Aesthetics of (new) media

For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.

Currently, at the edge of the new digital frontier, automation and smart algorithms are gaining immense social attention, enticing, as mechanization and machines in the previous centuries, as much wonder as awe. Countless magazine headlines paint a fully automated future and ask question about the social significance of automation driven by artificial intelligence. The most recent cover of the MIT Technology Review magazine (July/August 2018 issue) reads: ‘AI and robots are wreaking economic havoc. We need more of them’. Automation seems to be creeping into all aspects of our lives (at least in the developed and industrialized parts of the world), remaining especially noticeable in the context of work (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2011) and the utilitarian products and processes of the fourth industrial revolution – such as fully automated Tesla’s factories, Google’s driverless cars or Amazon’s automated order and delivery chains, to start with
a few most recognizable examples. But, automation is not only altering work. It is changing play too (in the broadest sense of the word).

I hope this piece of writing would work for some people who are interested in witnessing the boundlessness of the world regardless they are studying science, art or philosophy and so on. Since the concept virtuality which is a main word through this dissertation is not a definition or explanation of a specific phenomenon but rather it is an attitude or flexible mind to approach many other concepts in the world. By sharing this collaborated idea from the different ages and places, I hope this tiny effort for collaborating the ideas would connect some relevant ideas beyond timespace because I also got influenced by the other people who have done this effort in various eras.

Il libro, a cura di Valentino Catricalà, L'intelligenza artificiale svolge una funzione cruciale nell'ecosistema culturale globale. Consiglia ciò che dovremmo vedere, ascoltare, leggere e acquistare. Decide quante persone vedranno i nostri contenuti condi-visi. Ci aiuta a prendere decisioni estetiche quando creiamo contenuti digitali. Nella produzione cultura-le, l'IA viene da tempo utilizzata per produrre trailer di film, album musicali, articoli di moda, design di prodotti e web, architettura ecc. Lev Manovich ci presenta un quadro si-stematico per aiutarci a pensare agli utilizzi culturali dell'IA attuali e futuri. E ci offre la possibilità analitica per comprendere i media, il design e l'estetica nell'era dell'IA.

A Spanish-translated collection of essays on postinternet art, including "Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture," originally from Words Without Pictures (LACMA, Aperture/ Thames & Hudson, 2008); "Postinternet: Art After the Internet," originally from Foam Magazine #29 (Winter 2011/2012);  and "The Rhetoric of Soft Tools," originally from The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, ed. Kathy High, Sherry Hocking, Mona Jimenez (Intellect/ University of Chicago Press, 2013).


All but the interview above, in Spanish:

_Arte Postinternet_, Marisa Olson, Cocom Press (Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatan: Mexico), 2014

The essay aims to explore the soundness of traditional definitions of Aestethics (as Theory of Beauty, as Theory of Sensibility, as Philosophy of Art) in the Age of New Media. Analyzing some texts written by Walter Benjamin, the essay focuses on some ideas (montage, innervation, aura-choc) that, in different way, we can find in the current Media Studies (McLuhan, De Kerckhove, Ortoleva). Particularly, the concept of the “Innervation” comes to that “Technological body” (subject of various performances) in which technical medium and human body complement each other. Digital devices strengthen the human body’s possibilities communicating and perceiving, therefore, they give a new relevance to Aesthetics as Theory of Sensibility (aisthesis) in the baumgartenian meaning.
ITALIAN: il saggio vuole verificare quale delle tradizionali definizioni di estetica (teoria della bellezza, teoria della sensibilità, filosofia dell’arte) sia ancora valida nell’età dei nuovi media. Attraverso l’analisi di alcuni testi di Walter Benjamin vengono individuati alcuni concetti (“montaggio”, “innervazione”, “aura-choc”) che trovano riscontro nelle teorie dei massmediologi contemporanei (McLuhan, De Kerckhove, Ortoleva). In particolare il concetto di “innervazione” ha trovato esito in quel “corpo tecnologico” (oggetto di varie performance artistiche) in cui medium tecnico e corpo umano si integrano. Il potenziamento comunicativo e percettivo apportato nel corpo umano dai dispositivi digitali conferisce nuova attualità all’estetica, intesa in senso baumgarteniano come teoria della percezione (aisthesis).

In the light of the imminent publication of three collections of chapters about specific "moments" in TV programmes, this short blog reflects on the status of programmes and extracts from them in TV Studies methodologies. It refers to earlier work on the issues at stake in selection, canonisation, close analysis, evidence and aesthetic criticism in the discipline, especially as I have encountered them in my own work. It argues for the approach taken in the "Moments in Television" book series from Manchester University Press, where TV is regarded as an art form and approached from an aesthetic perspective.

The term “new media art” covers numerous, diverse phenomena with their own specific properties. I will present these properties in the following discourse. The diversity within this field sometimes leads to attempts at defining new media art by juxtaposing its numerous types. However, such a definition renders the term meaningless, yielding in essence merely a collective term encompassing a variety of individually defined types. Moreover, it fails to provide criteria that would indicate the reasons for considering these particular types to be forms of new media art. This term should, therefore, not be defined in reference to individual media or a juxtapositioning of a number of them, but by indicating what unites them and makes them types of new media art. This requires identifying the properties that make new media “new”, that is, different from previous dominant media. The field of new media art remains unstable, constantly in a process of transformation. This is so not merely because of the emergence of new and different types of media, but also because of the transformations constantly taking place in the multidirectional relations between them, including those resulting from processes such as technological convergence, divergence, and remediation, which shape different media configurations and produce hybrid forms. At the same time, however, this fact does not mean we are dealing with a process of substitution, that newer media merely supplant those that preceded them in time and assume their position and status, thereby becoming “newer” new media. On the contrary, within certain limits defined by their properties, newer media join older forms, thus expanding the overall field of new media and deepening its internal differentiation. This is precisely what has occurred in new media art, whose individual types, although seemingly rooted in the characteristics of the new media that gave birth to them, in fact, have acquired their own character and status in relation to the overall new media environment.
The category of new media art came into general use in the mid-1990s (Tribe, Jana, 2006, 7). The forms of artistic activity associated with it, whose beginnings I trace back to the 1950s in the development of cybernetic and oscilloscope art, and in the academic and critical studies that followed these transformations in art, have their own, even longer history. The theoretical approaches to new media art developed by scholars and critics feature a relevant concepts and terminology (Burnham, 1968; Reichardt, 1971; Nake, 1974; Popper, 1975; Druckrey, 1996; Sommerer, Mignonneau, 1998; Manovich, 2001; Wilson, 2002; Tribe, Jana, 2006; Shanken, 2009), proposals for a historical ordering (Youngblood, 1970; Rush, 1999; Grau, 2003; Frieling, Daniels, 2004; Wands, 2006; Grau, 2007; Cubitt, Thomas, 2013), and monographic studies dedicated to numerous trends in and types of new media art (Franke, 1971; Kahn, 1999; Goldberg, 2000; Weibel, 2001; Ascott, 2003; Paul, 2003; Green, 2004; Kac, 2005; Dixon, Smith, 2007; Raley, 2009; Menkman, 2011). Many books on the work of selected artists and analyses of individual works have also been published. In conjunction with the development of new media art and scholarly reflection on it, a number of university courses and programmes in art colleges were established. An institutional and exhibition system also developed, supporting the production and presentation of works and the realisation of artistic and research projects (such as Ars Electronica Center, Linz; ZKM ‒ Media Art Center, Karlsruhe; InterCommunication Center, Tokyo). The first new media art exhibitions were held (Cybernetic Serendipity, 1968; Software, 1970), and new media art magazines (such as Leonardo, Neural, Artnodes), internet sites (such as Rhizome; Netzspannung.org; ADA: Archive of Digital Art) and festivals (such as Ars Electronica, Linz; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Multimediale, Karlsruhe or Transmediale, Berlin) emerged. New media art thereby acquired a full-fledged institutional framework.
In the following paragraphs, I will analyse the concept and multiform phenomenon of new media art on four levels.
I will first consider it in terms of the interaction between art theory and the related conceptual understanding of this medium as an artistic discipline and a material; and media theory, and its approach to the medium as a technical means of communication. In doing so, I will make an effort to avoid privileging either of these two contexts, and explain why a definitional balance and consensus should be sought instead.
Secondly, I will point out and analyse the properties that characterise new media and new media art, and the consequences of trying to define them by assigning them a set of defining characteristics. In doing so, I will draw attention in particular to the possibilities that emerge from defining new media and new media art without placing them on a historical timeline.
Thirdly, I will provide both an overview of the history of new media art and examine the complexity and multiplicity of its types, revealing their diverse status.
Fourthly, I will highlight three basic factors of new media art: newmediality ‒ referring to the “technical-new media” properties of new media art that emerged as a result of the introduction of new technical means of communication into the field of art as tools for creative work; transmediality ‒ referring to the interaction between new and traditional media, whereby art utilising old and new technical means enter into a meaningful relationship or are even integrated into traditional fields of art, creating transmedial forms; and transdisciplinarity ‒ referring to the relations between artistic new-media and transmedia disciplines and other, non-artistic disciplines of social practice, such as science, the humanities, politics and social activism. These relationships result in the construction of transdisciplinary artistic forms.
I will also explain how changes in the hierarchy among these three factors have over time shaped new media art history. I will construct my position both through the use of and in discussion with a number of concepts found in new media art theory.

