uncopy

How do we think about media art aesthetics and the production of critical knowledge as the creative industries paradigm consolidates around us, amidst ongoing financial, environmental and political crises? Can we still claim a special place for media art given the increasing ubiquity of informational technologies in everyday life and the intensification of cultural distribution through social media platforms? This book reflects on these questions through the recent New Aesthetic. More specifically, we are interested in reflecting on why a notion developed by the British designer James Bridle caused such a reaction across multiple contexts, sectors and segments of network culture. Pitched as a highly-curated batch of crowdsourced visual and textual content on the commercial microblogging and social networking platform Tumblr, the New Aesthetic was presented as a ‘shareable concept’, a ‘theory object’. This collection, moreover, was delivered wit h a message: the machines were telling us something, trying to speak to us, and we just need to return their affectionate, surveillant gazes, and communicate with their program languages.
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