Mediada

A blog about digital culture

[mediada]

Wat is er nieuw aan The New Aesthetic?

-- Sorry, a post in Dutch this time, as I am typing more in Dutch these days. Will switch back to English soon --

  Marius Watz merkt met recht op dat de technologieën die veel voorkomen bij The New Aesthetic, als ‘machine vision’ of GPS relatief oud zijn (Watz, 2012). Voor hem is The New Aesthetic “an attempt at diagnosis of the most recent mutations of the human condition” (Watz, 2012). Hij is dus minder geïnteresseerd in de nieuwheid van de afbeeldingen die deze beweging construeerd, en meer in de vraag die in de discussie verscholen zit. De vraag naar wat moderne technologie met ons dagelijkse leven doet, en hoe we dát in visuele uitingen kunnen vangen. Op deze manier komen we in de buurt bij het eerder genoemde 'post internet art'.

Mediatechnologieën zitten ongevraagd verwoven in ons leven, zegt Watz. Mensen leggen zonder er bij na te denken hun smartphone onder het kussen en installeren een app die de telefoon in staat stelt met accelerometers onze slaapcurve te analyseren. The New Aesthetic is een wapen voor bewustwording. En dat is nodig, volgens Watz. Deze veranderingen die ons gedrag ondergaat met de komst van nieuwe mediatechnologieën gaan maar al te gemakkelijk aan ons voorbij (Watz, 2012).

Dit is ook een punt dat mijzelf opgevallen is bij het nader bestuderen van deze stroming. Wellicht is deze stroming niet relevant vanwege zijn revolutionaire karakter – wat haar naamgeving doet vermoeden – maar eerder vanwege de alomtegenwoordigheid van moderne technologie. Een verandering in onze dagelijkse technologie-doorzeefde cultuur die we zelf voor lief lijken te nemen door alleen maar uit te kijken naar het volgende, het betere, het nieuwere. We moeten juist onze aandacht vestigen op het hier en nu, en dat is wat The New Aesthetic lijkt te doen.

We kunnen ons afvragen of het fenomeen hierin dan wel vernieuwend is. Maar al snel kwam er een déjà-vu naar boven; waren schilders in de Renaissance niet ook al bezig met door technologie geïnspireerde beelden? In de 19e eeuw werd het voor het eerst mogelijk om de wereld vanuit vogelperspectief te bekijken, iets waar voorheen alleen over gefantaseerd kon worden. Eén van de kunstenaars die al vroeg bezig was met nieuwe, door technologie mogelijk gemaakte, perspectieven was Kasimir Malevich. Hij was geobserdeerd door kunst vanuit vogelperspectief. Voor hem was dit een middel om de moderne wereld te symboliseren (McNeill, 2012).

Bovendien liet de uitvinding van film en fotografie de kunstwereld ook niet onbewogen. Men was meer en meer bezig met fotorealisme. Inplaats van verisimilitude – het streven naar realisme zoals het bekeken wordt door het menselijke oog – werd er gestreeft naar realisme zoals bekeken door het mecahnische oog; de camera (Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2009, p. 137). Dziga Vertov was één van de kunstenaars die bezig was met fotorealisme:

“I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it…. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”

                     — Dziga Vertov

Dit kwam tot uiting in schilderijen die bijvoorbeeld de grijswaarden van vroege film overnamen door volgelingen van het kubisme of Picasso (McNeill, 2012). Sommige academici zoals Lev Manovich (1996) vinden dat cinematografie ons idee van realiteit heeft overgenomen. Verisimilitude heeft zover ingeboet voor fotorealisme dat we deze vorm van representatie ook zijn gaan accepteren als realistisch (Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2009, p. 138). We kunnen zeggen dat The New Aesthetic dus het fotorealisme is van de mediatechnoogieën van deze tijd. In die zin is het wél nieuw. Er wordt niet meer gekeken naar de foto als inspiratie en basis voor kunst en visuele technieken, maar naar GPS, algoritmes en pixels. Zo zijn er relatief veel New Aesthetic werken geïnspireerd op Google Streetview en Google Earth. En zoals Watz al zei, wordt er kritisch gekeken naar de verwovenheid van deze ‘nieuwe manier van kijken’ in ons dagelijkse handelen. Het gaat er dus niet zo zeer om hoe nieuw GPS is.