During the first reflections on media literacy and media aesthetic education and both their differences, emerging thoughts are that media literacy nowadays is probably more natural, more inherent to younger people and therefore is more likely needed to be taught to people from older generations. During the research for this paper it became obvious that – while the initial thought carries some truth – this does not fit the definition of media literacy.
This paper works with both German and English sources, where the first challenge and possible misconception emerges: the fine differences between definitions of media literacy and “Medienkompetenz“ or, literally translated, media competence. Media literacy doesn't really exist in German media pedagogy, which is why in this paper some definitions of media competence were carried over to the term media literacy.
The second term that is very important for this paper is media aesthetic education. Here, the first reflections are that it is implemented and transported throughout the entire process of media literacy, but must be conveyed separately. And this is not a wrong first reflection, but different challenges were faced while researching media aesthetic education: there is a lot of scientific research on aesthetic education, based on different approaches to aesthetic(s). There is a difference if this word alone is approached as a colloquial synonym for beauty, or from the original meaning of the word 'aisthesis', to perceive something, or as the philosophical discipline aesthetics, which can be subdivided into a lot of different approaches in itself.
But this paper is not about aesthetic(s) or aesthetic education, it is partly about media aesthetic education, and this is where the next challenges come up: to find a definition of media aesthetics. Surprisingly, there are not many definitions for a general media aesthetic. There are of course studies about film aesthetics, photography aesthetics et cetera, but a general media aesthetic discipline still seems to be not that established and only fragmentarily researched, even though the academic discipline media studies exist since about 50 years now.
This brings us to the next and most difficult challenge of this paper: What is media aesthetic education? At least aesthetic education has been sufficiently and coherently researched. Media aesthetic education as a specific discipline though, unfortunately occurs very little in the academic and also in the general cultural environment. Due to its limited length, this paper can of course only face the challenges and fill the gaps to a limited extent, but what it tries to do is to provide a coherent summary of both media literacy and media aesthetic education and, because this paper was written in the context of StadtWerkstatt Medien, to find both concepts or at least one of them within the workshops and exhibition of StadtWerkstatt Medien. The leading question of this paper is: Does StadtWerkstatt Medien impart media literacy, media aesthetic education or both?

What follows here is not a definition of art by decree. Nor is this some kind of art manifesto. We are not saying this is how art should be, or could be, but how it is, if you let go of the prison of aesthetics, and follow an infinitely more interesting conceptual trail. This is about uncovering and identifying an approach to art which avoids the triviality of sensory-based aesthetic theory and moves instead towards exploring the experiential worlds that art presents us with. And this approach is not about diminishing the sensory enjoyment of artworks, but about placing them in a much richer context, where they can work a far greater magic.

Videogame designers combine variable elements such as goals and challenges with repetitive ones ranging from props and textures recurrently used to mechanics that make the player perform the same actions time and again. Despite the importance of repetitive factors to provide for a consistent game experience, repetition can be treated as a symptom of a deficient design by researchers and creators. The pri-mary goal of this paper is to make a point of the importance of repetition in video-game design to help both to study further this aspect of this medium and to offer new insights for game creators. To do so, we first provide a list of some of the most common forms of repetition in which players engage while they play. We also an-alyze three case studies of games that have made use of repetition as a key element of their mechanics to introduce key features and nuances.

Whilst linguistics are still being made use of to promote global harmony and international communication, suffice to say that similar efforts are becoming concentrated further towards use within the media. So to what extent does Tolkien's work, and those which followed, deviate from the earlier constructed languages? How do other artlangs compare to Elvish? And to what extent have artlangs affected people having become commonplace in modern-day media? These are questions which will be addressed in this paper, with the intention of illustrating not only how Tolkien influenced the current artlang era, but the extent of the impact that artlangs had, and continue to effect our current view of linguistics.

In which aspects and to what extent can one regard as “narrative” the spatial experience provided by a museum route, a urban building, a multimedia interactive environment, or an immersive videogame? Under which conditions may spatiality be constitutive of a narratively organized interactive experience? What are the relationships between a represented pictorial space and a designed material space, when their narrative roles are taken into account? And what are the socio-cultural or political implications of the mediated interactions between individuals and environments?
Taken together, the possible answers to such questions allow us to grasp some specific features of contemporary media experience, which is broadly characterized by a special emphasis on the articulations between bodily interactions, spatial constructs, and technological innervations. At the same time, the distinctive features of contemporary media experience – irrespective of whether they take place in everyday, entertainment or artistic environments – allow us to rethink on a general theoretical level issues of narrativity, interaction, or immersion.
This special section of Imago aims at investigating the narrative configurations which emerge from the interaction between bodies, spaces, and technologies in contemporary media experiences. More specifically, it addresses the projects which prefocus and orient those experiences, and the forms they assume depending on the medium which is taken under consideration

Firmly throughout case study based analysis of Serbian and Balkan classical media communication, political influences and social impact of the alternative and rebel music scrutinisation of both artists and attached subculture movements members including casual fans in cases of carrying cultural symbolism attained trough artistic expression effects. Purpose of the work is to display the continuing effects of censorship present in the area of SFR Jugoslavija and newly founded countries on the same territory. Author would feel very proud if you would consider the work to be engaging on the level of social and democratic action following the reading's emphasis points.

Society for Novel Studies Conference 2014

Desert of the Real, Oasis of the Virtual: Technostalgic Pastoral in À Rebours and Ready Player One

Dr. Alf Seegert
Department of English, University of Utah
alf.seegert@utah.edu

Paper for Panel 18: FantasyLand, Virtuality, and Speculative Geography

Abstract
Has art theory any function and any importance? A function and importance for who? For the practising artist, theorists, writers on art?
Art speak and its place in art theory, art criticism and artists’ statement. - Many tools  to create an intersubjective and universal frame of reference to make sense of any art exist., for example art history, labels such as expressionism, impressionism, modern art, contemporary art, Fine art, Visual Arts, Northern Baroque Art, minimalist, post-minimalist, anti-art, anti-anti-art, New Aesthetics, new media,  slow art movement, etc and ‘art speak” .

Contemporary society is characterized by excess, by the exasperated search for beauty, in both psycho-physical (e.g., from athletics to yoga, from fashion to cosmetics, from cosmetic surgery to genetic  engineering) and material terms (from clothes to accessories, from mobile phones to automobiles). Confronting a reality where appearance, pleasure, and fun have become dominant concerns, the study of aesthetics has to move beyond the “canonical” confines of abstract academic inquiry in order to orient its research sphere in a pragmatic direction. There is an increasingly urgent need to identify new categories and to articulate more appropriate epistemological models.
Addressing these concerns in the present volume, Elisabetta Di Stefano aims to reconfigure aesthetics in transdisciplinary and transartistic (i.e., “hyperaesthetic”) terms. The goal is to understand the complexity of experience by establishing a dialogue with other disciplines (e.g., ecology, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, gastronomy) and also to initiate a richer and more comprehensive analysis of art, whose forms are no longer (or not solely) to be found in the artistic object, but also in the practices of everyday life. This goal explains the decision (which may be restrictive, but it is not arbitrary) to adopt as privileged interpretive frameworks the theories of two philosophers, the American pragmatist Richard Shusterman and the German neophenomenologist Gernot Böhme, because both reevaluate the significance of sensible knowledge through explicit references to Baumgarten. Shusterman aims to rethink in philosophic terms some bodily practices (e.g., cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, athletics, yoga) and to account for the aesthetic value of popular culture. Böhme articulates the new category of “atmosphere” in order to offer interpretive and critical tools with which to intervene consciously in many fields of “aesthetic work:” from design to packaging, from scenography to interior architecture, from fashion to cosmetics, from communications to advertising. Adopting this dual interpretive framework, the author examines various aspects of everyday life (from nature to design, from marketing to politics), in order to reconceptualize them in light of a new pragmatist aesthetics.

La società odierna è caratterizzata dall’eccesso, dall’esasperata ricerca di bellezza sia psico-fisica (dalla ginnastica allo yoga, dalla moda alla cosmetica, dalla chirurgia estetica all’ingegneria genetica) sia materiale (dagli abiti agli accessori, dal telefonino all’automobile). Di fronte a questa realtà in cui l’apparenza, il piacere e il divertimento sono divenuti, in ogni campo, gli obiettivi dominanti l’estetica deve sforzarsi di superare i confini “canonici” di un’astratta speculazione accademica al fine di orientare in senso pragmatico la sfera d’indagine. Diviene, quindi, sempre più urgente individuare nuove categorie e adottare più adeguati modelli epistemologici. Da qui l’ipotesi di riconfigurare l’estetica (“iperestetica”) in senso transdisciplinare e transartistico. Lo scopo è quello comprendere la complessità dell’esperienza attraverso il dialogo con altri saperi (ecologia, biologia, sociologia, psicologia, antropologia, gastronomia), ma anche di avviare un’indagine più ricca ed esaustiva sull’arte, le cui forme non sono più (o non solamente) identificabili con l’oggetto artistico, bensì sono da rintracciare tra le pratiche della vita quotidiana. Con questo obiettivo si giustifica la scelta, forse restrittiva ma non arbitraria, di privilegiare, come chiavi di lettura per questo lavoro, le teorie di due filosofi: il pragmatista americano Richard Shusterman e il neofenomenologo tedesco Gernot Böhme, poiché entrambi rivalutano, attraverso un esplicito richiamo a Baumgarten, il valore della conoscenza sensibile. Shusterman vuole riconsiderare, in chiave filosofica, alcune pratiche corporee (cosmetica, chirurgia estetica, ginnastica, yoga ecc.) e riconoscere il valore estetico della cultura popolare. Böhme, attraverso la nuova categoria di “atmosfera”, vuole offrire strumenti interpretativi e critici con cui operare consapevolmente in molti settori del “lavoro estetico”: dal design al packaging, dalla scenografia all’architettura d’interni, dalla moda alla cosmetica, dalla comunicazione alla pubblicità. Secondo questa duplice chiave interpretativa vari ambiti della vita quotidiana (dalla natura al design, dal marketing alla politica) saranno sondati al fine di riconsiderarli alla luce di una nuova estetica pragmatica."

Since the 90s decade, when the first online newspaper borned, untill nowadays, the research on designing them have hardly been developed. Most of online newspapers are in an experimental state of the question, in dependence on the traditional ones – lack of an own planned structure and contents – and conditioned by a group of technical limitations. Moreover, we have to add the disadvantages observed in usability and information architecture.

Key words: design, Internet, navigation, usability.

Desde que en la década de los 90 surgieran los primeros medios, hasta nuestros días -2006-; el diseño de estos medios se encuentra todavía en un estado incipiente de la cuestión. La mayoría de las versiones digitales se encuentran en fase experimental, en dependencia de los medios tradicionales - carentes de infraestructura organizativa propia y contenidos- y condicionados por una serie de limitaciones técnicas. Hemos de sumar además las críticas respecto a usabilidad y arquitectura de la información.

Palabras Clave: diseño, Internet, navegación, usabilidad.

This research was ultimately generated by the recognition of disturbances and difficulties pertaining to the curation, exhibition, and preservation of contemporary new media art. To start to formulate a process that is understood and achieved through the adaptation of artists, curators, and Academia, by researching current professionals’ experiences and opinions in each of these roles is the goal of this study. Comparisons between those artists categorized as “fine” or “commercial” show diversions that take this genre of fine art away from the art institution, and solutions on how to bridge the gap between these diversions are theorized. The role of the “medium” is broken down as Virtual Reality (as well as Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality) is touched upon as a crux in the theory of the aura of art and digital reproduction, as well as an outlet for future preservation and exhibition. Three case studies are presented to supplement each section of research including: Christopher Bauder, Vello Virkhaus, and Björk.

