[-empyre-] The New Aesthetic - questions and conclusions

[gh hovagimyan]

A curator here in New York is trying to reconstitute the early pre- 
web artist bbs's such as ArtNetWeb, thing bbs and rhizome. He wants  
to also use the original machines and have the archives available on  
the web for research. He's also asking for very early internet works  
that depend on netscape 1.0.  Seems to me, there is now an effort to  
understand the "New Aesthetics" and begin to sort out it's starting  
points.  I would say that right at the beginning when everyone in the  
90's started picking up computers and using the web there were  
several definable strains of aesthetics.  here's a partial list,  3D  
objects and worlds,  chat and social software, surveillance and  
privacy, web sites (as publications or interactive works),
sound art, video on the web and digital video. Digital photography is  
in there but it seems to be wrapped up in the other forms. Then there  
is interactive art, human and machine interface, open source and  
hacking community.  Let's not forget the computer vision crowd,  
virtual world and online theater.   This keeps on being added to and  
refined. For example the first online 3D code was VRML  that sort of  
petered out and is now wrapped into Augmented Reality.   Anyway all  
these aesthetic currents are constantly evolving and are very  
exciting as a new language.  It is just then beginning of an ontology  
so we don't know where it might lead. We do know that the "modernist/ 
post-modernist" discourse is pretty much played out and really boring.

On Sep 28, 2012, at 9:25 AM, Lichty, Patrick wrote:

> Also, I want to ask where people see NA going, if anywhere.  Will  
> that be dependednt on the development of technologies, or human  
> reflections upon them?