The New Aesthetic kijkt naar de technologieën die we hebben, niet naar de technologieën die we wensen te hebben. Dit zorgt ook voor een zekere hang naar retro – 8bit muziek en afbeeldingen zijn regelmatig terug te vinden op de blog van James Bridle. Zoals in de publicatie New Aesthetic, New Anxieties wordt genoemd, laat de beweging beelden zien uit een “digitaal verleden” die vooral opvallen nu we juist bewegen naar “een wereld met HD beelden en retina displays” (Berry, et al., 2012, p. 42). In een reactie op deze blog probeert Dan Catt uit te doeken te doen waarom. Hij breekt een lans voor het verschil tussen computer vision, waar The New Aesthetic haar herkomst vindt en computer graphics, iets dat voor velen herkenbaardere beelden oplevert (Catt, 2012). Zoals James Bridle en Matt Jones al eerder opmerkten, gaat het bij The New Aesthetic over ‘the grain of seeing/computation’. De verwarring ontstaat omdat computer vision nu in het stadium is – visueel gezien – waar computer graphics dertig jaar geleden was. Een goed voorbeeld dat Dan Catt aanhaalt om het verschil hier te illustreren, is computer-generated imagery (CGI). Bij grote blockbuster fantasy films als Pirates of the Carribean (zie figuur 2.2)bestaat computer vision uit lage resolutie pakken van de acteurs met stippen en groene schermen. Echter de hedendaagse computer technologie transformeert hen op scherm naar monsters en piraten in hoge definitie. The New Aesthetic is dus gebaseerd op de huidige stand van computer vision, het is dus de mode ontwerper die de vervreemdende pixel pakken neemt uit figuur 2.2 en hierop nieuwe ontwerpen inspireert (Catt, 2012). Hierdoor lijkt het alsnog aan 8bit retro jaren ’80 beelden te refereren terwijl het bezig is met beelden uit ons huidige tijdperk.

We visualiseren op deze wijze de vervreemdende nieuwe kijk op onze eigen wereld die in staat wordt gesteld door onze technologie. Zij zien in “andere spectra” dan wij, ze bepalen ruimte en visie met behulp van barcodes, QR codes, wifi signalen, GPS plaatsbepaling, bewegingsdetectie en metadata (Bridle, Waving at the Machines, 2011). Daarin ligt de kern van The New Aesthetic gevangen, een inspiratiebron die net als ten tijde van de opkomst van fotografie zorgt voor een ‘nieuwe kijk’ op onze omgeving.

  Bronnen:

Berry, D. M., van Dartel, M., Dieter, M., Kasprzak, M., Muller, N., O'Reilly, R., et al. (2012). New Aesthetic, New Anxieties. Rotterdam: V2_.

Bridle, J. (2011, december). Waving at the Machines. Opgeroepen op januari 24, 2012, van Web Directions: http://www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/

Catt, D. (2012, april). Why The New Aesthetic isn't about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates. Retrieved oktober 12, 2012, from Rev Dan Catt: http://revdancatt.com/2012/04/07/why-the-new-aesthetic-isnt-about-8bit-retro-the-robot-readable-world-computer-vision-and-pirates/

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., & Kelly, K. (2009). New Media: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.

McNeill, J. (2012, maart 14). New Aesthetic at SXSW 2012. Opgeroepen op februari 27, 2013, van Joanne McNeill: http://joannemcneil.com/index.php?/talks-and-such/new-aesthetic-at-sxsw-2012/

Watz, M. (2012, april 6). The Problem with Perpetual Newness. Opgeroepen op november 12, 2012, van In Response to Bruce Sterlings Essay on The New Aesthetic: http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/in-response-to-bruce-sterlings-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic

[mediada]

Interview Jan Robert Leegte

I met Jan Robert Leegte when I was setting up and directing the exposition ‘Coded Perception’ for SETUP in Utrecht. He was one of the ‘digital curators’ I asked to fill up to projected walls of three by nine metres with their own view on The New Aesthetic. 

