The New Aesthetic

Needs to Get Weirder

• By Ian Bogost, www.theatlantic.com
• Ver original
• abril 13º, 2012
• arte

The New Aesthetic is an art movement obsessed with the

otherness of computer vision and information processing. But Ian
Bogost asks: why stop at the unfathomability of the computer's
experience when there are airports, sandstone, koalas, climate,
toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, and
the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to contemplate?
You know that art has changed when a new aesthetic movement
announces itself not with a manifesto, but with a tumblr.
Manifestos offer their grievances and demands plainly, all at
once, on a single page--not in many hundred entries. "Literature
has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and
slumber," wrote Filippo Marinetti in his 1909 Futurist
Manifesto. "We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish
sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and
the blow with the fist." The stakes are clear: out with idleness
and chatter, in with speed and violence.

You'll find no such gripes or hopes in James Bridle's modest

microblog "The New Aesthetic," which has recently enjoyed
considerable attention thanks to a panel at the SXSW
interactive conference, a Wired essay response by Bruce
Sterling, and a series of responses to both at The Creators
Project--not to mention dozens more replies all around the web.

Recent noise and attention notwithstanding, compare Bridle's

original, phlegmatic blog post on the New Aesthetic to
Marinetti's feverish immodesty. "We want to glorify war," the
latter writes, still proudly ignorant of the Great War that would
turn the Dadaists against art entirely. Bridle, by contrast, doesn't
exalt or rebuff, but opens up a file folder: "For a while now, I've
been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new
aesthetic of the future."

Bridle's initial collection included satellite images,

superimposed digital and physical maps, physical goods that
look like pixel art, and real shoes made to look as if they were
low-polygon 3D renders. His tumblr--the closest thing to an
official record of New Aesthetics--offers even more curiosities. A
screenshot of a Flickr search for broken Kindle e-readers. A list
of tweets announcing the surprising discovery that the Titanic
was a real ocean-liner and not just a film. A histogram of player
moods while playing Xbox Live. A Wells Fargo ATM that laments
having missed a customer's birthday.

What is the New Aesthetic? One accurate answer would be:

things James Bridle posts to its tumblr. Another doubled as the
subtitle for Bridle's SXSW panel, and it amounts to a
generalization of the same thing: "seeing like digital devices."
Pixel art, data visualizations, computer vision sensor aids--these
are the worldly residue that computers have left behind as they
alter our lived experience: "Some architects can look at a
building and tell you which version of autodesk was used to
create it."

Marinetti discovered Futurism after driving his car into a ditch

outside Milan. Avant-garde art used to work like that, as
exception, rupture, dissidence. When it wasn't formalist, it was
political--for better and for worse: Marinetti was an early
affiliate of the Italian Fascist Party, while Tristan Tzara, Hugo
Ball, and their Dada compatriots made anti-art that rejected the
nationalism and colonialism that they perceived to be the root
causes of the Great War.

But today's world is one of inclusion rather than exception. The

New Aesthetic doesn't have individual effects, but only
aggregated ones, just as a technology startup can't serve a niche
audience but only the largest one possible. Bridle insists that it
"is not a movement." A movement draws a line in the sand, but
an aggregator collects seashells. Instead of drawing up dictates
he pins curiosities to his digital pinboard. In a century, art has
evolved from caprice into bric-a-brac. The Futurists crashed
cars; the New Aestheticians assemble scrapbooks.

There's an honesty to it. As Sterling writes, "Look at those

images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would
have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People
of those times would not have known what they were seeing
with those New Aesthetic images. It's the news, and it's the
truth."

He's right, there's something refreshingly humble about the

New Aesthetics. "Here's a thing," it says, as so many of us do
when we email or tweet or blog or Facebook a curiosity. Here's a
weird thing a computer left behind. It's a good start.

***

Yet, to my eyes, the New Aesthetic could use a dose of good, old-
fashioned twentieth century immodesty. Not naïve fascism or
impulsive radicalism, but bigger eyes, larger hopes, weirder
goals. Sterling shares this impression: "a heap of eye-catching
curiosities don't constitute a compelling worldview."

