But it moves: the New Aesthetic & emergent virtual taste

April 8, 2012
Matthew Battles
http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/04/but-it-moves-the-new-aesthetic-
emergent-virtual-taste/

In the wake of South-by-Southwest, Bruce Sterling has posted a grand,

thorough, ruminative essay about the New Aesthetic. If you dont know the
New Aesthetic, you should go and have a look at the tumblr that serves as
both its wonder cabinet and its manifesto. Hosted by technologist,
impresario, and publishing artist James Bridle, the New Aesthetic is a
collaborative attempt to draw a circle around several species of aesthetic
activityincluding but not limited to drone photography, ubiquitous
surveillance, glitch imagery, Streetview photography, 8-bit net nostalgia.
Central to the New Aesthetic is a sense that were learning to wave at
machinesand that perhaps in their glitchy, buzzy, algorithmic ways,
theyre beginning to wave back in earnest.
At Bridles SXSW panel, a quartet of terrifically smart and creative people
put the New Aesthetic through its paces, situating it in the history of avant-
gardes and exploring its social, commercial, and literary potential.
Sterling isnt convinced:
[T]he New Aesthetic is a gaudy, network-assembled heap. Its
made of digitized jackstraws that were swept up by a
generational sensibility. The products of a collective
intelligence rarely make much coherent sense.

It was grand work to find and assemble this New Aesthetic

wunderkammer, but a heap of eye-catching curiosities dont
constitute a compelling worldview. Look at all of them:
Information visualization. Satellite views. Parametric
architecture. Surveillance cameras. Digital image processing.
Data-mashed video frames. Glitches and corruption artifacts.
Voxelated 3D pixels in real-world geometries. Dazzle camou.
Augments. Render ghosts. And, last and least, nostalgic retro
 8bit graphics from the 1980s.

These are the forms of imagery that Bridles collaborators have

thrown over his transom. Theres lots, theyre all cool, and most
are rather interesting, and some are even profound, but they
dont march together.

Those cats just dont herd yet; that puzzle is still in its pieces.
One can try to cluster them, in a vague ecumenical way, by
saying, This is how contemporary reality looks to our pals, the
visionary machines. But thats not convincing. I recognize that
this is an effective, poetic formulation, and Im touched by that,
but its problematic. When you abandon the feel-good aspect of
collectively discovering new stuff together, and start getting
rigorous and picky about what youre actually perceiving, the
New Aesthetic Easter eggs rather overflow their wicker basket.

I should point out that throughout his essay, Sterling applauds Bridle and his
New-Aesthetic comrades for their taste, energy, and creativity. He wants to
see their project cohere, wants to see it thrust forth some fully-assembled
theory for making and perceiving beautiful objects in a digital age. Sterling
isnt primarily concerned that the New Aesthetic group lacks grand,
synthesizing ambitions, but that the trust they place in machines as
collaborators is naively misplaced:
Machines are never our friends, even if theyre intimates in our
purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be
our algorithmic investors, but theyre certainly not our art
critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at
running our economy.

If machine vision was our pal, then we wouldnt need James

Bridle to assert that for us. Wed have a Bridlebot, a Googleized
visual search-engine that could generate as much aesthetics as we
want.
 That wont happen. Why not? Because it is impossible. Its as
impossible as Artificial Intelligence, which is a failed twentieth-
century research campaign, reduced to a sci-fi conceit. Thats
why the New Aesthetic isnt about robot vision from
digital devices, even when it claims that, as a rhetorical gesture
to grant itself some aura.

