 |
 |
Hi all thanks for your thoughts, and links, on the new aesthetic. i think the points raised are really interesting and something which has been circulating around my research for some time: aggregating and 'liking' as new forms of curatorial practice how audiences consume content differently in online spaces object-beingness (old fashioned Heideggerian dasein, or the networked-object's present-at-handedness and how that is accommodated curatorially) I particularly am interested in Dan's comment that "A lot of my New Media Art friends seem to want to avoid this conversation, or have adopted a "tell me why this matters" stance. I guess that's understandable, it's easy to look at the Tumblr blog and not see much substance. Plus it's a broader cultural thing, it doesn't exclude fashion and advertising, it is probably generationally divisive." I'd like to unpick this further... Is it an art and design division or a generational one? cultural one? in what way did Eyebeam's Re:group show (which Beryl and I were nominally involved in as Eyebeam's research partners at the time) address this and is it the only show to have done so? We've talked about exhibitions on this list where media art on view was at the service of other than aesthetic experience -- changing the world, addressing issues such as financial regulation or climate change -- but not in terms of how information about these works circulates, how the history of art and design is being written through them. What are the criteria for evaluating these works beyond those we've used so far (how the work behaves, how the audience participates, how the work questions or exhibits its own production and distribution)? As Curt said, To fail to ask these questions leads to a kind of reversion toward evaluating these new image as discrete, hermetic, "aesthetic" objects rather than as the residue/result of a series of cultural processes, networks, and relationships (which is what images have always been, and what these new images particularly are). Apologies for rambling, Sarah P.S. I would love to hear of other writing about surf clubs -- is there (or should there be) a reader on it?