Jan Roberts take on the subject came from net.art, a subject that he already dealt with as a teacher, researcher and maker during its high times (the nineties). Some of his most wll-known pieces would be (several takes on) ‘scrollbar composition’ and the simple yet effective ‘random selection in random picutre’. Through his talk at the opening night at the exposition, I myself became curious about net.art. Was The New Aesthetic a rebirth of this phenomenon that was now past its glory days?

I met with Leegte at a café in Amsterdam afterwards to see how this connection laid for him. For Leegte, net.art was an ideology based art practice. It was against the institutionalization of art.  Internet would be the new, free space of the era, without commercial ideals where information, but also art, could roam free. New groups were formed, for example jodi that were quite influential in the late eighties and nineties.

Leegte admits that he himself was quite late to the game, he started experimenting only in the mid nineties with the internet as a space for art. He was working on the materiality of the internet, and how this could be expressed via art. One of his works that shows this very well, is another take on scrollbar composition, in which he has put the scrollbars in physical space.

Seeing as one of the more superficial ideas behind The New Aesthetic is the blurring between the actual and the physical, net.art seems to have a lot in common with this recent discussion/phenomenon. I am missing a step here though, according to Leegte. “There has also been a movement called ‘post internet art’ that can be seen as the successor of net.art. Instead of focusing on the internet as space or even as a medium, they began to look at our changing practices influenced by modern technology”. Evan Roths well-known ‘multi-touch paintings’ clearly bring this to the fore.

An artist that is interesting to Leegte, because he “takes the image as an object in post-internet art”, is Artie Vierkant. In such works it is obvious how quickly we recognize digital native objects nowadays. It is the same 'object' that Evan Roth is experimenting with. As David M. Berry said, a qualitative shift is going on, where our attitude towards technology and our daily practices are changing. Digital technology has become part of our mass culture, Leegte agrees. The curiosity for The New Aesthetic may well be born out of our surroundings filled with ‘ubiquitous technology’, says Leegte.

Ubiquitous technology also changes the dynamics between computer interface and people. Take for example the abstract 'every day' world of Google Maps, a subject I came to talk about before with Bartholomäus Traubeck. According to Leegte, when negotiate with this abstraction “we proceed to anomaly detection, to find a new ‘natural’ ecology within this constructed virtual map system”. That is something that is also going on within the discourse of The New Aesthetic. We negotiate to find our place within our digitized environments.

There is a lot of romance in these assumptions for Leegte. Do we interact with these technologies as the Other, as equals? We want to ‘understand’ them, by looking at pictures of how they interpret our surroundings, and us. We try to ‘open them up’ to get a better insight in our digital culture. But for Jan Robert Leegte, these practices are all quite naïve. Academics want to force these processes, while for the most people, these ‘black boxes’ just open themselves. That is what makes the works by Vierkant or Roth so recognizable and interpretable. The digitization of our culture has already been embraced by most, but should the academics follow or rather wonder more about this normalization?

[mediada]

Interview Horst Hörtner

When I was planning my artist-in-residence trip to Vienna, I just had to visit Linz as well. For there the Ars Electronica Centre was located. Since I was dealing with the subject of The New Aesthetic during this trip, it seemed it seemed fitting to talk with the people at Ars Electronica. Especially their Futurelab is busy doing research into the future of technology, art and society. I was happy to get an interview with the busy Hort Hörtner, who sat with me at the museum restaurant with a cup of coffee to tell me more about the centre and his views upon the phenomenon of The New Aesthetic.

When the conversation kicked off, it was immediately clear that Hörtner was proud of what surrounded him; his workplace, his colleages, the projects they worked on and the city they were located in. He is the director of the Futurelab, the driving force behind many of what the clients, collaborators and visitors get to see.

He tells with vivre how Ars Elektronica would not be here if it wasn’t for the city of Linz itself. In a relatively early period, in the seventies, Linz wanted to contrast itself with other Austrian cities by positioning itself as the city for the ‘information society’. Where Salzburg and Linz were focused on their historian riches such as Sissi and Mozart, Linz was going to look forward. This change of mindset was not in the least motivated by getting rid of its old identity; the city for steel… and Hitler’s retirement village.