Among the Creators Project authors who responded to Sterling's

essay was Greg Borenstein, an artist and researcher who
currently specializes in computer vision. Contra Sterling's
skepticism, Borenstein exudes optimism: "I believe that the New
Aesthetic is actually striving towards a fundamentally new way
of imagining the relations between things in the world."
 From
Mishka Henner's "Dutch Landscapes" series. Via new-
aesthetic.tumblr.com.
In his essay, Borenstein connects the New Aesthetics to a trend
in philosophy called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), a
movement of which I myself am a part (along with Graham
Harman, Levi Bryant, andTim Morton). If ontology is the
philosophical study of existence, then object-oriented ontology
puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements, but
not the sole elements of philosophical interest. OOO contends
that nothing has special status, but that everything exists
equally--plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and
sandstone, for example. OOO steers a path between scientific
naturalism and social relativism, drawing attention to things at
all scales and pondering their nature and relations with one
another as much as ourselves.

My version of object-oriented ontology, outlined in my new

book Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like to Be a Thing,
concerns the experience of objects. What is it like to be a bonobo
or a satellite or a pixel?

There's a reason I start from aliens instead of computers, and

from phenomenology instead of aesthetics. We usually
understand alien either in a political or a cosmological sense: a
terrestrial alien is a foreigner from another country, and an
extraterrestrial alien is a foreigner from another planet. Even
when used philosophically to refer to otherness more generally,
aliennness is assumed to be a human-legible intersubjectivity.
The other is someone we can recognize as enough like ourselves
to warrant identification.

But the true alien might be unrecognizable; it might not have an

intelligence akin to our intelligence, or even one we could
recognize as intelligence. Rather than wondering if alien beings
exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us,
everywhere, at all scales. Everything is an alien to everything
else. It is ultimately impossible for one thing to understand the
experience of another, but we can speculateabout the
withdrawn, inner experience of things based on a combination
of evidence--the exhaust they leave behind--and poetics--the
speculative work we do to characterize that experience.

From the vantage point of alien phenomenology, I would issue

several challenges to the New Aesthetic that might draw it
closer to the speculative object-oriented philosophy that I
advocate.

Look beyond humans and computers.

Borenstein may be right that New Aesthetic strives toward a

new conception of relations between things in the world. But for
now, the New Aesthetic is exclusively interested in computers
on the one hand and humans on the other.
In David M. Berry's words, it "revels in seeing the grain of
computation," the exhaust of computer activity that courses
through the non-computational world. Some of these examples
are created by humans, like pixelated pillows. Some are created
for computers, like the fiducial markers that facilitate computer
vision. And some are created by computers, like the satellite
images that let us see a familiar world in an unfamiliar way.

These are lovely examples, but they are selective ones. It's true
that computers are a particularly important and influential kind
of thing in the world, and indeed I myself have spent most of my
career pondering how to use, make, and understand them. But
they are just one thing among so many more: airports,
sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the
International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the
brand name 'TaB.' Why should a new aesthetic interested only
in the relationship between humans and computers, when so
many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the
computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?
 From
Mishka Henner's "Dutch Landscapes" series. Via new-
aesthetic.tumblr.com.
Take the experience of objects seriously.

Despite its acknowledgement of computers as weird artifacts

that have taken on lives of their own, the New Aesthetic is still
primarily interested in human experience. That is to say, the
aesthetics of the New Aesthetic are human aesthetics,
appearances and interactions that we people can experience and
that, in so doing, trouble our understanding of what it means to
live in the twenty-first century.

