Catching up on the New Aesthetic writings. In...

12th October 2012

Video with 2 notes

Catching up on the New Aesthetic writings. In particular Curt Cloninger’s October 3rd article:

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/manifesto-theory-%E2%80%98new-aesthetic%E2%80%99

New Aesthetic images are uncanny (unheimlich, un-homelike). If NA images were totally familiar, we would read them as family photos. (They are our new family photos.)

This relates a lot to the thinking behind the RGBD research.

For example, the aesthetic of a retro instagram filter or a super8 movie of your grandparents as children is nostalgic because it locks that image to a time and place, because it’s evidently created by the technology from that time.

The new aesthetic investigation seems to have to do with a sort of speculative nostalgia of right now — for example Clement Valla’s, postcards from Google Earth.

There is an interest in understanding how right now ‘looks’ (and will to those in future). And where the Instagram culture is a longing for brand new photographic ubiquity of the 20th century, the new nostalgia may lie in the brand-new surveillance ubiquity of the 21st century.

Like this family portrait by Trevor Ames.

RGB+D