What is actually new about New Media? One isolates some of the key qualities at the macro-scale of their articulation with major social changes: digitization and convergence; interactivity and networks; virtuality and globalization. From the much more restricted vantage point of the aesthetics of computers as experienced by the end-users of software, five characteristics are identified:
1 numerical representation;
2 modularity (the principle of assembling larger units from smaller ones);
3 automation;
4 variability;
5 transcoding (the relationship between computing and everyday cultures).
In his account of ‘visual digital culture', focused on the experience of viewing work made on digital devices, one emphasizes simulation, hyperrealism and spectacle, terms which suggest a divorce between the image and reality, a heightening of the quality of images to the point that they can substitute for reality, and the decline of narrative in favour of sheer visual pleasure. These approaches, and the many more that have been offered defining the distinguishing characteristics of digital aesthetics, offer highly recognizable facets of the phenomenon. We all recognize a digital animation by its sharply defined edges, lustre and spatial sophistication; we recognize computer graphics by their saturated colours, high gloss, use of mathematical and geometrical motifs; and we can mostly tell a digital special effect from a physical one like a real stunt. Everyone can recognize the digital sound of techno music, but some people swear they can tell the difference between a vinyl record and a digital CD, claiming that the older medium has more ‘warmth'. Few amateurs, however, would be able to tell a digital from an analogue photo, or tell you whether a track had been recorded digitally or on old reel-to-reel machines. For his film Princess Mononoke (1997), Myazaki commissioned a new piece of software, Toonshader, which would give his digital animations the look of traditional handpainted anime - increasingly, digital tools are used to disguise their own use. And since so much medical and scientific imagery, from ultrasound scans to Hubble Space Telescope images, are digitally gathered, treated and disseminated, the idea that the connection with reality has been broken is premature.
The problem can be put like this. Digital aesthetics, like any other form of aesthetics, has to respond to the material qualities of the media it investigates. An aesthetics of painting would look at brushwork, colour, depth and consistency of the paint and so on. But digital aesthetics has the uncomfortable job of looking at many things, from celnets to Internet governance, that simply cannot be seen or touched. And where products are produced digitally, we often have no clues left that they were made that way; and many digital tools, like the dozen or more computers in a contemporary car, are tucked away where the driver cannot see them. A second problem is that there is no single digital aesthetic, in the way one could imagine a single aesthetic of painting. Old school digital games like Super Mario Bros (1986) are different to the latest releases. Flash animations have one aesthetic, and locative media (the artistic use of mobile technologies in a defined geographical area) another one entirely. The aesthetic of electronic music is different to that of the digital engineers recording a classical quartet. The aesthetic appreciation of a clever text message bears little relation to our enjoyment of the latest Pixar animation or a particularly elegant piece of coding in open source. What kinds of principle, then, can we bring to bear? Among those that have the longest track record is the aesthetic principle that a whole be more than the sum of its parts. This presents two difficulties for digital aesthetics. First, the digital domain is far too vast to ever be seen as a whole, even by whole populations, since much of it is person to person (digital phone calls, SMS, email) and much of it is privately owned and protected (bank accounts, whole areas of digital publishing). And second, Manovich's principle of modularity insists that the parts remain distinct from any larger whole into which they might be assembled.
The nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic of organic unity holds little more hope, partly because the metaphor of an organism seems mismatched to the complex technological infrastructure of the digital domain; and partly because our fragmented experience of modernity does not encourage faith in overarching unifications. The early twentieth-century principle of montage aesthetics looks a more likely candidate, but too easily slips from meaningful juxtapositions to meaningless jumble, and is in any case as characteristic of advertising as it is of fine art. Another twentieth-century aesthetic, this time from architecture and design, suggests ‘truth to materials' as a guiding principle, but while this might be helpful in choosing how to use concrete, steel and glass, it is less so in choosing how to use invisible code. A leading programmer who was also a victim of the Unabomber, proposes ‘elegance' as a key value, a mathematical concept which describes formulae which are only as complicated as they need to be, but no more so. This is indeed a valuable principle, especially in a period in which built-in obsolescence and general bloat of operating systems and applications is almost universal, and where every program seems to offer what Critical Art Ensemble describe as ‘redundant functionality', functions which users rarely if ever want from a particular application. Other contenders offer themselves. Much of the utopian discourse about network media laid claim to a renewal of democracy, away from the orgy of voting followed by long periods of (mis)representation, and towards participation on a daily basis.
While this falls outside the purview of this article, the principle of democracy has a place in aesthetics, notably in the composer Arnold Schönberg's principle of the equality of all notes in a composition. When every pixel in an image can be manipulated, every symbol rewritten, every note turned and stretched, when an iPod set on shuffle flicks from one end of the musical spectrum to the other without faltering, there seems to be apparent something more than endless jumble, something perhaps closer to the endlessness of mathematics. This democratic aesthetic will make more sense, however, if we extend it beyond the human realm of social relations. In our dealings with machines since the beginning of history, human beings have enslaved technology, demanding that it do what we want. Increasingly artists and technologists are developing machines which have the capacity to evolve in their own ways, from game engines to robots. The digital aesthetics that emerge in the next century will have to involve both technologies and, as bio-computing becomes a reality, our eco-system in a democratic dialogue. In the end, there is no single or simple digital aesthetics, but there is or can be a digital ethics.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Brandon Winters at
01192010
1. Choosing the Right Surveillance Camera
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved.