New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

ultimately responses that together posit a constitutive context of the problematic.Under such conditions, thought, for Foucault, is that which allows one to 'step back'from conduct, to present conduct as an object of thought and to question itsmeaning, goals and conditions: “thought is freedom in relation to what one does, themotion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it asa problem” (Foucault 2000: 117). This motion of freeing up conduct is the object ofFoucault’s work, but also his practice. In other words, problematizations are soughtout and re-posited in untimely ways in the present. Here, “what is important is whatmakes them simultaneously possible: it is the point in which their simultaneity isrooted; it is the soil that can nourish them all in their diversity and sometimes in spiteof their contradictions” (Foucault 2000: 118) The re-positing of problems themselves– an act of both discovery and creation – is the domain of critique. How does thiswork? There exists a strange doubling in the notion of re-positing a problem – agesture of heterogenesis that cannot be secured through a set of formal criteria, nor amorality of solutions, but always a kind of movement that grapples with its ownconstitution.We understand that emerging aesthetic and critical practices do have potential tocreate such movements. They present opportunities to rethink not only the context ofmedia art, but a variety of situated practices, including speculative design, netcriticism, hacking, free and open source software development, locative media,sustainable hardware and so on. This is how we have considered the New Aesthetic:as an opportunity to rethink the relations between these contexts in the emergentepisteme of computationality. There is a desperate need to confront the politicalpressures of neoliberalism manifested in these infrastructures. We agree with HalFoster in a recent essay, "surely now is a bad time to go post-critical" (2012). Indeed,these are risky, dangerous and problematic times, and these are periods when critiqueshould thrive, but here we need to forge new alliances, invent and discover problemsof the common that nevertheless do not eliminate the fundamental differences in thisecology of practices (Stengers 2005). Here, perhaps provocatively, we believe a greatdeal could be learned from the development of the New Aesthetic not only as a mood,but as a topic and fix for collective feeling, that temporarily mobilizes networks. Is itpossible to sustain and capture these atmospheres of debate and discussion beyondknee-jerk reactions and opportunistic self-promotion? These are crucial questionsthat the New Aesthetic invites us to consider, if only to keep a critical network culturein place.New Aesthetics: Practice as ResistanceAny range of emerging aesthetic forms, processing these conditions, could offercertain 'exploits' to surface the digital and its inequalities and control in different ways(Thacker and Galloway, 2007). What we might call the 'knowledge infrastructure' is animportant possible site of resistance in itself, reinforced through the diffusion oftechnologies of the information society. This can clearly be seen in the practices of thehackers of the free software and open source movements and their critical practicesand discourses. Whilst we have not had space or time to engage with these hacking60