New Aesthetic

The New Aesthetic is a term, coined by James Bridle, used to refer to the increasing appearance of the visual language of digital technology and the Internet in the physical world, and the blending of virtual and physical. The phenomenon has been around for a long time but James Bridle articulated the notion through a series of talks and observations. The term gained wider attention following a panel at the SXSW conference in 2012.

Developing from a series of collections of digital objects that have become located in the physical the movement circulates around a blog named "The New Aesthetic" and which has defined the broad contours of the movement without a manifesto. The New Aesthetic as a concept was introduced at South By South West (SXSW) on March 12, 2012, at a panel organised by James Bridle and included Aaron Cope, Ben Terrett, Joanne McNeil and Russell Davies.

An article by Bruce Sterling in Wired Magazine propelled the ideas around the New Aesthetic into critical and public consciousness. Sterling's article described the concept's main outlines but also proposed some key critical areas for development. The subsequent response from across the web was rapid and engaged with a number of significant contemporaneous contributions.

The author Bruce Sterling has said of the New Aesthetic:

Matthew Battles, a contributor to Metalab, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, gives a definition that makes reference to purported paradigm examples:

One of the more substantive contributions to the notion of the New Aesthetic has been through a development of, and linking to, the way in which the digital and the everyday are increasingly interpenetrating each other. Here, the notion of the unrepresentability of computation, as both an infrastructure and an ecology, are significant in understanding the common New Aesthetic tendency towards pixelated graphics and a retro 8-bit form. This is related to the idea of an episteme (or ontotheology) identified with relation to computation and computational ways of seeing and doing: computationality.

Michael Betancourt has discussed the New Aesthetic in relation to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ provides a reference point for the examination of Karl Marx's discussion of machines in ‘The Fragment on Machines.’

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