But computers and oil derricks and toaster pastries share our
universe and our century, even if their experience of that time
and place is unfathomably different than our own. The New
Aesthetic stops short of becoming an object-oriented aesthetics
partly by limiting itself to computational media, and partly by
absconding with the lessons of object-aesthetics into the realm
of human concern.
Sterling criticizes the New Aesthetic's desire to make amends
with the machines that increasingly rule us. "Machines are never
our friends," he says, "even if they're intimates in our purses and
pockets eighteen hours a day." Sterling is right, but he paints a
bleaker picture than is necessary. The problem isn't that
computers are going to rise up and take over, but that we do not
and will never understand computers on their own terms. We
will never understand them as computers. We will never
understand the experience of computers as computers
experience things. Nor anything else, for that matter--bats,
dolphins, automobiles, or bags of Frito-Lay Garden Salsa Sun
Chips.

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in

reserve, in a thing. The best we can do as humans is to respect
the hidden mystery of the experience of things, and speculate
metaphorically about how an object like a computer or a pound
cake encounters the world.

Make collecting an aesthetic strategy.

The New Aesthetic embraces an unusual creative technique:

aggregation. It rejects the demands of the manifesto in favor of
the indiscriminateness of the collection. Like any mess, it's a bit
ghastly to look upon. Sterling calls it a "gaudy, network-
assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws." From Hummel
figurines to tumblr image blogs, collecting has a long history of
kitschiness.

But collecting doesn't have to be this way. Blogs, Twitter,

Facebook, and the web writ large have trained us to think of
collections as eternal piles of ever-growing content. In a world
where businesses small and large are built on ever-growing sets
of data, we've trained ourselves to think of more stuff as better.
Merely collecting things isn't aesthetics, its just avarice.
Bridle appears to abdicate his role as convener when he calls
The New Aesthetic a "series of artifacts" rather than a
movement, but drawing no distinction is but one step away from
making any distinction whatsoever. Cataloging becomes an
aesthetic strategy when it involves curation. And curating so
much material for an indeterminate time doesn't really amount
to curation at all.

The compendium is a better model than the aggregate. A list of

things is most useful when it is large enough to show diversity
and juxtaposition, but small enough to provide coherence: a tiny
bestiary, not an infinite zoo.

I've suggested the term ontography as a name for creating lists,

groups, or other collections of things for the purpose of
documenting the repleteness under one tiny rock of existence.
Ontography is an aesthetic set theory: it can take the form of
lists, photographs, collections, even tumblrs, perhaps, with
enough practice. Collection is aesthetically productive, but a
collection that strives to trace an asymptote toward infinity
creates obligation instead of clarity.
 From
Mishka Henner's "Dutch Landscapes" series. Via new-
aesthetic.tumblr.com.
Make things for understanding things, not just for human
use.

Most of the examples Bridle and others showcase as examples of

the New Aesthetic were created intentionally. Some were found
(data visualizations, tweet aggregations) some were created by
accident (glitches, computer vision fiducials), and some were
created deliberately (pixelated industrial designs, sensor
disruption devices). Borenstein argues that New Aestheticians
are most interested in the way computational objects impact our
lived experience: "They want to know what CCTV means for
social networks, what book scanning means for iOS apps, and
what face detection means for fashion."

These applications are both sober and interesting. Our devices

are not just connected to us but to one another as well. Part of
the New Aesthetic involves inventing (and disrupting) the
connections between computational media.

Yet, we could take this challenge further than the New Aesthetic
suggests. As it stands, Borenstein is only half right: New
Aestheticians are mostly interested in CCTV for social
networks for people. It's understandable; and the technologists
that comprise the New Aesthetic are used to making things for
people--most of them spend their days as paid consultants and
designers, after all. But from my perspective as a philosopher as
much as a designer, once we start paying attention to the secret
lives of things, we have to resist drawing the conclusion that
they exist for our benefit--even if we ourselves created them.

The things we make in and beyond the bounds of the New

Aesthetic might have different goals: not art that helps us couple
machines to one another, but philosophical lab equipment that
helps us grasp, as best we can, the experience of objects
themselves. I've called this practicecarpentry, making things that
speculate how things understand their world. Carpentered
objects need not be fashioned from wood, but they bear the
same mark of hand-manufacture, care, and craft--not just the
craft of the artist, but the way that craftwork helps reveal how
things fashion one another, and the world at large.

