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Goodness. Another long rant on wired, like a curate's egg, good and bad in parts. But finally someone has said out loud that, "The appreciation of generative art requires an aesthetics of process." "“Generative art” is not the be-all and end-all of art, or design, or engineering, or coding, or architecture. It’s an approach, a technique, and a mode of perception." which, frankly, is what some of us have been saying more generally about new media art (in relation to Art with a capital A) for quite some time now. I like Olia's quip retold by Sterling that the new aesthetic is new media without the media. which isn't exactly saying that it is only new either. But I also especially like Saul's comments - and Michael's and Honor's - which have followed on this list, which tease these things out a little further, agreeing that it is not worth discounting the new aesthetic for not being new, but rather to consider how it sits, both looking back _and_ looking forward -- so I wonder, for instance, about the show BitStreams at the Whitney Museum from 2001, could we look back and see the work in that show through the lens of the new aesthetic? Is there scope for parallel history telling here - as Roger Malina has suggested? Certainly lots of work in that show was generative, if we are to follow Sterling's lead regarding one of the places the new aesthetic has perhaps come from. I also deeply appreciate Armin's and Nick's comments about histories and recouperation strategies (and I wasn't saying there was an art/design dichotomy per se, for the record, I was rather feebly pointing out how new media art has been understood and appreciated sometimes more often across the traditional boundaries present in museums, for example at MoMA, and that there are as a result, for those of us observing these things, sometimes different crowds of interest around works, and therefore different histories which get noted). The human and the thing-i-ness of all this -- as art -- still is out there to be described. (maybe that's what, on ten years reflection, I didn't much like about the BitStreams show, the messy human got a little lost in all the digital technical trickery of the glossier works? So there you go Saul, another event to "be jury-rigged and used to prop up New Aesthetics in a longer timeline"?). As Honor said "Aesthetics and art are not interchangeable concepts" and yet a problem with histories of new media art is that the works in question have not been often considered as 'art' because they perhaps didn't spend as much time engaging in aesthetic debates, as in social/political/technical/economic ones, which is often what good art does best. running out of steam... someone take over! Sarah On 19 Apr 2012, at 18:36, Dennis Moser wrote: > More from Mr. Sterling today: > > http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/generation-generator-new-aesthetic/ > > Best, > > Dennis > > ~~ > If your first move is brilliant, you’re in trouble. You don’t really know > how to follow it; you’re frightened of ruining it. So, to make a mess is a > good beginning. — Brian Eno ------------------------------------------------ Dr. Sarah Cook Reader MA Curating Module Leader University of Sunderland Faculty of Arts, Design and Media Ashburne House, Ryhope Road Sunderland, UK SR2 7EF t: +44 191 515 2134 email: [log in to unmask] The Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss www.crumbweb.org See our exhibitions! Mirror Neurons, including work by Michael Snow, Catherine Richards, Simon Pope, Thomson&Craighead and Scott Rogers, at the National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland, on view until 20 May 2012 http://www.nationalglasscentre.com/whats-on/2012/03/01/mirror-neurons.html Joe Winter: A History of Light - Variable Array, at the National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland until 20 May 2012. Read our books! Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (2011) from Banff Centre Press and Riverside Architectural Press http://www.banffcentre.ca/press/39/euphoria-and-dystopia.mvc Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (2010) from MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12071 A Brief History of Curating New Media Art, and A Brief History of Working with New Media Art (both 2010) from The Green Box, Berlin http://www.thegreenbox.net