The New Aesthetic

Summary: 

The New Aesthetic is a trend whose title was termed by James Bridle, the young English man who is known for pioneering the recognition of this movement, and who has developed a blog devoted to the New Aesthetic on tumblr. The New Aesthetic, which exists in the virtual world as well as our physical world, is consistently developing, shifting, and evolving. There are no hard and fast rules for what qualifies as being part of the New Aesthetic, only recognizable trends like pixilation, 8-bit representations of the world, the capabilities of smart technology, and especially the blurring of the boundaries that define the real world and the digital world, the physical world and the virtual. It is an ever-growing digital existence.  The New Aesthetic is a communally defined trend, and its contributors further the claim made by Bridle that “the spaces of our imagination are now digital,” and that technology is evolving to be more like us, and at the same time, we are evolving to be more like technology.

Response: 

This was the first time I was introduced to the New Aesthetic, and it is something I consider to interesting. It is not anything groundbreaking or new necessarily, it’s a digital consciousness whose trends are continually being recognized with more frequency.

Someone in class brought up an interesting question, if James Bridle should be responsible for defining what is and what isn’t categorized under New Aesthetic. I don’t think this is his responsibility: he recognized the trend, but he just got the ball rolling to gather whatever it may from other contributors recognizing and fueling the trend.

Something I found unnerving about Bridle’s video on the New Aesthetic was his comment about us repeatedly having to prove to machines that we are human, suggesting that we are not in control of these machines that were made by humans in the first place. He brought up facial recognition technology, and how some artists out there are making work that fools this technology. I found this funny because when I take images of my sculptures using my camera phone, the facial recognition technology that accompanies the camera detects the faces of my sculptures, thinking that they are human faces. Is it sad that I take this as a compliment from my phone? 

These are the tumblr posts I felt most illustrated the New Aesthetic for me:

• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/18848546972/economist-hand-keyboard
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/33424855834/sariwat-by-maitha-demithan-formed-from-hundreds
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/17163297795/investigating-the-rotation-of-data-these
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/29836065801/the-anti-instagram-filter-works-on-old-photos-too
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/20085302829/wind-map
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/19316467382/eigenface-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia