[spectre] New Aesthetic, New Anxieties

[Michael Dieter]

New Aesthetic, New Anxieties is the result of a five day Book Sprint
organized by Michelle Kasprzak and led by Adam Hyde at V2_ from June
17–21, 2012.

Authors: David M. Berry, Michel van Dartel, Michael Dieter, Michelle
Kasprzak, Nat Muller, Rachel O'Reilly and José Luis de Vicente.

Facilitated by: Adam Hyde

You can download the e-book as an EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.

EPUB: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-epub

MOBI: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-mobi

PDF: http://www.v2.nl/files/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties-pdf

Annotatable online version:
http://www.booki.cc/new-aesthetic-new-anxieties/_draft/_v/1.0/preface/

The New Aesthetic was a design concept and netculture phenomenon
launched into the world by London designer James Bridle in 2011. It
continues to attract the attention of media art, and throw up
associations to a variety of situated practices, including speculative
design, net criticism, hacking, free and open source software
development, locative media, sustainable hardware and so on. This is
how we have considered the New Aesthetic: as an opportunity to rethink
the relations between these contexts in the emergent episteme of
computationality. There is a desperate need to confront the political
pressures of neoliberalism manifested in these infrastructures.
Indeed, these are risky, dangerous and problematic times; a period
when critique should thrive. But here we need to forge new alliances,
invent and discover problems of the common that nevertheless do not
eliminate the fundamental differences in this ecology of practices. In
this book, perhaps provocatively, we believe a great deal could be
learned from the development of the New Aesthetic not only as a mood,
but as a topic and fix for collective feeling, that temporarily
mobilizes networks. Is it possible to sustain and capture these
atmospheres of debate and discussion beyond knee-jerk reactions and
opportunistic self-promotion? These are crucial questions that the New
Aesthetic invites us to consider, if only to keep a critical network
culture in place.

James Bridle's Tumblr site: http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/