New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

10. THE NEW AESTHETIC AS MEDIATIONLet's explore the notion of mediation within the contours of the New Aesthetic, inparticular the computational contribution or facilitation of certain way of working,looking, and distributing. Whilst we are aware of the limitations that the structure ofthis book enforces on our discussion of mediation, and especially the difficulties ofexplicating the complexities of computational media, it is clear that emerging creativepractices are problematising, in some sense, this medial dimension. Indeed, medialchange is linked to epistemic change – and here of course, we are referring to asoftware condition.Software presents a translucent interface relative to a common 'world' and soenables engagement with a 'world', this we often call its interface. It is tempting, whentrying to understand software/code to provide analysis at the level of this surface.However, software also possesses an opaque machinery that mediates engagementthat is not experienced directly nor through social mediations. Without anattentiveness to the layers of software beneath this surface interface we are indanger of 'screen essentialism'. In terms of this analytic approach, one of the keyaspects is that the surface can remain relatively stable whilst the machinery layer(s)can undergo frenetic and disorienting amounts of change (Fuller 2003). This franticdisorientation at the machinery layer is therefore insulated from the user, who isprovided with a surface which can be familiar, skeuomorphic (from the Greek, skeuos -vessel or tool, morphe - shape), representational, metonymic, figurative or extremelysimplistic and domestic. It is important to note that the surface/interface need not bevisual, indeed it may be presented as an application programming interface (API)which hides the underlying machinery behind this relatively benign interface. Here, areuseful links to many of the formulations around a notion of the New Aesthetic.Indeed, we argue that the New Aesthetic is interesting as a kind of pointing orgesturing towards mediation by digital processes, in some instances connecting toclaims whereby it renders human input or control unnecessary – similar to claims abouta non-human turn. This is the very act of automatic computation or a form of idealizedartificial intelligence is in some senses a technical imaginary that runs through theBridle/Sterling formulation. Mediation itself can be understood within a frame ofunderstanding that implies the transfer between two points – often linked to notionsof information theory. Guillory argues,the enabling condition of mediation is the interposition of distance (spatial,temporal, or even notional) between the terminal poles of the communicationprocess (these can be persons but also now machines, even persons andmachines). (Guillory 2010: 357)The software that is now widely used is part of a wider constellation of softwareecologies made possible by a plethora of computational devices that facilitate thecolonisation of code into the lifeworld (see Berry 2012d). In other words, softwareenables access to certain forms of mediated engagement with the world. This isachieved via the translucent surface interface and enables a machinery to be49