New Aesthetic New Anxieties - Institute for the Unstable Media

Things explored relations between different materials in the world. This involved anaesthetics aimed at generating new hybrid or more-than-human collectives.The Power of Things exhibition included only a few screens, and their presence wasalways to support sculptural objects. Pigeon d'Or (2010) by Tuur van Balen, forexample, was a proposal to genetically modify pigeons so their excrement iscomposed of soap and, therefore, the city is cleaned rather than soiled when pigeonsdefecate. The installation included material things which gave viewers a sense of aproject's conceptual and thematic scope. Most works in the exhibition were sculpturalobjects, or objects with screens as support, instead of time-based or image-basedinteractive works. This was not a prohibition on the use of screens, but an attempt tocomplicate certain established and conventional exhibition practices in new media art.Other works such as Irrational Computing (2011) by Ralf Baecker dealt with thematerials and aesthetics of digital processes. Using semiconductor crystals (the keytechnical component of information technologies), five modules based on variedelectrical and mechanical processes that form a kind of primitive, macroscopic signalprocessors. Irrational Computing is not supposed to ‘function’ – its aim is to search forthe poetic elements on the border between ‘accuracy’ and ‘chaos’, amplifying thepoetic side of these materials. Similarly, Pulse (2008) by Marcus Kison dealt with thematerials and affects of digital processes in the form of a cascade of wires andexposed mechanical parts. Pulse is a live visualization of real-time emotionalexpressions on the internet. Each time an emotion is identified in a recent blog entry, ared shape-shifting object at the centre of the installation transforms itself, so that thenew volume of the shape creates a visual representation of an overall currentemotional condition of internet users.Beyond the domain of new media art, human-computer relations are also not new tothe contemporary art world. The works of Thomas Bayrle presented at dOCUMENTA(13) for example, are machines which move in rhythmic and hypnotic ways,accompanied by barely audible soundtracks of murmured prayers. Also atdOCUMENTA (13), in a neighbouring venue, several physical experiments byphysicist Anton Zeileger were installed, which affectively materialized the work of afield which is normally quite opaque to those outside it. Although the contemporary artworld could not be said to be hermetic (an interest in machines and their aestheticsstretches back to at least Futurism), the new media art world and contemporary artworld still remain very much distinct. Manovich infamously referred to this as thedifference between 'Turing-land' and 'Duchamp-land' (Manovich, 1996). CuratorCatherine David expressed the Duchamp-land view in an early statement when shesuggested "technology in itself is not a category according to which I judge works. Thistype of categorization is just as outmoded as division into classical art genres(painting, sculpture…). I am interested in the idea of a project; ideally the means ofrealizing the project should arise from the idea itself" (1997). However, from theperspective of a decade of change, we can now recognize the reticent politics of the'project' as a characteristic of neoliberal governmentality.The conversation about the New Aesthetic, even though it arose from a designcontext, is remarkable for the way that it so naturally disregards established divides ofcreative industries, art practice and theory. It posits an aesthetic turn that has4