Dear <<empyreans>>,
David, there's nothing obscure about computational systems of control
where the deus ex machina is a counting machine and a graphing machine.
Mez, I enjoyed your breakdown of the self-promotion across academic /
theoretical / technical lines implicit in the New Aesthetics. I think
also that the ad hominem aspect needs to be addressed simply because
part of the disease is the production of culpable subjects. Is there
anything disinterestedly stand-alone in the concept? New Aesthetic?
I can't see anything particularly admirable in it myself, but then...
the old aesthetics seems to me to be a grabfest at the process of the
new. Which it never quite gets.
Best,
Simon
David
On 13 Sep 2012, at 13:56, "Lichty, Patrick" <plic...@colum.edu
<mailto:plic...@colum.edu>> wrote:
Well, I actually see a lot of The New Aesthetic, as with much of what
is happening in New Media blogjournalism as being infinitely
strategic/self-reflexive. There are many examples for evidence of
cultural entrepreneurism/branding, not just in the blogs, but also
with the tech/craft cluster of Make,
Makerbot/Sparkfun/evilmadscentist/adafruit. The fact that so many of
us hve flocked to kickstarter is talked about in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html?pagewanted=all
All right - this potentially bifurcates the conversation. Is NA
actually a cultural branding scheme meant to capitalize through
recognition or whatnot the idea od a disparate set of machine imaging
practices, or is it a rigorous curatorial statement?
This might be a little polemic, but I might say it could be a little
of both.
However, I am interested in what, as a curatorial vision, NA seeks to
accomplish as a serious curatorial statement.
If we want to talk about NA as a cultural placement strategy for
James Bridle, we can do that, but I think it is much less interesting.
For example, in my Robotics class this semester, we are building a
UAV to create drone art. Fortunately this is so far off my
colleagues' radars that they're not commenting much. I think that if
they realized that I'm trying to to do drone art in the heart of a
major city, they would probably have an aneurism. But I think this
is the bleeding edge of NA.
Patrick Lichty
Editor-in-Chief
Intelligent Agent Magazine
c/o Columbia College Chicago
916/1000 S. Wabash Ave #104
Chicago, IL USA 60605
"Better to live on your feet than to die on your knees."
________________________________________
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of mez breeze
[netwur...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 6:44 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Machines
Nice timing, seeing Bridle has reactivated the New Aesthetic tumblr
in the last two weeks or so.
The more I think about NA, the more I'm inclined to ponder whether
Bridle is using it as an adjunct promotional strategy that mimics
start-up/entrepreneurial frameworks: grab a
manifest-yet-still-edge-worthy-to-some spinable idea, run it through
a concept grinder and link it with a delivery system (in this case,
the dangling carrot-bait of merging digital concepts with physical
that theorists/academics/creatives/intellectuals just can't resist,
with high profile figures being drawn to pontification +
publicizing). This "debate bait" then actualises as an emergent
discourse with assured (built-in) funding/exposure strategies through
clever generation of its own marketing/PR machine - complete with
monetisation through conference creation + academic
publications/hype/circuit creation - rather than it acting to
ideologically frame a legitimately culturally relevant paradigm that
highlights "new" corresponding forms of cultural interpretations
regarding the fusion of the digital and physical?
I'm not trying to assert that Bridle is intentionally aping this
entrepreneurial strategy, but just having a quick examination of his
previous attempts to kick-start (using this term in an oldskool
sense, not in the crowdfunding model sense) buzz-worthy/coinable
frames of reference such as his 2010 labelling attempt: "I want to
give it a name, and at this point I'm calling it Network Realism"
http://booktwo.org/notebook/network-realism/, or ideas evidenced on
his "hand-drawn" website: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/moleskine/
to his audition "tape" for TED2013:
http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/James-Bridle-A-new-aesthetic-fo
makes me curious?
And if Bridle is indeed covertly emulating an entrepreneurial model,
and is in fact a concept-"manifestering" mastermind, we're all
playing our roles perfectly, with me more than most:
http://www.facebook.com/TheNewAesthetic.
Chunks,
Mez
| http://www.vizify.com/mez-breeze
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mez_Breeze
On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 4:48 AM, Patrick Lichty
<plic...@colum.edu<mailto:plic...@colum.edu>> wrote:
September on --empyre soft-skinned space: The New Aesthetic: Seeing
Like Machines
Moderated by Patrick Lichty (US) with invited discussants:
Rahel Alma, David M. Berry, Ina Blom, Nick Briz, Amber Case, Marcelo
Coelho, Michael Dieter, David Golumbia, Julia Kaganskiy, Michelle
Kasprzak, Jon Lebkowsky, Patrick Lichty, Joanne McNeil, Hrag Vartanian
The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Machines
It's been months since Bruce Sterling delivered his endnote talk at
SXSW highlighting James Bridle et al's panel on The New Aesthetic,
and there have been furious conversations about it. If we take the
replies by Watz et al on the The Creators Project blog as an
indication, there is a bit of dismissal of the idea from my
interpretation. However, many of us are still talking about the idea,
but why? I still believe that a cultural chord was struck that is a
result of extant developments in contemporary digital art of the
2000's that lead right to The New Aesthetic blog, or something like
it. Where I and others argue that The New Aesthetic might be a
non-movement, I would like to re-imagine that it is actually
indicative of other cultural phenomena and New Media proto-movements.
These have to do with issues of curation, precedents in New Media
"movements", and the shape of culture in New Media society. Where I
think Bridle et al might have done a disservice to the idea of NA is
through a partial superficiality in the case of a subject, while
ephemeral, is not superficial at all.
Why? It is for the reason that in the current day and age,
ephemerality is often mistaken for superficiality. Net.culture by
default is mercuric, and technoculture is typified by the fact that
things like the iPad and tablets have become nearly ubiquitous within
two years of the technology's emergence. This is reflected in online
culture, through the torrent (pun intended) of images spilling
through social media like blogs, Facebook, image boards, and tumblrs
like The New Aesthetic. Love or hate it, what Bridle describes is a
phenomenology of this torrent of images as an aesthetic and their
generation by technology. For this month's discussion on Empyre which
will last only three weeks due to the disappearance of a week in the
black hole of the start of the academic semester, we will have a
floating group of key correspondents on the subject who have been
posting and publishing around the Net on The New Aesthetic.
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
---
Dr. David M. Berry
Senior Lecturer in Digital Media
(Associate Professor in Media Studies)
Department of Political and Cultural Studies
Swansea University
Singleton Campus
Swansea
SA2 8PP
Tel: 01792 602633
http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/ArtsHumanities/berryd/
Room: Room JC015, James Callaghan Building
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
