New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

Computation, understood within the context of computationality, pervades oureveryday life. It therefore becomes one particular limit (there are others of course) ofour possibilities for reason, experience and desire within this historical paradigm ofknowledge, or episteme (see Berry 2012c). One can think of creative practices asbeing bounded extricably with the computational and the foundation for developing acognitive map (Jameson 2006: 516). The fact that abduction aesthetics arenetworked, sharable, modular, 'digital', and located both in the digital and analogueworlds is appropriate, because they follow the colonisation of the lifeworld by thetechnics of computationality.David Hockney writing about his Fresh Flowers (Grant 2010) links his artistic work tothe medial affordances of the computational device, in this case an iPad, stating'when using his iPhone or iPad to draw, the features of the devices tend to shape hischoice of subject...The fact that it's illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects'(Freeman 2012). Parisi and Portanova further argue for an algorithmic aesthetic withtheir notion of 'soft thought':the aesthetic of soft thought precisely implies that digital algorithms areautonomous, conceptual modes of thinking, a thinking that is always already amode of feeling ordered in binary codes, and is not to be confused with sensing orperceiving. Numerical processing is always a feeling, a simultaneously physical andconceptual mode of feeling data, physical in the actual operations of thehardware-software machine, conceptual in the grasp of numbers as virtualities orpotentials (Parisi and Portanova 2012).Other researchers (Beaulieu et al 2012) have referred to 'Network Realism’ to drawattention to some of these visual practices. Many of the artworks in this book can beseen to fall under this category of work. Such works display similar investments inproducing visual, affective and object-based articulations of digitality and the network.The Tumblr blog that presents the New Aesthetic to us as a stream of data – again,significant in this reading of computationality (see also Kittler 2009) - collects digitaland pseudo-digital objects through a computational frame, and is only made possiblethrough new forms of computational curation tools, such as Tumblr and Pinterest(2012). The New Aesthetic thus gives a description and a way of representing andmediating the world in and through the digital, that is understandable as an infinitearchive (or collection). Secondly, alongside many other creative practices including artpractices that we have pointed to in this book, The New Aesthetic alternatelyhighlights the fact that something digital is a happening in culture – something whichwe have only barely been conscious of – and also that culture is happening to thedigital. Together these aspects ontological, technical, and of course material,contribute to what we might call the condition of possibility for emerging aestheticpractices invested in the present, invested as these are in irupting the 'digital' into the'real'.More surface-level investments such as those captured in the New Aesthetic wemight say remain focussed on the aesthetic in the first instance (rather than theontological) and in this way perpetuate the obfuscation of the sociological and politicalreality of computational conditions. This is a useful point of distinction for considering47