***
 From
Mishka Henner's "Dutch Landscapes" series. Via new-
aesthetic.tumblr.com.
If anything, the New Aesthetic is curious, and these days
curiosity is a virtue in short supply. But an overabundance of
caution meant to preserve that curiosity, its proponents have
abandoned some of the immodesty that earned earlier artistic
movements the label avant-garde.

For one part, an arbitrary focus on computational systems is to

blame. In one of many nonplussed responses to the New
Aesthetic's newfound status as meme, the interaction designer
Natalia Buckley observes that, "we already live in the reality
where digital and physical are beginning to blend." But whether
one is pro- or contra-New Aesthetic, isn't it bizarre to think
that digital and physical are necessary or even logical spheres
into which to split the universe? Is this not just another repeat of
the nature/culture divide that has haunted all of modernity?

Computers may seem to have taken over for puppies, OLEDs

blinking at us longingly as if to affirm their consciousness. But
neither computers nor computationalists are so special as we
believe. Why couldn't a group of pastry chefs found their own
New Aesthetic, grounded in the slippage between wet and dry
ingredients? Computers are interesting, influential, and
important, but they are just one thing among many. Just one tiny
corner of a very large universe.

For another part, the New Aesthetic fails the ultimate test of
novelty: that of disruption and surprise. Misguided as they may
seem a century hence, avant-garde movements like Futurism
and Dada were not celebrating industrialism nor lamenting war
so much as they were replacing familiar principles with
unfamiliar ones on the grounds that the familiar had failed. The
New Aesthetic is not surprising, but expected. After all, the
artists now wield the same data access APIs, mapping
middleware, and computer vision systems as the corporations.
In some cases, the artistsare the corporations.

A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of

concerning itself with the way we humans see our world
differently when we begin to see it through and with computer
media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if
we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and
Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their ownaesthetics. The
perception and experience of other beings remains outside our
grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that
emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the
event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings
remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to
speculation--even to art.

Here's an example that demonstrates the friction point between

the New Aesthetic and the Alien Aesthetic: Tableau Machine, a
nonhuman social actor created by Mario Romero, Zachary
Pousman, and Michael Mateas in the Aware Home at Georgia
Tech. Romero and his collaborators hoped to disrupt the
assumption that ubiquitous computing is good for task support.
Instead they created an "alien presence," a computational agent
that interprets the state of a home and reports its results in the
form of abstract art.

Tableau Machine is a work of computational media, there's no

doubt about that. But here the computer is just that, a medium,
the wood and glue in a work of carpentry that offers a
speculative, metaphorical view of the home rather than the
computer itself. Like many projects of the New Aesthetics,
Tableau Machine uses computer vision, but it does not do so to
predict or encourage particular behaviors on the part of
individual human actors, nor to reveal the curious method by
which a computer sees (as we see in Timo Arnall's Robot
Readable World).

Tableau Machine takes for granted that the home itself is a unit,
one distinct from but inclusive of its kitchen, living room, dining
room, and hallways. Its creators surmise that the home can
perceive, but they add an additional presumption: a home's
perception is unfathomable by its human occupants. Instead of
understanding it, the best we can do is trace the edges of its dark
noise, producing a caricature of its experience in a form we can
recognize. In Tableau Machine's case, the rendition is literally
caricature, that of abstract art.

But even Tableau Machine is a transitional example--more alien

phenomenology than alien aesethetics. It produces two-
dimensional abstract art suitable for human consumption in
order to look awry at the way a home perceives. It offers a
speculative account of the experience of a home, but it doesn't
quite crack the harder, weirder question, "what does a home
find beautiful?"
Is such a question even answerable? If so, this Alien Aesthetics
would not try to satisfy our human drive for art and design, but
to fashion design fictions that speculate about the aesthetic
judgments of objects. If computers write manifestos, if Sun Chips
make art for Doritos, if bamboo mocks the bad taste of other
grasses--what do these things look like? Or for that matter,
when toaster pastries convene conferences or write essays
about aesthetics, what do they say, and how do they say it?

I wonder, for example, what James Bridle's tumblr makes of all

this...