New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilalwill confine himself to the gallery space. Over the duration, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. They will have the ability to watchBilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Should theychoose to do so, viewers will also have the option to shoot Bilal with a paintballgun, transforming the virtual experience into a very physical one. Bilal's selfimposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqipeople and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and thevirtual war they face on a daily basis. This sensational approach to the war ismeant to engage people who may not be willing to engage in political dialoguethrough conventional means. DOMESTIC TENSION will depict the suffering ofwar not through human displays of dramatic emotion, but rather through engagingpeople in the sort of playful interactive video game with which they are familiar.(Bilal 2007)Just as pixel sculptures do, Domestic Tension takes a digital phenomenon ofaffective experience and networked mediation into the physical: the opportunity toshoot an (often anonymous) person that could be on the other side of the world; aprinciple at the heart of any online first-person shooter game. Would DomesticTension however sit comfortably next to a pixel sculpture in the New Aestheticconceptual container? Arguably it wouldn’t. Domestic Tension is much more than aphysical rendition of a digital aesthetic; it has a politics of affective experience andembodied encounter that aims to affect political sensibilities and influence behaviour.Pixel sculptures rather lack such aims. This fundamental difference between apolitically engaged new media artwork and a pixel sculpture seems marked andsymptomatic for the New Aesthetic; the New Aesthetic claims a status as anemergent aesthetic, but does not really aspire to any sort of active or emergentimpact. While it makes claims about the reality of the present, it does not wish topolitically affect views or induce behavioural changes in that reality, like art commonlydoes. It merely documents and collects.How can an aesthetic that is concerned with "how culture is embracing the tools oftoday" (McNeil 2012) be this far removed from the material situations in which thesetools operate and seemingly steer clear of their political implications? The so-calledNew Aesthetic's elision of embodied experiences and of digitality beyond surface, isan elision of position taking through asethetics and of art's investment in behaviouralchanges. It's exemplars would bear a striking resemblance to contemporary art usingnew media technology if it's concept were actually politicized (see Tribe and Jana2006). But it doesn't seem designed to do that. Perhaps this is why it features somany weak experiments with new media art's toolset? Could the New Aestheticsimply be a poor attempt at curating new media art online? If so, its style is far fromnew and merely borrows from evolutions and throughout the history of new media art,evolutions which have been widely discussed for some years (see, e.g., Manovich2001; Fuller 2005; Munster 2006; Bosma 2011; Brouwer, Mulder and Spuybroek2012). Introducing a New Aesthetic that speaks to the “eruption of the digital into thephysical” (Sterling 2012), but that does not account for embodied experiences, steersaway from this eruption's contextual dimensions and political implications. It is likebuying a domain name, but not knowing how to build a website. Sometimes when onereceives a 404 error, it's not worth taking a screenshot of it and posting on a Tumblr37