New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

design. In some ways, 8-bit images are reassuring and still comprehensible asdifferent from and standing in opposition to the everyday world people inhabit. In otherways, however, the glitchy, retro 8-bit esque look that we see in pixelated works areactually distant from the capabilities of contemporary machines and their 8-bit blockyontologies provide only limited guidance on the way in which software now organisesand formats the our shared, and sharable, world (Berry 2011). So ironically, just asdigital technologies and software mediate our experience and engagement with theworld, often invisibly, so the 'digital' and 'software' is itself mediated and made visiblethrough the representational forms of pixelation and glitch.As notions of abduction and related aesthetic styles in art and design become moreprevalent it will be interesting to see more exemplars of this form emerge and see howwe deal with them. Whilst today we tend to think of the 8-bit pixelation, satellitephotos, CCTV images, and the like, it is probable that alternative, more computationalforms will probaby take over. Perhaps skeuomorphic images will become increasinglycommon? Or indeed skeuomorphic representations of older 8-bit technologies (forexample enabled by MAME and other emulators) (see MAME 2012). Conceivably, thisleads to a form of cognitive dissonance, perpetuating drives to look for patternaesthetics everywhere. Apophenia, the tendency to see meaningful patterns orconnections in random or meaningless data (called a type 1 error in statistics) isdefinitely playing out in the New Aesthetic in this regard. We might further expect thatpeople are also seeking digital or abductive explanations for arts of other moments,for visual or even non-visual experiences which may not be digital or produced throughcomputational means at all, a digital pareidolia.Pareidolia involves seeing importance in vague and random phenomenon, for examplea face in a random collection of dots on paper. The term 'digital pareidolia' we coin togesture towards this tendency in the New Aesthetic to see digital causes for thingsthat happen in everyday life. Indeed, under future regimes of computationality it mightbe considered stranger to believe that things might have non-digital causes. Thusapophenia would be the norm in a highly digital computational society, perhaps even asignificant benefit to one's life chances and well-being if finding patterns becomesincreasingly lucrative. Here we might consider the growth of computational highfrequencytrading and financial systems that are trained and programmed to identifypatterns very quickly.Software is not only necessary for representation; it is also endemic oftransformations in modes of “governing” that make governing both more personaland impersonal, that enable both empowerment and surveillance, and indeedmake it difficult to distinguish between the two. (Chun 2011: 58)When we speak of seeing the grain of computation, or perhaps its 'seams', what dowe mean by this and what is being articulated in particular discourses around therepresentation of the new aesthetic? Here we might note that seeing the grain ofcomputation, is a merely representational model of understanding a media form, andalthough useful in one dimension is unable to capture a range of specific medialaspects and issues that are very important, and to which we now turn.43