The New Aethetic (NA) is not new - it has just reached a 'gee-whiz' level of (general) enthusiasm or tipping point. It is interesting though and should be pursued but with more critical and contextual rigour ('A theory') - concept such as, Latour (ANT), Heidegger (Present at Hand) and Deleuze are aligned. Key point: although computers function without us and are intrinsic in construction the NA it means nothing without 'us' i.e we 'suss' NA and are inextricably entangled within technology and therefore NA's construction - "Down with Pan-Psychism".
Headings
What is the New Aesthetic
A Process without a Singular 'Aesthetic' Intentionality
New Aesthetic Images are Affectively Sussed by Humans not by Things
Down with Pan-Psychism!
Up with Pan-Experietialism!
New Aesthetic Images: The Uncanny, the Present-at-Hand, the Sublime
Four Summaries, Three Quotations and a Closing Exhortation
Summary/Quotes
"If, according to Debord, ‘the spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image’, then the New Aesthetic is technology accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image. The New Aesthetic (NA) image is a special kind of image – an image which is bodily, affectively sussable by humans. The NA image is not merely (or even) an image to be intellectually pondered by humans. You ‘get it’ before you understand it (if you ever even come to understand it)."
NA is not a single aesthetic - Drone tech, Google Maps, Generative Processing across various media/ algorithms produce their own visual aesthetics.
"The term ‘New Aesthetic’ is similar to the term ‘New Media’. When your descriptive adjective is as vague as ‘new’ (or ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’), then all ontological constraints are off."
"Those less theoretically inclined might argue that since the New Aesthetic begins with an affectively intuited image, that's where it should end.."
"The New Aesthetic is not a new flavour of aesthetics. At best, and properly understood, it is a new way of understanding aesthetics altogether, one that renegotiates the relationship between human-subject and non-human-object. Perhaps we need a less historically-encrusted word for this ‘new’ relationship than ‘aesthetic’."
"The New Aesthetic is indifferent to mimesis. The NA image is not the re-presentation of an object. The NA image is the incidental visual residue of the performance or enactment of a process. The process never intentionally alters itself in order to achieve the ‘goal’ of the NA image. The NA image is a trace, a remnant, a remainder, a residue, a (potential) clue."
"NA images are not produced solely by randomness, nor are they produced in order to conform to a pre-conceived human aesthetic. NA images are produced by entangled nature/culture systems. Thus, human will is always partially involved in their production, but it is rarely an aesthetic will heading toward the production of NA images."
"To fetishise the NA image as a mere ‘aesthetic’ object is to conveniently ignore the ethical ways in which we are implicit in its production. To fetishistically credit ‘machines’ as the primary agents behind the production of NA images is to conveniently ignore the ethical ways in which we are implicit in their production."
NA images in stasis are kind of cool but are more interesting in what they reveal about the "historical forces that came together to produce it in 'stasis'" better still NA images reveal:
" how things are currently coming together in process; and how things may possibly come together in the near future [..] they are the actual traces and residues of processes and relationships"
"New Aesthetic images can teach us humans a New Aesthetic. But as we listen to this New Aesthetic, what we are hearing is neither the pure voice of nature nor the adulterated voice of machines. We are listening to systems in the world – a world that we are co-creating, a world of which we are always already a part (never apart)."
"Pan-psychism is the idea that all things in the world (rocks, animals, predator drones, weather systems, Hello Kitty lunchboxes) have consciousness. " don't fall for it, it's a trap "Just because we've finally come to recognise that things and systems have their own agency and are not merely passive and inert, this doesn't mean that things and systems have consciousness." As humans we are 'speciest' and it is not enough that we we seek elevate things to our level; we feel we must ourselves to thing level
"As a result, we humans are hubristically tempted to attribute the uncanniness of New Aesthetic images to the pan-psychic agency of AI technology. ‘Gee, these systems must be sentient (in a way that we humans are sentient), because we humans sure didn't invent these crazy new images.’ "
Up with Pan-existentialism - the idea that all things experience 'being' over time. Experience isn't always tethered to (conscious) thought:
"experience is the base of all being; consciousness is the apex of all being. So although rocks don't think like humans (indeed, rocks don't think at all), at some base level of being, humans and rocks both experience."(Alfred North-Whitehead)
"We need to understand things as vector forces enacting within networks, not as anthropomorphised objects. Yes, thing have agency, but their agency is altogether thingy. Emergent systems (a.k.a. things made up of things) exercise all sorts of funky agency: flocking behaviours, attraction to strange attractors, radical modulations at state-change thresholds. Yes, non-inert behaviours; but not sentient behaviours. A painter enters into a kind of pragmatic dialogue with the viscous and luminous behaviours of her paint. She need not speculate about its withdrawn essence."
