"The New Aesthetic embraces an unusual creative technique: aggregation. It rejects the demands of the manifesto in favor of the indiscriminateness of the collection. Like any mess, it’s a bit ghastly to look upon. Sterling calls it a “gaudy, network-assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws.” From Hummel figurines to tumblr image blogs, collecting has a long history of kitschiness… For another part, the New Aesthetic fails the ultimate test of novelty: that of disruption and surprise. Misguided as they may seem a century hence, avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada were not celebrating industrialism nor lamenting war so much as they were replacing familiar principles with unfamiliar ones on the grounds that the familiar had failed. The New Aesthetic is not surprising, but expected. After all, the artists now wield the same data access APIs, mapping middleware, and computer vision systems as the corporations. In some cases, the artists are the corporations. A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves “see” the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation—even to art."

"The New Aesthetic (previously) is a phrase for the burgeoning artistic relationship to machine-processed images. The phrase was coined by James Bridle who maintains a tumblr of links to projects, art, news stories, and discoveries that match that description. The idea is further elaborated in this short essay and image gallery. Bridle goes in to more detail with his talk at Web Directions South in December of last year (text transcript). There's also this round-up of a recent NA panel at SXSW, to which Sterling refers in his Wired essay. Some examples (culled from the Bridle's tumblr) of NA in online performance art, video art, comics, glitches, fashion, commercial design, advertising, warfare, more fashion, relationships, photography, poetry, entrepreneurship, homelessness, erotic dancing, glitches, and humanity. And that's just within the last month." A great place to start for research into the New Aesthetic.

"An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering… The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings… Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished… [T]he New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one."

The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

"Mussolini’s embrace of Italian Futurism (albeit briefly) suggested a more progressive outlook than the aesthetically reactionary German Führer, Herr Hitler; Duce’s architectural preferences were certainly less gothic and less medieval. While Mussolini extolled the style and trappings of ancient Rome (i.e. the Roman salute and the fascist emblem), he allowed for crosscurrents of Classicism and Modernism to run through Fascism, which contributed a bit of Mediterranean flair. To this day, the remnant of Fascist style continues to be subtly evident in Rome. (Having just spent a week there with students, as part of a design workshop, I watched how seduced some where by the Fascist facades and block letter inscriptions. Indeed, some drew inspiration for making original typefaces through their own interpretation of classic and fascistic lettering.)"

On the necessity versus desirability of slow food and localised micro-farming. "Urban farming was forced on Cuba; whatever its admirable achievements, I'm sure many of those courtyard smallholdings would become carparks with the end of the economic crisis. They are a contingency measure until better times arrive. Now, there are very good reasons to grow more food inside cities, and to encourage people to grow some of their own food where they can. We do not want to continue to be at the mercy of a bloated, destructive and wasteful industry that gulps petrochemicals, destroys ecosystems and ruins the lives of thousands. As well as being ethically ropey and bad for our health, the food industry is very fragile, with long, tenuous supply lines and vast resource requirements that make it very vulnerable to exogenous shock and sudden collapse. Our dependence on industrialised food is a huge risk; self-reliance, on an individual and civic scale, is a virtue."

Evolving music at personal and social levels. "Throughout recorded history, people have attempted to explain music’s sway over the human spirit. Music has been labeled everything from a gift of the heavens to a tool of the Devil, from an extension of mathematics to a side effect of language processing. Charles Darwin was famously stumped by music’s ubiquitous presence around the world: man’s predilection for music, he wrote in 1871, “must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”... Music seems to offer a novel method of communication rooted in emotions rather than in meaning. Research shows that what we feel when we hear a piece of music is remarkably similar to what everybody else in the room is experiencing.... Songs facilitate emotional bonding and even physical interactions such as marching or dancing together... In addition, tunes may work to our benefit on an individual level, manipulating mood and even human physiology more effectively than words can."

Kevin Kelly talks evolution/beauty/tech. "Newborn, unrefined cities lack depth, and so humans find new cities ugly... But over generations, every urban block in that city and all others are tested by daily use. The parks and streets that work are retained; those that fail are demolished. The height of buildings, the size of a plaza, the rake of an overhang are all adjusted by variations until they satisfy. But not all imperfection is removed, nor can it be since many aspects of a city cannot be changed easily. So urban workarounds and architectural compensations are added over generations... Over centuries, the constant infilling, ceaseless replacement and renewal, and complexification creates a deeply satisfying esthetic. The most beautify places are those that reveal layers of time. They accrue forms uniquely fitted to that place. Every corner in a city carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by it."

This article explores the visual metaphors of the PS3 game 'Flower': "What particularly interested me was how straightforwardly Chen’s imagery in the game was rooted in super-ancient Western mythologies about a dry, broken land healed by a heroic quest. Now, plenty of video games use this as their substructure — hell, you could argue that Super Mario is sort of in that tradition — but Chen strips everything back to pure, raw metaphoric imagery. Yet because so many of those images are so peculiarly contemporary — power windmills, out-of-control electricity, brooding weather, corroded industrial towers — I couldn’t escape the idea that he was deploying all this rich tradition to rummage around in our modern unease about the environment."

"What makes this guy so revolutionary? Not only has he been able to popularize a product he created for the sole purpose of his personal graffiti endeavors, but that he's been able to expand the concept to a global market, all while staying close to the subculture and scene that originally got him noticed in the first place. "

Recent work by several researchers at University College London has made the first steps toward a unified biocultural theory of art. An object's beauty may not be universal, but the neural basis for appreciating beauty probably is. The researchers' initial discoveries and the increasing formalization of the field promise to open the way for the first time to an understanding of beauty based on something other than speculation.

Our sense of the nature of beauty cannot be separated from our sense of the beauty of nature.