David Berry: What is the New Aesthetic?

What is the New Aesthetic?
The 'New Aesthetic' is an aesthetic that revels in seeing the grain of computation, or perhaps better, seeing the limitations or digital artefacts of a kind of digital glitch, sometimes called the 'aesthetic of failure'. More so this aesthetic is concerned with the act of representing the digital within the more commonly analogue life-world that we inhabit in everyday life.  This representation of the digital is, of course, an interesting feature of the New Aesthetic as much as (1) there may be the mediation of digital technology in the creation of aesthetic objects or (2) the affordances of digital vision that creates certain kinds of recognisable digital artefacts. This I called 'an element of "down-sampled" representation of a kind of digital past, or perhaps digital passing, in that the kinds of digital glitches, modes, and forms that are chosen, are very much located historically'. We might think of these alternative formulations or threads within the New Aesthetic as (i) representations of the digital, (ii) mediation by digital processes, and (iii) digital/computer vision. In any case, it is clear that it is the aesthetic output that is being addressed here and it could be augmented with consideration to the non-visual computational processes involved in mediating this output, such as code and software (see Berry 2011) – but so far the main focus of the New Aesthetic has been visual. In this paper I want to think about the questions the New Aesthetic raises more generally for Media Studies and Software Studies, and how it connects to wider issues within the Digital Humanities.

David M. Berry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. Currently he is based at IMK, UiO, on an Yggdrasil fellowship from Forskningsrådet. He is author of The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011), Copy, Rip Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008), and editor of Understanding Digital Humanities (2012). His new edited book Life in Code and Software is due out shortly on Open Humanities Press. He is @berrydm on Twitter. http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/artshumanities/berryd/