[-empyre-] NA: A parting thought

Tue Oct 2 03:00:15 EST 2012

I think that as with many of these things we will have to wait and see to the extent to which the new aesthetic is "new", an "aesthetic", used in practice, or has any trajectory associated with it. For me, the responses it generates are as interesting as the concept of the new aesthetic itself. 

And regarding the "remembering" (perhaps, territorialization) of new media and previous practices, let's not forget that forgetting things (deteritorialization) can be extremely productive, both theoretically and in everyday practice (as elpis, perhaps). Indeed, forgetting can be like forgiving, and in this sense can allow the absorption or remediation of previous forms (a past bequeathed by the dead) that may have been contradictory or conflictual to be transcended at a higher level (this may also happen through a dialectical move, of course). This is, then, a politics of memory as well as an aesthetic. 

But the claim that "NA is that it seems to be all gesture and no ideology" is clearly mistaken. Yes, NA is clearly profoundly gestural and is focused on the practice of doing, in some sense, even if the doing is merely curatorial or collecting other things (as archive/database of the present). The doing is also post-human in that algorithms and their delegated responsibility and control appears to be a returning theme (as the programming industry, as logics of military colonisation of everyday life, as technical mediation, as speed constitutive of absolute past, or as reconstitution of knowledge itself). It is also ideological to the extent that is an attempt to further develop a post-human aesthetic (and of course, inevitably this will/may/should end in failure) but nonetheless reflects in interesting ways a process of cashing out the computational in the realm of the aesthetic – in some senses a maieutic of computational memory, seeing and doing. 

As to the charge of the inevitability of historicism to counter the claims of the new aesthetic, one might wish to consider the extent to which the building of the new aesthetic may share the values of computer science (highly ideological, I might add) and which is also profoundly ahistorical and which enables the delegation of the autonomy of the new aesthetic (as code/software) as a computational sphere. But this is not to deny the importance of critical theory here, far from it, but rather it is to raise a question about computation's immunity to the claims that critical approaches inevitably make – as Ian Bogost recently declared (about a different subject), are these not just "self-described radical leftist academics" and their "predictable critiques". Could not the new aesthetics form an alliance here with object-oriented ontology? 

This is indeed where the industrialisation of programming and memory become linked to the industrialisation of "seeing" (and here I am thinking of mediatic industries). What I am trying to gesture towards, if only tentatively, is that if the new aesthetic, as an aesthetic of the radically autonomous claims of a highly computational society, might format the world in ways which profoundly determine, if not offer concrete tendencies, towards an aesthetic which is immune to historicism – in other words the algorithms aren't listening to the humanists, do we need to follow Stephen Ramsay's call for Humanists to build? Here I point to both the industrialisation of memory but also the drive towards a permanent revolution in all forms of knowledge that the computational industries ceaselessly aim towards. That is the new aesthetic may be a reflexive sighting (the image, the imaginary, the imagined?) and acknowledgement of the mass-produced temporal objects of the programming industries, in as much as they are shared structures, forms, and means, that is, algorithms and codes, that construct new forms of reception in terms that consciousness and collective unconsciousness will increasingly correspond. 

Best

David

On 1 Oct 2012, at 16:51, "Lichty, Patrick" <plichty at colum.edu> wrote:

> Hi, everyone.
> Just got back from a STELLAR SLSA 2012 in Milwaukee, where I did not present, but was there to poach for things like Media-N, Empyre, and Intelligent Agent. (FYI, I usually scan the proceedings of the major conferences and am on a ton of adjudication boards, so that's where I see a lot of the content I get).  Saw, but unfortunately did not meet David Golumbia.  Richard Grusin, Katherine Hayles, and many others chimed in a little on our discussion, or that they watch Empyre.  Great! 
> 
> That being said, I have a few thoughts distilled from some of our recent discussions, and some of my own that I've put at the RealityAugmented blog.
> 
> I think that the recent posts by Bishop Zareh and Simon Biggs are spot on.  To put my spin on things, I think there is an off ahistoricity to NA, which clearly comes from a lineage.  This is my complaint of discourse coming from practitioners who come from the post-New Media era (2000+, which is after Net_Condition, Whitney 2000, Data Dynamics and the SFMOMA show).  Even in the case of Rita Raley's Tactical Media book, except for a few references to Next Five Minutes, her history is largely post-1999 as well.  This spawns my polemic that has given rise to wornderful programs like Media Art Histories that there is a conception that things like New Media didn't exist before 2000.
> 
> In regards to NA, I think Bridle, et al are forgetting things like net.art and the Tribe/Galloway era of Rhizome, and even further back, as I had mentioned with A Michael Noll's experiments with generating Mondrians in the late 60's.  From a contemporary art perspective, it's almost like forgetting Modernism existed as a weird Postmodern twist to culture, and that either our attention spans and event-horizons for reflection/research are narrowing, there aren't many records left, or that, and I hate to go here, NA is a product designed for the "Generation Sell" (New York Times on the contemporary generation of entrepreneurs) group of New Media/Contemporary Art organs served by NectarAds (which are very good, though).  I might think that the latter is far too harsh of an indictment; let's leave that as a Gibsone-esque media science fiction. 
> 
> I think Jon Lebkowsky nails a lot of points, and honestly, I think there is a fair consensus on NA by the critical community - it is a thin strategy that tries to create a Modernist movement without a real shape or ideology; is inclusive without the former, and as I mentioned earlier has the feel of a 4chan.org (popular message board) feel of "Oh, hai - I'll just leave this here." aesthetic that was popularlized by Internet Surfing Clubs like NastyNets and Double Happiness. THAT being said, I think NA also is an acute reflection of the time, as economies crumble and cultural production varies from grand Hadid projects to endless shallow pop-kitsch, the latter not being an indictment, but merely a statement of the time, as the Walker had an Internet Cat Video Festival.  
> 
> This is more evidence of Anderson's Long Tail and cultural reflection of the widening disparities in income and the situations that influence artists to make their work.
> 
> My main issue with NA is that it seems to be all gesture and no ideology.  It only represents an aesthetic observation, not a social engagement. Even Relational Art and Interventionism as movement and genre have an investment; NA seems to lack it.  As I said, even though Bridle has re-started the NA tumblr (again, a reflection on the time - a movement that began centered around a Tumblr feed?), I think his first gesture is quite apt.  He kept it active for one year, and then moved on, which I think that I may announce at SXSW next year in that my interest in NA will cease on the anniversary of Sterling's speech.
> 
> In this screed, forgive me for any offense, but where I think NA is a sand in my shell is that there have even been social engagements in the Postmodern, and I would like to see artists beyond the few genres like Tactical Media and Public Practice get in there, plant a flag, state a position, and upset some apple carts, instead of opening another Etsy store.  I might hear a reply either decrying this as words of an Ivory Tower Academic or someone of comfort (which I actually am not) and refer to documentaries like Blank City where some of the most amazing work of the 80's NYC film scene came out of the abjection of the time, a time that is not unlike Detroit today.
> 
> We live in a time of shallow, rhizomatic strategic moves, and maybe I crave affect.
> And how do you derive affect from the eye of a robot or a drone?
> Maybe that's my point.
> 
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---

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

---

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

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