This change of course for the city provided fertile ground for an organization such as the Ars Electronica Centre. Of course such a big and succesfull does not just start up in its current complex and big state. But their goal was always the same: to create a cross-over platform between art practices, academics and society. In 1987 they started out with the annual Prix Ars Electronica. It took a while to realize their full potential, for only in 1996 did the Ars Electronica Centre begin to strive for a broader public and to have a local impact to promote Linz as a modern (in contrast to classical) city. “Instead of standing still, we wanted to move forward, hence the Futurelab”.

This seemed to be a succesfull take on the state of Linz, for Ars Electronica soon got (international) partners from industry and academics. I wondered how they got the interest of the academic world. According to Hörtner, it was the possibility for cross-disciplinary research that got the attention of the forward-thinking academic. “Academics used to work within their own field, and not get much input from beyond that field”, The Ars Electronica Centre provided a non-university research platform where people could work together, to drive innovation, art and technology research. As the website says: “the Ars Electronica Futurelab considers its every day practice of connecting a variety of disciplines as [a] fundamental, important innovation battery”¹.

They want to be a creative catalyst – “generating environments to improve creativity” – the recent ‘Alphabet Project’ may be a good example of this. It had the Klangbürke as context, an annual event at the banks of the Danube River. It was an open source art project, in which many letters were made, that people could hold up, but they had to work together to actually be able to make words (in German, as in Dutch, no words exist containing only one letter). Projects like these is where it all comes together: innovation, art, locality, society.

The Futurelab can be seen as the Research & Development department behind the Ars Electronica Centre. It provides clients with advice based on thorough research, it is the backbone for big events such as the ‘Klangbürke’, and along the way it provides insides for the big exhibition centre at the Danube River in Linz. I was surprised to see how efficient the Centre is running, when it is also a platform for shared knowledge, they have their own ‘fab lab’, , robolab, biology lab and several studio’s, they help out with city events, whilst also still keeping up their own Prix and festival. A hectic, but rewarding workplace, Hörtner assures me. 

[mediada]

Interview Bartholomäus Traubeck

When looking more into the phenomenon of The New Aesthetic, I became more and more eager for an artist’s point of view. It seemed to me that media artists (already a contested label), had their work thrown into the New Aesthetic category by critics, curators, designers and academics, without having any input in the matter themselves. I talked to Bartholomäus Traubeck (Bart for short) about his perception of The New Aesthetic as an artist.

Some works by him, especially Perspective and Projection have been put into the New Aesthetic discussion by James Bridle and others. The work shows interesting cutouts from satellite photography, making it very suitable to be set into The New Aesthetic, which is often intrigued by the way machines and technology ‘view’ our world.

I spoke to Traubeck when I was in Vienna during SETUP’s artist-in-residence program there. First, I wanted to know if Traubeck saw himself as a media artist (and if so, as part of the The New Aesthetic movement). As he also does graphic design, motion design, media design, etcetera, he thinks of the term media artist as too narrow. In a broader sense, though, it is probably the most fitting term to use, but it has some bad connotations to it as well, for example being effect centric, where his work is also many times ‘just’ aesthetic centric. He can find himself in the arguments made by Goodiepal in his influential talk on media art.

The main interest Traubeck wanted to get across in his works that are labeled New Aesthetic, is representation and reality. One of his influences for the Perspective and Projection work was Alfred Korzybski, a Polish- American philosopher and scientist. One quote he is reminded of in this conversation is “Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness”. So, for example, when we see a map, Traubeck believes it is blurring the difference between the actual land and the represented geography on the map, as we merge the two in our minds. 

The New Aesthetic only came to Traubeck’s attention when a work he did together with Jasper van Loenen, was featured on the blog. When he looked into it, though, he was actually somewhat disappointed to find that it was a more or less incoherent collection, which had “no concise concept or anything behind it”. But after a while he saw how he fitted in, because of the idea that we get to have a new perspective on our surroundings, enabled by our modern day technologies. But that should not be called “new” though, according to Traubeck, for it was already going on for decades. It is only accelerating now. For example, “pictures taken from airplanes or space changed our perception on reality a lot”, take for example the famous picture of our own planet as this blue planet. And now pixels may have the same effect; we immediately recognize pixels when adapted in a work of art. We recognize them as a digital artifact.      

