Computation, understood within <strong>the</strong> context of computationality, pervades oureveryday life. It <strong>the</strong>re<strong>for</strong>e becomes one particular limit (<strong>the</strong>re are o<strong>the</strong>rs of course) ofour possibilities <strong>for</strong> reason, experience and desire within this historical paradigm ofknowledge, or episteme (see Berry 2012c). One can think of creative practices asbeing bounded extricably with <strong>the</strong> computational and <strong>the</strong> foundation <strong>for</strong> developing acognitive map (Jameson 2006: 516). The fact that abduction aes<strong>the</strong>tics arenetworked, sharable, modular, 'digital', and located both in <strong>the</strong> digital and analogueworlds is appropriate, because <strong>the</strong>y follow <strong>the</strong> colonisation of <strong>the</strong> lifeworld by <strong>the</strong>technics of computationality.David Hockney writing about his Fresh Flowers (Grant 2010) links his artistic work to<strong>the</strong> medial af<strong>for</strong>dances of <strong>the</strong> computational device, in this case an iPad, stating'when using his iPhone or iPad to draw, <strong>the</strong> features of <strong>the</strong> devices tend to shape hischoice of subject...The fact that it's illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects'(Freeman 2012). Parisi and Portanova fur<strong>the</strong>r argue <strong>for</strong> an algorithmic aes<strong>the</strong>tic with<strong>the</strong>ir notion of 'soft thought':<strong>the</strong> aes<strong>the</strong>tic 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 <strong>the</strong> actual operations of <strong>the</strong>hardware-software machine, conceptual in <strong>the</strong> grasp of numbers as virtualities orpotentials (Parisi and Portanova 2012).O<strong>the</strong>r researchers (Beaulieu et al 2012) have referred to 'Network Realism’ to drawattention to some of <strong>the</strong>se visual practices. Many of <strong>the</strong> 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 <strong>the</strong> network.The Tumblr blog that presents <strong>the</strong> <strong>New</strong> <strong>Aes<strong>the</strong>tic</strong> 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 <strong>for</strong>ms of computational curation tools, such as Tumblr and Pinterest(2012). The <strong>New</strong> <strong>Aes<strong>the</strong>tic</strong> thus gives a description and a way of representing andmediating <strong>the</strong> world in and through <strong>the</strong> digital, that is understandable as an infinitearchive (or collection). Secondly, alongside many o<strong>the</strong>r creative practices including artpractices that we have pointed to in this book, The <strong>New</strong> <strong>Aes<strong>the</strong>tic</strong> alternatelyhighlights <strong>the</strong> fact that something digital is a happening in culture – something whichwe have only barely been conscious of – and also that culture is happening to <strong>the</strong>digital. Toge<strong>the</strong>r <strong>the</strong>se aspects ontological, technical, and of course material,contribute to what we might call <strong>the</strong> condition of possibility <strong>for</strong> emerging aes<strong>the</strong>ticpractices invested in <strong>the</strong> present, invested as <strong>the</strong>se are in irupting <strong>the</strong> 'digital' into <strong>the</strong>'real'.More surface-level investments such as those captured in <strong>the</strong> <strong>New</strong> <strong>Aes<strong>the</strong>tic</strong> wemight say remain focussed on <strong>the</strong> aes<strong>the</strong>tic in <strong>the</strong> first instance (ra<strong>the</strong>r than <strong>the</strong>ontological) and in this way perpetuate <strong>the</strong> obfuscation of <strong>the</strong> sociological and politicalreality of computational conditions. This is a useful point of distinction <strong>for</strong> considering47
<strong>the</strong> difference between aes<strong>the</strong>tic <strong>for</strong>ms instantiated within <strong>the</strong> computationalcondition. The point we want to make is that <strong>the</strong> collections that Bridle and Sterling inparticular are identifying are in fact more symptomatic than exemplary of acomputational paradigm in creative work, of whatever kind. Some of us think this is afairly obvious point to make, but it never<strong>the</strong>less needs this degree of explanation.Surface digitality elides computational realities that in<strong>for</strong>m aes<strong>the</strong>tic feeling, whileholding unclear or haphazard investments in such hidden or lower level realities.48
Change language