New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

things and communities. Experimental art and critical projects might attempt to thinkthrough these infrastructures by playing with and breaking the logics and medialaffordances differently. We are emphasizing the urgency precisely because all ofthis plays out on the topos provided by computational technologies, on loose, hazyneoliberalized social fabrics, which in a similar way to software, render older forms ofattachments and subject positions irrelevant. As Gelernter argues:No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting ordangerous than 'now.' As we learn more about now, we know less aboutthen. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but thecapacity of the human mind not at all… The effect of nowness resemblesthe effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to seethe stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past(Gelernter 2010).Irruptions of the Digital into the Real, Economics into ‘Culture’Writing in the Dutch context, we understand the contemporary period’s inattention tothe effects on the subject of neoliberal transition as symptomatic of the success of itsideological takeover. Emerging aesthetic forms and critical practices can raiseimportant questions about the autonomy and continuity of the human agent in thispresent where matters of autonomy for cultural practitioners and critics are becomingincreasingly stressed and questioned.In such contexts, moving toward a technological politics is necessary. Consider forexample that the auto-curation of the stream's processing – Tumblr blogs, Twitterfeeds, and so forth - does not just provide information to the user, but also activelyconstructs, directs, and even newly creates, significant socio-cognitive conditions forthe subjectivity of the real-time stream, a kind of algorithmic humanity. This is how thesubject is captured by the New Aesthetic, whose comportment seems hooked to theminimization of risk, and shot through with projective sentimentality. We feelphenomena such this might, as Derrida has argued,Oblige us more than ever to think the virtualization of space and time, thepossibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us morethan ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely andthoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, 'real time'to 'deferred time,' effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living,in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts (Derrida 1994: 212).Software changes the games of cultural work and production; the lesson takes a longtime to learn and is complicated by other parallel conditions. The neoliberal economy isnot just driven by software as a kind of symbolic machine but instead is made ofsoftware, as Galloway has emphasized (2012a). It fosters in a logic of “the extractionof value based on the encoding and processing of mathematical information” (10). Butthis is not just to say that software is a kind of conceptual motor underpinning theeconomy, and useful for thinking it through: “more and more, software is the thingwhich is directly extracting value” (10). For Galloway, this software condition, like our57