New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
like Screenshots of Despair. Without some analysis or comprehension of thesematerial and technical process of mediation, there is no aesthetic there.38
Page 2 and 3: NEW AESTHETIC NEW ANXIETIES
Page 4: TABLE OF CONTENTSNew Aesthetic New
Page 8 and 9: 1. AESTHETIC TURNSA month before th
Page 10 and 11: arguably animated all of these scen
Page 12 and 13: esource for curators. She has writt
Page 14: INTRODUCTION3. INTRODUCTION4. NEW A
Page 17 and 18: This is followed by a series of ref
Page 19 and 20: Jumping from the medium of the scre
Page 21 and 22: Aesthetic seems to evoke what alrea
Page 23 and 24: 4. NEW ANXIETIESThe # tumblresque i
Page 25 and 26: worked to propane-fuel this intelle
Page 27 and 28: “pigeon language” that takes pl
Page 29 and 30: NET EFFECTSThe new aesthetic episod
Page 31: CURATORIAL READINGS5. A BLOGPOST AS
Page 34 and 35: the image are those that can be dis
Page 36 and 37: which radiate a lightness of form,
Page 38 and 39: intends to produce connections betw
Page 40 and 41: 7. ERROR 404: NO AESTHETIC FOUNDAt
Page 44: IRRUPTIONS8. THE NEW AESTHETIC AS R
Page 47 and 48: are in danger of further 'screen es
Page 49 and 50: 9. WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS OF POSSI
Page 51 and 52: at-hand/ ready-to-hand) - this is a
Page 53 and 54: the difference between aesthetic fo
Page 55 and 56: engaged which computationally inter
Page 57 and 58: Kant argues that ‘mere reason’
Page 59 and 60: 11. THE POLITICS OF EMERGENT AESTHE
Page 61 and 62: We now find ourselves in a situatio
Page 63 and 64: crisis-ridden economic condition, i
Page 65 and 66: ultimately responses that together
Page 67 and 68: ‘informational societies’? How
Page 69 and 70: 12. BIBLIOGRAPHYADILKNO (The Founda
Page 71 and 72: Bridle, J. (2011a) 'The New Aesthet
Page 73 and 74: Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question C
Page 75 and 76: Globally', empyre, http://www.maila
Page 77 and 78: 13. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSBy its very nat

New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?