When I asked him if he saw himself as part of this movement, he was still unsure. He reflects on things “in a similar nature”, but is not sure if it can be said that he is part of this movement. But, “if you take the Tumblr as a general reference, a lot of works actually fit in there, just aesthetically speaking”.   

He does “necessarily” agree with the idea behind The New Aesthetic, that computer vision is changing our visual culture. For “if images are being made, and there are a lot of them, they will change visual culture necessarily, right?”. So that also holds true if we are using machines that make the images for us. Maybe the difference here is that we are often looking at images that the machines make for themselves. And the visual culture will then change thinking in general. “For I see images not only as one dimensional compositions, but they can be tools as well, like a map or data visualization”. 

When I asked his views upon how he was ‘placed’ or ‘copy-pasted’ in a movement by others, he was quite temperate: “so far it is great”, because it gets me noticed in todays “attention culture”. And he actually related this easily curated Tumblr to older dynamics. You used to have a professor or a curator at your side to get you into the works, but today the internet facilitates a lot of the promotion for media artists.

So, where I saw the Tumblr as a harsh, cold copy-paste medium that was avoid of human contact that normally forms the basis of art movements, Traubeck actually sees the possibilities in this change of dynamics. The only downside can be that the blogs ‘read’ your work the wrong way, as happened to him recently when a work got explained in a really esoteric way. But to be fair, this free interpretation was already around before online curation. When you are put in a collection, you are also put in a new explanation, a new context. But still; the hope of ending up in a gallery catalogue is less of a struggle today, when you are featured in multiple blogs, or "online catalogs".

[mediada]

Interview David M. Berry | & some thoughts on The New Aesthetic

David M. Berry is a media scholar at Swansea Universty, Wales. His most prominent focus is on open source technology and black boxing. From this latter perspective, he has also written some texts about ‘The New Aesthetic’, a subject he spoke on during SETUP’s symposium ‘Understanding The New Aesthetic’ and on which I’ve asked him some more questions the day after. In the country for just two days, I met up with David M. Berry the day after he has held two talks in the Netherlands. At a crowded café I find him at a corner table, typing away on a laptop with a cup of coffee.

David M. Berry found out about ‘The New Aesthetic’ “probably just by reading blogs”, and coming across Bruce Sterlings reaction, which fitted in with his own research into “abduction, thinking and patterns” and black boxing. According to Berry, "The New Aesthetic doesn't open black boxes, but it reveals that they are there". That it ‘just’ brings to the fore the presence of the black boxes in society, should not be thought of as a problem though, if anything it is rather a solution to a wide held problem nowadays, namely that we are ubiquitously surrounded by black boxed technology that we use and don’t question. It is a “qualitative shift” that's happening today according to Berry. The new way of naturally attributing everyday technology is what has changed.

Some exceptions within The New Aesthetic may be able to show a bit of what is going on inside this black box, for example with data moshing, in which you can see the computational algorithms at work. But this ‘opening up’ of the black box is not the true strongsuit of The New Aesthetic for David M. Berry. Because, for one, it only rarely does so, and because, we should be careful in associating the New Aesthetic phenomenon with the term of ‘the black box’ in the first place. For it is a very loaded term, and has strong connotations with Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory. And if you are not willing to go all the way in sharing his opinions on media theory (which few do), you’d better stay clear of the term that he has a wide bibliography on.

SETUP, for which I did the internship that got me working on The New Aesthetic in the first place, was concerned exactly with this angle of The New Aesthetic; media art as a tool to open up the complex workings of ubiquitous technology. So, as a direct consequence of doing this interview I had to question whether the black boxing part was really what I wanted to look into for my internship paper. I decided it should still be taken into account, but my main concern during the whole process of working for SETUP and setting up there New Aesthetic related events, was probably more like ‘why is the New Aesthetic discussion happening now?’. Many people who I had spoken to or of whom I had read their ideas, seemed to agree on the fact that what The New Aesthetic blog was showing, was not new necessarily. But that still leaves a big question as to why the discussion is going on in the 2010’s, as opposed to, for example, the sixties, when computer generated art first saw the light of day.

