New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

5. A BLOGPOST AS EXHIBITIONThe contemporary obsession with novelty is an obsession of high capitalistconsumerism: we need to own the newest tech gadget, dress ourselves in the latestfashion, enjoy the freshest foraged ingredients for the new thing in molecular diningexperiences, and continuously and persistently come up with new exciting ideas tomarket ourselves and our jobs. As communications guru Marshall McLuhan said in oneof his numerous probes, "At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a newcareer and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years" (McLuhan 2002:114-115).'New' is both trendy and trending, 'new' is youthful, 'new' surprises us, 'new' is thevarnish elaborately used to shine up that what is already there, what has been lyingaround in the bottom of the drawer collecting dust and what no one paid attention to...until it becomes the latest 'new' thing. Perhaps 'new' is to modes of consumption what'radical' has been to contemporary art over the past few decades. 'New' as a term incontemporary art is used sparingly however, as 'new' indicates a highly significantbreaking point. In past decades contemporary art and art theory have tended to buildmore on palimpsestic models, which allow for a layering of conceptual and theoreticalinfluences by predecessors and peers. Contemporary art therefore prefers to use theterm 'turn', which is milder and allows for baggage to be included and schlepped along.The 'new' comes into art in a different way, in the sense that art makes us see things'anew' and defamiliarises our perception of things. In his original blog post on 'The NewAesthetic' of May 6th 2011 on the Really Interesting Group website Bridle intends tomake us “see the technologies we have with new wonder” (2012a). In other words,Bridle is employing a tested curatorial strategy of selecting images in order to havethat very collection produce a different way of looking – he wants us to see with 'new'eyes, as it were. So let us treat Bridle's original post as curated exhibition space, acuratorial project which attempts to unearth something about contemporary visualperception and image production.Blog posts are rigid exhibition platforms: they are unforgivingly linear, so that thesequence of images – whether intended or not – has to be read according to a certainhierarchy. Bridle's New Aesthetic blog kicks off with a NASA satellite image of anagricultural landscape (2012a). We see an abstract painterly composition,consisting de facto of a rocky land formation with a pixelated green pattern. The originof this image does not seem to be of great importance, as its biography is summarisedin a minimal hyperlinked caption as “Guardian gallery of agricultural landscapes fromspace”. What matters though, is the visual impact of this image. Its natural rough andorganic textures mix with unworldly patches of green, as if the latter werephotoshopped into the image. The caption suggests that what we are looking at isreal, but whether this image is real or fake is probably besides the point. What Bridlewants us to see in this image, it appears, is its seemingly digital aesthetic. How thisimage was produced however, by means of satellite technology, is not revealed inwhat we see. Bridle seems to have selected the image because its graphics suggest apixillated version of a landscape. The technological properties that are foregrounded in28