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

[Rob Myers]

On 09/28/2012 03:22 PM, Jon Lebkowsky wrote:
> I think NA so far is more acknowledgement than movement, more
> curation  than active construction. What would it take to transform NA from
> passive to active force? Or does it make more sense to look for activist
> forces to emerge?

TNA is managerial capital's digital bleedthrough into the everyday. 
Things finding their own use for the street. It's something that you 
experience rather than do. It's something to ironise [further] rather 
than embrace directly IMO.

TNA is a quantitative shift big enough to represent a qualitative shift. 
We weren't doing this in the gallery and in the faculty twenty years ago 
because it wasn't the pervasive aesthetic epiphenomena of logistics 
technology.

With regards to "cool", the TNA tumblr can be certainly be seen as 
design fiction cool hunting (Bigend would love it). But the history of 
the creation and instrumentalization of cool (pace Liu) sits 
productively uncomfortably with this particular distillation of cool.

The question that TNA cries out is "why does the world look like this"? 
The answers are obvious, but the devil is in how we cross-reference the 
details.

- Rob.