The ‘computational devices’ (a better term to use, following Berry’s advice) that are used in The New Aesthetic, vary from sattelites to smartphones. Most of the devices seem to have been given some kind of aesthetic notion, we try to look at ‘computer vision’, how ‘they’ see and understand 'our' world. That this is done via showing the algorithmic background through which this perception takes place, shows us the relation to the black box discourse. Glitches and generative art are a serious part of the discourse and can easily be connected. But there is another side to it as well, if we try to put into perspective what we are doing: we are imposing aesthetic judgments on technology as our significant Other. An interesting thought that will come more to the fore when I start working on my MA thesis later this year.

For Berry, The New Aesthetic is still “an empty signifier, it has not had its meaning locked down”. Which actually makes it an even more interesting subject for discursive research. We should not rush toward a definition while the process of getting there is so fruitful and full of inspiration. One thing we know already, is that the definition will not come from those (Sterling, Bridle) who first coined the term. It has grown bigger and wider and beyond their scope now. It will most likely fragment into new paradigms in order to be somewhat locked down by academic writers.

Furthermore, he warns me that The New Aesthetic phenomenon is something that reaches beyond the mere visual. It is about the way we engage with technology to him (the qualitative swift), so it may just as well be about our tendency to check the local network ping or use digital photo filters as I discussed before on this blog. Because the discussion keeps on referring to the original Tumblr blog, it is presented as something visual, while it has a much bigger potential. It is about media practices, about the discourse, and about the representation of technology. A diverse and interesting discourse that I should definitely delve into for its academic meaning.

[mediada]

Interview Matthias Tarasiewicz

In 2005 Matthias Tarasiewicz set up the 5uper.net group with about eight fellow students. TThese new media arts students had a shared interest for critical practices in computer- and new media arts, which they felt were lacking in the university program they attended. It proved to be a fruitful initiative, for a couple of years later they extended their activities to organizing a festival in Vienna: ‘Coded Cultures’, which has been successful and growing ever since.

Matthias himself has a background in creative programming and academic research. With his own ‘Artistic Technology Research’, he is affiliated with the Viennese University of Applied Arts. His research mainly concerns media production and practices; practical technological research from a critical artistic viewpoint.

The first ‘Coded Cultures’ festival (2004) was taken up from this very angle. It was self-funded, which immediately got them noticed and brought forward the initiative NetzNetz, which thematized principles of community funding and liquid democracy. The initiative was partially grounded in the dishonesty that Matthias sees in (the standard Austrian process of) jury funding for cultural events. The cultural elite that have their hands on the money, often have quite a low regard for discourse analytic research, which is not by coincidence a great part of the ‘Artistic Technology Research' program and greatly reflected in the festivals program. 

Currently, ‘Artistic Technology Research’ is positioning its work between discourse analytic research into documenting and "big data" as well as into the idea of virtual currencies. This latter research has been reason for Ryanne Turenhout to conduct a research into the community of Bitcoin users and their digital discourses from a Humanities perspective during her stay in Vienna as to contribute to the ongoing research program of Artistic Technology Research.

With the discursive analytic research, Matthias is aiming at a different approach then the more common approaches following the ideas of Michel Foucault or Bruno Latour. With his programming background, he is trying to find a more practical and pragmatic approach to discursive research. He is looking to abstract discourses to data, in such a way that patterns will be recognizable and interpretable. As a humanities scholar myself, I am very interested in this approach as I recognize the low regard for discursive research because of it being non quantifiable. But developing a semantic query system is (almost) impossible, as he himself admits, so there is definitely a (theoretical and practical) challenge there.

Here I should probably enlighten the reader into the reason for all of our trips to Vienna. Both people from the University of Utrecht and SETUP – Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Ryanne Turenhout, Frank-Jan van Lunteren, Tijmen Schep, Max Laane and myself – have been going on trips to this beautiful city with the motive to exchange on thoughts, knowledge and practices within digital culture. Artistic Bokeh (a sub-division of the Artistic Technology Research project) has made this possible together with the MuseumQuartier and their lively artist-in-residence program.

