The New Aesthetic
For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products.
(Some of these things might have appeared here, or nearby, before. They are not necessarily new new, but I want to put them together.)
For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures:
→ Guardian gallery of agricultural landscapes from space.
→ Updates on Bin Laden’s Death, New York Times
→ Tracking iPhone locations with iPhoneTracker, from Ben on Flickr
The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.
→ Tracking iPhone locations (Ongoing personal project)
→ Landscape Permutation 2 (2010), David Semeniuk
Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.
→ Three screens (for London 2010)
→ FER IN 1970 & 2010, Buenos Aires, Back to the Future Series, Irina Werning
→ Luminant Point Arrays, by Stephan Tillmans
Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.
→ Diptych 1 on Flickr (ongoing personal project)
→ CV Dazzle by Adam Harvey
→ Megabytes of Spring, Reed+Rader for vmagazine.com.
(I could put a whole load more animated gif stuff in here like this and this and this and this. But I won’t. Except to say: animated gifs are the first artform of the internet, and they are in some way the future.)
→ German Tornado fighter with splinter camouflage.
→ Low resolution Lamborghini Countach, by United Nude
→ Lo Res Shoe, by United Nude
→ Fabricate Yourself, Karl D.D. Lewis
→ Telehouse West, by YRM Architects
The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.
→ Robert Hodgin’s Kinect Fatsuit
→ NYC Street Art, photographed by Benjamin Norman
→ Embryo Firearms by Cornelia Parker
→→→→→→→→→→ And so on and so forth.
UPDATE: continuing the exploration at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com – submissions welcome.
[...] The New Aesthetic | Blog | Really Interesting Group Me on maps and pixels at RIG. [...]
Fabulous images!
PS There were at least 3 iphones on the IOW a week ago…they didnt show up on the tracking…I wonder what the sensitivity for detecting them is (only joking BTW.)
[...] I’m quite enjoying the low rez effect. It’ll date itself quickly but it’s interesting [...]
In a similar vein the the lo-res Lamborghini and shoe, with some rapid-prototyping and web technologies thrown in, you might enjoy some of my former classmate at CIID in Copenhagen Mary Huang’s explorations of “computational couture”, which uses that low-poly triangulated aesthetic to great effect:
http://bit.ly/continuum_d-dress
http://www.continuumfashion.com/Ddress/
You should add a link to the N.A tumblr so people can submit/email stuff? (Unless there is one and I’m blind.)
More things-polygonized:
http://www.testroete.com/index.php?location=head
[...] James Bridle for RIG: For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown products… [...]
[...] couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the New Aesthetic over at the RIG blog (and I am continuing the research over at Tumblr). I wasn’t really sure [...]
[...] for The New X, where X can be Liberal Arts, Aesthetic, Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, whatever—but this is actually quite good. More descriptively, it’s probably the sensor aesthetic, or maybe the digital backwash aesthetic. [...]
[...] RIGLondon on why, instead of waiting for jetpacks, we should look at the amazing tech we have w/a fresh sense of wonder. [...]
[...] infrastructural landscapes in the infrastructural public policy problem to re-industrialization to the new aesthetic of cheap satellite [...]
crop circles and some new-age jewelry is definitely a new aesthetic … consciousness is becoming more able to pick up subtle energies … technology of course reflects this
we should definitely keep trying with jetpacks
I fully support ongoing jetpack research. Please don’t take this in any way as an attack on jetpack researchers, or the valuable work that they do.
http://nathantdean.tumblr.com/post/6520579540/the-new-aesthetic-blog-really-interesting-group
[...] No designer am I. It’s probably why I’m so curious to learn how design works and what the edge of a field I know little about might look like. This tumblr page has yet to fail at giving me a new angle from which to view the world or at least providing me with better questions. It’s getting thrown in delicious as well as my reader. If you’re going to check it out, be sure to see where it all began. [...]
[...] and even post-modernism was a mere transition) but, “Evocation needs more than notation [and aesthetic]: it needs [...]
[...] for ages. I’m not going to blockquote it, like I normally would. You should just read it — The New Aesthetic. And then look at the New Aesthetic [...]
[...] amused by the idea that, in an era of voice interface, New Aesthetic would become No Aesthetic overnight. Or, at least, would have to somehow become audial. [...]
[...] new aesthetic: 1 ; [...]
[...] architectural vocabulary” is clearly related to the “New Aesthetic” that Bridle began talking about this past May. (I’ve always liked Matt Berg’s description of it as a [...]
[...] those of you who haven’t come across the New Aesthetic before, it began here, it continues here, I’ve been interviewed about it here, and here are a few [...]