces glowingominously as people walk down the street at night staring at their phones -or worse, their iPads (Watz 2012b).Indeed, disruption and augmentation can even be generalized beyond thisphenomenological state, given increasing transformations associated with softwareinfrastructures throughout everyday life (Dodge and Kitchin 2011), and the pressuresthey have brought to bear on institutional forms (Lovink 2012). In other words, if thereis a sensibility, it becomes one of experiencing the large-scale 'breakdown' carriedalong by socio-technological processes at large.In the recognition of this shifting ground, a number of reactionary responsesimmediately arose regarding the relation between media art and this wider conditionsignalled by the new aesthetic. In this context, Mez Breeze, a practioner of codepoetry and artist involved in early net.art, raised concerns regarding the appropriativedynamics of new aesthetics in its role as an aggregative litany of digital images. Usingthe term, 'The Phrase That Shall Not Be Named', the specific act of labelling work wascriticized as an act of assembling cultural capital, 'cred value', 'ego aggrandrisement',or cultural capital capable of being monetized: "name the new art phase in order toperform/get x" (2012).This process was understood as raising a series of questions around culturalownership and attribution: "to employ a relevant phrase: it just smells wrong" (2012).Indeed, for Breeze, the 'faux-trendoid label' problematically grouped together a seriesof practices, techniques and approaches to digital and networked technologies thathad much longer histories and were related to competing conceptual frameworks anddiscourses: "appropriating + remixing graphic markers/standards from marginalised or'other-fied' disciplines/decades does not a new genre/paradigm make" (2012). Herposition raises important questions around both the histories and immediate future ofmedia art practices. Nevertheless, gesturing to the dynamics of concept generation innetwork cultures ("and so it goes"), she would conclude with the highly pious note:"this too will pass" (2012).20