‘Coded Cultures’ was a genuinely positive addition to the Viennese cultural event calendar. It was not afraid to ask questions. Why is media art flourishing in these time and what is its message? And how has Eastern Europe risen as a creative catalyst for media art and the demo scene? The answers were given in Vienna in May 2004. Since then other themes have been media art and visual culture in different localities, such as Japan in 2009 and Southern America in 2006 and The City as Interface (Vienna) in 2011. The themes are quite closely linked to popular culture as well as academic discourse. This relevant and critical media festival is one to keep an eye out for.

[mediada]

Filter Aesthetics

When we see pictures like this, we immediately recognize it as a product of the immensely popular Instagram app. It is a weird realization that you immediately recognize a digitally rendered filter over a photograph, and maybe even the type of filter used if you are a frequent user yourself.

Today, Twitter announced that it is letting their users adjust their photos with pre-made filters prior to uploading them with their tweet. Unsurprisingly, these filters are very much alike those of Instagram. Another tool that seems to take over these new aesthetics is the webkit filter, a tool that can change the look of your blog or website quickly and simple by adding the same pre-made filters. The filters are supposed to be reminiscent of old times and analogue camera's, but in the widespread use of today's visual oriented social networking sites, it seems to be missing its referent. The only thing they are referring to now are the digital filters themselves, they seem to become more and more their own metaphors. A metaphor gone wrong, but shaping our visual culture nontheless.

Twitter used this clip to show how easy it is to use their new addition. From a media archeologist perspective, one of the first things that is striking about this clip, is the background music. While the aesthetics of these filters only still seem to refer to the digital age, the producer seems eager to keep the nostalgic idea of analogue photography alive. The romantic warmly toned images, shown in a quirky animation montage, are supported by music from the age of early photography. Nostalgia has become a thing producers, and users as well, desperately seem eager to hang on to in the age of sharing. Authenticity seems lost, even more so than in Walter Benjamins time. When you are scrolling through your Tumblr, Instagram or Pinterest feed, pre-made digital filters have taken over the act of the actual craft of photography. We want it back, so we make it look like the forelorn eras we feel still had craftmenship at the base of art. But it does not actually look or feel like that, it just feels like looking at a simple, digitally filtered, Instagram photo.

More info on the webkit is found on GitHub.

[mediada]

De kracht van de 'Filter Bubble' online en de invloed ervan op onze identiteitsconstructie.

Een opdracht voor mijn studie heeft mij ertoe aangezet om het boek 'The Filter Bubble' van Eli Pariser te lezen en de consequenties van dit concept op een filosofische manier te benaderen. Ik ben zoals velen tamelijk geïnteresseerd in de wijze waarop mensen hun identiteit construeren, aan welke processen dit onderhevig is en wat hierin beïnvloedt kan worden.

Met dit idee in het achterhoofd is 'The Filter Bubble' al gelijk een intrigerend concept. Het beschrijft hoe het internet steeds meer macht overneemt over ons zoekresultaten via personalisering en zo over welke informatie wij tot ons nemen via dit medium, dat inmiddels alomtegenwoordig is. De menselijke poortwachter tot informatie wordt vervangen door een computergestuurd algoritme dat is afgemeten op onze voorkeuren en wensen, personalisatie dus. En dit algoritme is zo sterk afgericht om ons te geven wat wij willen, dat wij een heleboel nuancering en differentiatie missen in de ontvangen informatie. Het web geeft ons zo, wat het denk dat wij willen. Google, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo, CNN, MSN.. ze controleren allen minstens 64 informatiestukjes van ons, die zij gebruiken om ons gebruik van hun website te optimaliseren. Welke computer je gebruikt, welk nieuws je leest, wat je "like"-t, soms zelfs de inhoud van je e-mails en IMs.

Een zoekopdracht naar "Egypte" kan zulke uiteenlopende resultaten opvragen voor verschillende Google gebruikers, ligt bij één de nadruk op de recente revolutie, bij de ander staan vakantiedeals bovenaan, en wordt de eerste pagina gevuld met economisch nieuws en foto's. Of, zoals Facebook oprichter (en fervent filter gebruiker) Mark Zuckerberg zegt: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." En ja, dat is schadelijk. Pariser haalt namelijk in zijn boek meer dan eens, wat hij noemt "The You Loop" aan. Hierin beschrijft hij hoe deze personalisatie filters ervoor zorgen dat jij in je eigen bubbel komt te zitten. Hier komt alleen naar binnen wat past bij jouw interesses en jouw surf- en zoekgeschiedenis. Het probleem dat hierin schuilgaat is dat je steeds minder gaat delen met mensen waarmee je deze interesses en kenmerken niet deelt. Zo verwordt je internetgedrag in een autopropaganda, die ons indoctrineert met onze eigen ideeën, die ons verlangen naar het bekende versterkt en ons blind maakt voor de verscholen gevaren van het onbekende.

