Hermann Ebers recalled, “His system was both simple and enlightening. Objects close to the ground were painted in warm tones, somewhere between yellow and brown. Towards the sky the colors are influenced by cold, playing into blue. Vertical surfaces finally show violet influenced tones. “… A more precise rule might be that the downfacing planes are warm and the upfacing planes are cool. All these effects are clearest on the shadow side of any white form, especially with a dirt-covered ground and a blue sky.
Bruce Sterling: an essay on the New Aesthetic
So Brucie finally wrote up the SXSW panel on the New Aesthetic.
I have to think this through, have to parse it - need to work out how it affects the 800 words on said aesthetic that I’m delivering in a fortnight’s time.
So. A first gloss on Sterling’s points:
1. Yes it matters.
2. It’s not postmodernist. I may disagree. Yes it’s generative and creative, not (immediately) destructive of menaing, but it’s also hugely about representation and fucking with surface forms. The brightly coloured video-glitchy-pixellation strand of the New Aesthetic is pomo, let’s call a spade a Duchamp-referencing found object shit shovel.
3. It’s not about “seeing like a machine”. Something I was getting towards, though finding hard to express elegantly. It’s about us. Our imaginings, our reactions, however we might try to disavow or other them.
4. Sterling implies - not quite directly - that one problem with the New Aesthetic is that it’s aestheticised - that is, it’s apolitical. It is - or risks being - a bit “let’s pretendy machines are our friends” - rather than investing the necessary attention in the questions of, Why is London covered in surveillance cameras? Why are we building drones with superhuman vision? That is - where’s the money? - which is to say, what are the power relations in this situation?
[Aka what happens when you let designers loose on an idea rather than social scientists? Architecture flirts with a similar trap.]
A sincere New Aesthetic would be a valiant, comprehensive effort to truly and sincerely engage with machine-generated imagery — not as a freak-show, a metaphor or a stimulus to the imagination — but *as it exists.* The real deal, down to the scraped-metal chip surface, if necessary.
[…] Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished.
That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one.PS This thing really needs a oooler-looking hashtag… #NewAeX?
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