*He takes half the article backfilling for the Atlantic readership before working his way up to the New Aesthetic metaphysics, but once it gets rolling, it's awesome. "Ontography." "Carpentry." I don't even know if I agree or disagree with that. I'm gonna have to get up and walk around the room for a few weeks.
*This is gonna be a busy summer.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/
(...)
"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.
"A selection of toothbrushes held by children. From a Library of Congress collection of outdoor schools.
"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 practice carpentry, 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.
* * *
"The Tableau Machine.
"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 artists are 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 own aesthetics. 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)...."