This insistence that machines dont care and wont care about what we see, or
about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deepand I
think deeply productiveproblem for the New Aesthetic. Theres a
yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I cant help thinking
well find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to
see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines.
Networks manifest an aloof, alien kind of omniscienceincreasingly
ubiquitous and radically, irredeemably insensible in crucial ways. This is off-
the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness and from some quarters there is a
yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or
singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness
interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-pointall of which
Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin. Were not in fact empathizing with machines; were empathizing
with screens. And when you consider whats really going on in the machine,
the screen behavior is epiphenomenal.
BERGs QR clock comes to mind; check this out if you havent seen it. Its a
clock only readable by a machine, its display taking the form of cycling QR
codes. BERG developed it with the idea that incorporating a QR readout
into a clock with a standard numerical display would afford a way to
authenticate photos of physical spaces, the way we hold up newspapers in
ransom photos. Its a funny affordance to design for, however, when the
machines are already metering time on scales and according to schemes that
utterly elude our senses. What do computers care about clocks or faces? We
teach machines to indicate them, to prick up their ears in their presence,
because thats what we need. Our imaginary just manages to graze the edges
of what might be called the experience of machinesand its on that
borderland which the New Aesthetic emerges, traveling a differently-ordered
sovereignty, in which were feral interlopers.
So maybe theres more to glitch than the *merely* weird, mere passing fancy.
Perhaps glitches are the syllables of a kind of lingua franca, a Chinook jargon
for the our imaginal interface with the net; perhaps theyre the sensory visa
stamped by machines in our feral passport. The glitch is precisely the sigil of
the Singularitys asymptotic impossibilitythe glimmer of the irreducible
gap, which is also a meaning-making swerve. Its what makes J. G. Ballard a
toweringly better futurist than Arthur C. Clarke. What would a New-
Aesthetic 2001: A Space Odyssey look like? Would lies, or mission loyalty, or
even the monoliths be interesting to a machine intelligence in touch with
itself? Of course, HAL never was interested in the monoliths. In HALs
place, we have the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, whose patience through the
long Martian winters is both awe-inspiring and unnerving. Theyre slow,
palsied trek, their long frozen pauses, their caterpillar tracks in the red soil,
amount to a kind of new-aesthetic performance par excellence.
In a conversation elsewhere, a friend pointed out that the New Aesthetic is
practicing something like the pathetic fallacythat time-honored conceit of
poets that attributes feeling to inanimate objects. Indeed there is an element
of pathetic fallacy here, which promises all the richness and poetic power
poets have used it to body forth. Its an attempt to frame something akin to
Spinozas notion of Natura naturansnature naturingnature
expressing itself in its unfolding, a process whose edges we barely touch. And
even in fronting the brute facts of nature through scientific means, we have a
hard time rinsing ourselves of the pathetic fallacy entirely. Gravitational
bodies attract one another; nature abhors a vacuum. Eppur si muove, Galileo
is said to have murmured under his breath after being forced to recant
heliocentrism and affirm the Earth as the stationary center of the universe:
but still it moves.
Its not totally unreasonable to suppose that *something* is going on in
nature, that its constituent objects have some kind of motivation, even if
theyre composed of mere chemical gradients or pressure differentials or
quantum states. The computer opens up a special case because we made it,
and yet it manifests itself in all kinds of ways that seem like a nature
another naturea little nature, perhaps. There is a strong sense that with
computers and their networks, something is going on in there, something
emergent and radically other, which nonetheless does begin to infiltrate our
edges.
I think of the check digit here. In a line of encoding, the check digit is a 1 or 0
placed at the end of a message to ensure the sum of the line is either even or
odd; if a bit is missing somewhere else in the line, the check digit lets the
system know that something has gone missing. In a slightly pathetic frame of
mind, its a very naive, very simple kind of aesthetic sensibility we afforded to
the machine. And check digits predate computers; they were introduced in
the context of telegraphy. The telegraph network didnt give a fig for our
sense of error; the characters encoded in any given transmission might be put
to work telling a lie, expressing an inapt simile, or proffering some malignant
ideology, but the cables didnt care. If a bit is out of place, however,
something like a tastea taste radically different from ours, different even
from the pathos-free taste Sterling wants, a budding virtual taste akin at this
stage to a single neuron sparking in a petri dishis offended. Not really, of
course. And yet it does move. Ramified and compounded many times over,
the emergent, virtual taste of the network metastasizes into some fascinating
effects: a ubiquitous-but-glitchy attention; an ambient-but-imperfect
recoverability of the past; an assemblage of objects that seem to keep track of
their histories, that seem to have something like experience; a participatory,
slightly asynchronous panopticon. I dont think the New Aesthetic is
heralding the approach of the Singularitys event horizon, where computers
will vault into consciousness and begin writing a sui-generis literature that
drops fully formed from the brow of Stanislaw Lem. The New Aesthetic is
making a much humbler move: pointing out these feral phenomena erupting
into our midst and saying, but they move.