Ik heb zo mijn bedenkingen bij de pessimistische blik die meneer Pariser in zijn boek schetst. Toch denk ik dat deze processen niet te ontkennen zijn en ze wel degelijk invloed hebben op welke beelden en teksten wij in de media tegenkomen, oftewel: welke gemedieerde belevenissen wij meemaken in ons leven. Een belangrijke stroming in filosofie met betrekking tot identiteit gaat er namelijk van uit dat wij onze identiteit (de unieke relatie die ieder mens tot zichzelf heeft) opbouwen doormiddel van opvoeding, omgeving, vrienden etc. Maar, dat tevens een belangrijk onderdeel van onze identiteit het continue proces van toetsing en reflectie is. Reflexiviteit duidt hier op zelfbeschouwing, bespiegeling en het hebben van een zelfbeeld. Thompson schrijft mede hierover in 1995 een invloedrijk boek getiteld 'Media and Modernity'. Volgens hem (bedenk dat hij het schrijft aan de vooravond van het internet, oftewel 'the information highway') zorgen media ervoor dat deze gemedieerde belevenissen steeds rijker worden. In plaats van dat wij alleen ons lokale milieu meemaken, de lokale taal en cultuur, kunnen wij nu uitreiken naar geheel andere landen en mensen. Deze diversiteit van beelden en kennis die dit meebrengt, stelt ons in staat om ons eigen leven aan deze beelden te toetsen. Dus als Oxfam Novib een reclamespot laat zien met hongerige Afrikaanse kinderen, dan heb jij het in jouw westerse omgeving goed, en ben je gezond. Maar ook andere manieren van spreken in andere delen van de wereld of in steden, zorgen ervoor dat jij op jouw eigen identiteit kunt reflecteren.

Pariser schrijft in 2011, wanneer in tussentijd de gehele dynamiek van het internet veranderd is door de grote spelers als Amazon en Google, waar hij in zijn boek zoveel kritiek op heeft. Maar zijn het dan alleen deze internetbedrijven die voor deze filter bubbel zorgen? Is het internet zonder hun tussenkomst een vrije kennisomgeving waar wij onze interesses ten volste kunnen ontplooien en wij andere perspectieven mee kunnen nemen in onze identiteit? Ik denk zelf van niet, daar is het internet simpelweg te groot voor geworden. En juist uit de „hulp‟ die deze internetbedrijven bieden om hiermee overweg te kunnen, ontstaan deze filter bubbels. Het lijkt dus een onontkoombaar gegeven dat hoe meer informatie aangeboden wordt door de verschillende media, deze uiteindelijk gefilterd dient te worden om door ons behapbaar te zijn. In eerste instantie verrijkt het ons leven, tot het punt dat wij oververzadigd raken met informatie en meningen.

Met dit alles in het achterhoofd lijken opeens de recente trailer van Google+ of die advertenties naast je Facebook profiel een stuk angstaanjagender. Want wat nou als je niet meer uit die bubbel kunt breken, en je gedoemd bent tot het slechts van gedachten en verhalen delen met degenen die sowieso al dezelfde voorkeuren als jou hebben? Dat begint ernstig op een eilandjes cultuur te lijken. En zo graag als we dat in de politiek tegen willen gaan, zo zouden we dat ook in ons privé leven tegen moeten willen gaan. Want andere inzichten en ideeën zijn belangrijk, voor wie je bent, en wat jouw omgeving is. Het bepaald de bril waardoor jij naar de wereld kijkt, laat deze niet van je afnemen.

Bronnen: · Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble. London: Penguin Books. · Thompson, J. B. (1995). The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford: Stanford UP.