New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

of reality, touches a growing sense or suspicion towards the digital, or gives a senseof the limits or even the absolute, this is also because experienced reality beyondeveryday life is too difficult for most members of a society to move or understand.What we are dealing with is a heuristic pattern for everyday life – the parameterizationof our being-in-the-world. An example of parameterization as a kind of default (digital)grammar of everyday life would be say, that mediated through the 140 characters inTwitter or other social media.Computation in this sense can be considered as an ontotheology. A specific historicalepoch defined by a certain set of computational knowledges, practices, methods andcategories. Related to this is a phenomenological experience of frantic disorientationcaused by, or throught to be contributing to lived experience – which is not incidentallyan important marker of the specificity of the New Aesthetic that foregrounds or evenrenders as normal the loss of control, loss of human importance or the erasure ofdifference between human and non-human. Therefore new aesthetic registrations ofthe computational regime involve, in an important sense, an abductive aesthetic builton patterning and first order logics, in which computational patterns and patternrecognition become a means of cultural expression.Patterns are deeply imbricated with computerized recognition, repeated codes,artifacts and structural elements that enable something to be recognised as a type ofthing (see Harvey 2011, 2012 for a visualisation of facial pattern recognition). This isnot just visual, of course. Patterns may be recognised in data sets, textual archives,data points, distributions, non-visual sensors, physical movement or gestures, hapticforces, and so on. Indeed, this points to the importance of information visualisation aspart of an abduction aesthetic in order to 'visualise' the patterns that are hidden insets of data.Thus, computationality (as an ontotheology) instantiates a new ontological ‘epoch’ asa new historical constellation of intelligibility. Code/software is the paradigmatic caseof computationality, and presents us with a computational 'objects' which are locatedat all major junctures of modern society. To view it as an ontotheology enables us tounderstand the present situation and its collections, networks, or assemblage of'coded objects' or 'code objects'.One of the things that the New Aesthetic strongly expresses (which indeed is not thatnew in fine art or pop culture) is the concept of a 'glitch ontology'. To see the 'eruptionof the digital into the physical' (which we understand as 'iruption') everywhere, is toacknowledge glitch as an ontological condition. Heidegger has very interestinglyconceptualised the way in which everyday objects come to presence and withdrawfrom our attention over time, depending on the way in which they are used, which hedescribes as Vorhandenheit (or present-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (or ready-tohand).The common example Heidegger uses is that of a hammer, which observed in adetached manner appears as 'present-at-hand', as an object decontextualised beforeus. In contrast, when used by the carpenter it becomes 'ready-to-hand', that is part ofthe activity, or making, of the carpenter, no longer noticed as a discrete object.In contrast to the more subtle shifts in the vision/use of the hammer, computationaldevices appear to oscillate rapidly between Vorhandenheit/ Zuhandenheit (present-45