New Aesthetic Images: The Uncanny, the Present-at-Hand, the Sublime - NB:"Aesthetics are related to both experience and consciousness. Aesthetics are born in experience and arrive at consciousness. No consciousness at which to arrive, no aesthetics. So when we talk about aesthetics, we're mostly talking about humans."
1. For Freud NA images are 'uncanny'. NA images are not totally familiar to us (family photos) or totally alien (white noise) instead they fall within the Uncanny Valley - something non-human that is almost human enough to seem human.
2. Harman ref Heidegger's 'Presence-at-hand' NA is an eruption of the thing out of its normal function in the world (readiness-to-hand).
"New Aesthetic visuals don't necessarily ‘reveal’ a hidden ‘truth’. It's not as if readiness-to-hand is false and presence-at-hand is true, or vice versa. They are just two simultaneous ways of being in the world. (Heidegger's genius – his ‘sleight of hand’ – was to draw our attention to readiness-to-hand without turning it into presence-at-hand.)"
3. Latour - our systems have proliferated & hybridised beyond our range of knowledge and sight to strange and complex degrees - NA images "strike at the heart of the modernist myth that man is master and measure of all things"
"NA images are neither human ‘art’ nor non-human ‘nature’. They were not created to address a static conception of human nature, nor to dialectically overcome preconceived contradictory drives within human nature. Neither were they created by extra-human forces in order to provide human ‘subjects’ with ‘natural’ objects for aesthetic contemplation. Instead, NA images are residues that result from current ways of being in the world, entangled ways in which humans are ‘always already’ implicated. At their best, NA images challenge humans to re-imagine ‘humanness’ ‘being’ and ‘the world’ altogether."
Four Summaries, Three Quotations and a Closing Exhortation - "Indeed, according to Heidegger, things in relationship with other things make up ‘the world’. No things; no ‘world’. Things don’t consciously ‘know stuff’ about the world, but... things behave in ways derived from their history in the world and from their current entanglements with the world. Things are caught up in the world (of other things), and the world is caught up in things."
"‘What might things make of the New Aesthetic?’ is not a very useful question. ‘What might humans make of the New Aesthetic once we realise that we have been entangled with things all along?’ is a more useful question." - opens out onto Latour
"Probably, we should spend some time figuring out how these systems flow and function so we can more effectively modulate them (or sabotage them), hopefully for reasons other than making more money."
"All of this stuff is cool. Does it mean that objects have souls, psyches, withdrawn essences, or intelligences? No. Does it mean that humans are merely one thing among many things, no more or less endowed with agency? No."
"It does mean that humans are recursively entangled with things and forces in increasingly problematic ways (Bruno Latour told us this in 1991.) Furthermore, it means that humans affectively experience all sorts of things in the world prior to (and often without ever) cognitively becoming aware of these experiences; it means that things also affectively ‘experience’ forces in the world; and it means that systems, ideas, networks, entanglements, forces, events, technologies, animals, humans and objects are all ‘things’ in ‘the world’. (Whitehead told us this in 1927. His word for ‘things’ is ‘entities.’) The fact that a bunch of people are currently talking about all this stuff online simply means that our technology has accumulated to such a degree that it has become an image"
Thoughts:
Agree strongly with views relating to experience of NA by non-humans - OOO is difficult to envisage. My view tends more towards the author and Latour - Objects are filled with people (even if they have evolved beyond our knowledge & sight).
Interesting contextual relations relating to Heidegger and Latour - similarities between 'exhaust gas'/ traces of computational process (and their entanglement with humans) and Latours 'chains of association'/ proliferation of hybrids etc. As well as the eruption of the thing and Heidegger etc.
Pan-existentialism is worth pursuing as well as phenomenological aspects of aesthetics.
Cloninger Q's worth developing:
The NA image reveals how things are currently coming together in process - and how things might possibly come together in the near future (define and try to envision?) try to map these 'processes?'
Explore themes relating to the things own agency (non-psychic!)? Thinking here of generative / data objects. Could relate to ideas raised by Berry relating to types of code?
Experience of aesthetics (not consciously thought) is interesting - relates to some developments in (critical) design practice and "Technology as Experience' text by Wright & McCarthy.
Could be interesting to investigate (different) 'algorithmic aesthetics' not as images but as code.
Investigate links between NA and Process Art - as art retro-engineered and incorporating computation.
These residues/ vectors can be traced back / investigated as an archeology - data as vapour trail
www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/manifesto-theory-%E2%80%98new-aesthetic%E2%80%99
