The (Not So) New Aesthetic

David Semeniuk, Landscape Permuation 1 (2010)

I say not-so-new because the New Aesthetic, in January 2013, has been around for a little while. The SXSW panel discussion which blew the idea wide open took place in March 2013, and James Bridle started the New Aesthetic blog a year or more before that.

There's plenty of debate about what the New Aesthetic stands for and means, and how much it's worth as a concept, but Bridle kind of describes as looking at things with new eyes - the eyes of all this new technology. Think google maps, CGI, the obligatory pixels.

The idea on paper sounds clever enough but once you take it down one or two roads of practical manifestations it starts to get Twilight Zone interesting. And once it gets personal.. even more so, obviously.

Say we're taking the New Aesthetic to be the new boundary, often-crossed, permeable and sometimes hard to see at all, between technology's view of the world and our view of the world. I say new boundary, but only as new as the internet and internet culture, really. Once the internet began gaining momentum, we were using it to represent and see the world in a way only the internet, or cyberspace, could show it. How does our technology see the world which then feeds back into the way we see the world? What kind of world are we shown, how is our world different - visually, emotionally, any way - for this perspective which literally did not exist twenty years ago?

There's googlemaps, and the way we interact with the world through that lens. By interact, I don't just mean see, the most interesting part is how we invest emotionally in the world we are seeing through technology. A personal example - I had the sudden idea to look up the house I lived in from ages 7 to 9, which is in Houston Texas. I've not been back, and - up until seeing it again - had only memories to recall it with. I expected to feel emotional or excited at seeing it, rather it was a somewhat disappointing American suburban house, which looks smaller to me today than it did to me as a child. Interacting with the world and my past memories through a screened technology, and the emotional impact of the technology.

I don't know, this is all coming out quite clumsily, which is fine. I'm probably putting more of an emotional spin on the NA thing than it actually has. Went to see Mark Leckey screening at the ICA last night and it's really started me thinking about all of this again, he talked loads about the emotional power of the object, and the kind of subconcious dream world which the internet acts as. I'll put something up about his films (his newer films have an clear pre-occupation with these same issues, framed slightly differently perhaps) and what he said - which was really interesting - over the weekend.

David Semeniuk, Landscape Permutation 2 (2010)