New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

are in danger of further 'screen essentialism'. In terms of the computational asinstantiated within computational devices (or code objects), one of the key aspects isthat the surface can remain relatively stable whilst the machinery layer(s) can undergofrenetic and disorienting amounts of change (Berry 2012c). This frantic disorientationat the machinery layer is therefore insulated from the user, who is provided with asurface which can be familiar, skeuomorphic (from the Greek, skeuos - vessel or tool,morphe - shape), representational, metonymic, figurative or extremely simplistic anddomestic. It is important to note that the surface/interface need not be visual, indeedit may be presented as an application programming interface (API) which hides theunderlying machinery behind this relatively benign interface.As discussed in the introduction, the scope and boundary points of the New Aestheticare currently being drawn, redrawn and contested. This is great: it lives, it is beingtracked and experimented with, reworked and so on. But critical attention needs to bepaid especially to the New Aesthetic's formal investments in the non-humandimension of the computational, both in terms of a worrying (rather thanmethodological) decentring of the human, but also its related problem of grantinganthropomorphized agency to code.Indeed, this raises questions about what we might call the "thinginess" of the newaesthetic object more generally. To a large extent this "thinginess" or perhaps thedifficulty in engaging with it has been obscured due to an over-reliance on images torepresent its sets of new aesthetic "things" that purport to be in the world. This merepointing to materiality (even screenic images are material in an important sense) andassumes transparent means of communication facilitated by computationalcommmunicational systems. That is, there appears to be a theory of communicationinbuilt into the new aesthetic as shown in its popular registers. We need to takeaccount of this.THE REPRESENTATION PRACTICES OF THE NEW AESTHETICThe new aesthetic is deeply influenced by and reliant on patterns and abductivereasoning (Berry 2012a). This is a common thread that links the lists of objects thatseem to have nothing more in common than a difficulty to reconcile a tenuousdigitality, or a retro attachment towards older forms of digital rendering andreproduction. In actuality it is no surprise that we see a return of 8-bit retro – it couldperhaps be described as the abductive aesthetic par excellence, inasmuch as itenables an instant recognition of, and indeed serves as an important representationfor, the digital, especially as the digital becomes high-definition and less 'digital' by theday (see Jean 2010). Differently, this is a 'down-sampled' representation of a kind ofdigital past, or perhaps digital passing, given that the kinds of digital glitches, modes,and forms that are chosen are very much historically located – especially consideringthat we are moving into a high-definition world of retina displays and high-pixel densityexperience (for an example, see Huff 2012).As computation, and by definition its carriers, code and software, increasinglywithdraw into the background of our experience, we have increasingly seen thisforegrounding of representations of, and for, the digital/computational across art and42