"The paper draws on the author’s research into podcasting, especially in relation to its uptake by public service radios, which may be constituting a revitalising of the public radio voice. Invoking historian, John Durham Peters discussion of the merits of dissemination and dialogue, and critical theorist Bertolt Brecht’s disappointment with “one way” broadcast radio in the 1930s, the author explores podcasting as a new form of broadcast dissemination which draws on radio’s past dreamings of “eros and democracy” (Peters 1999). The significance of this time-shifted and ever expanding distribution of voice and its acousmatic presence creating a new media 'pod-ecology' is also discussed in the context of amateur and citizen media.

Reference; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, University of Chicago Press, 1999.""

In which aspects and to what extent can one regard as “narrative” the spatial experience provided by a museum route, a urban building, a multimedia interactive environment, or an immersive videogame? Under which conditions may spatiality be constitutive of a narratively organized interactive experience? What are the relationships between a represented pictorial space and a designed material space, when their narrative roles are taken into account? And what are the socio-cultural or political implications of the mediated interactions between individuals and environments?

Taken together, the possible answers to such questions allow us to grasp some specific features of contemporary media experience, which is broadly characterized by a special emphasis on the articulations between bodily interactions, spatial constructs, and technological innervations. At the same time, the distinctive features of contemporary media experience – irrespective of whether they take place in everyday, entertainment or artistic environments – allow us to rethink on a general theoretical level issues of narrativity, interaction, or immersion.

This special section of Imago (No. 22/2021) aims at investigating the narrative configurations which emerge from the interaction between bodies, spaces, and technologies in contemporary media experiences. More specifically, it addresses the projects which prefocus and orient those experiences, and the forms they assume depending on the medium which is taken under consideration.

The musical universe of the 20th and 21st centuries is a force-field in which styles, instruments, personalities and stories can be found that are ascribable to conceptual frameworks that may differ greatly one from another. Such complexity cannot be traced back to single theories or all-encompassing interpretations, but may be tackled, philosophically, starting from certain characteristics. This book identifies nine such characteristics: namely, Extremes, Noise, Silence, Technology, Audience, Listening, Freedom, Disintegration, and New Media. Each of these permits us to open up unforeseen philosophical-cultural paths and interpret, in its multifarious variety, the developments of contemporary music, profoundly interwoven with the history of thought, culture and society.

This paper discusses the ways in which affect and the political aesthetics of Anonymous can be linked to possibilities of arousing affect, create unity and mobilise resistance; invite public participation in public affairs. In the culture of Anonymous, political resistance is not considered as limited to rational tactics nor in accordance with the principles of intellectual/cognitive “reason” (alone), but interplayed with “the lulz” – a specific kind of political passion – that works as an affective political force; capable of inspiring an alternative (radical) imaginary. In this context, the “lulz” and the aesthetics of Anonymous are reflected in strategies of engagement deployed to challenge the hegemonic discourses promoted by political economy. Following Mouffe (2013), we argue that there is no political equality (plurality) without conflict and without conflict no constructive political dialogue. In this line of argument, we are also influenced by the Spinozan perspective on affect as ability for action and change.

Keywords: Anonymous, Affect, Aesthetics, Hacktivism, Passion, Lulz, Social Media, Power, Surveillance, Resistance

Ferrada Stoehrel, Rodrigo and Simon Lindgren. 2014. For the Lulz: Anonymous, Aesthetics and Affect. TripleC - Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12 (1): 238-264.

The paper is concerned with the complexities of interrela- tions between human sensory modalities and the role of artistic experimentation in triggering new forms of percep- tual organization. The research field of sensory substitution, starting from the neuroscientific investigations by Bach-Y- Rita in the 1970s, has provided many insights into how certain brain functions can compensate for the others, thus demonstrating the brain capabilities for plasticity. Although trackable through brain-scanning and neuroimaging technologies, the emerging effects, such as vision-like qualia, remain subjective and can be communicated primarily only through analogies. One productive way to explore the dialectics between the subjective and possible objective knowledge is a comparative analysis of neurocomputational models and experiences designed in artistic projects. How can a model – be it computational or experiential – guide us into what happens at the level of the neuronal structures? In what follows, we consider some methods of testing the ‘sentience’ of the brain and making the inner changes ‘feelable’ explored through artistic means in a series of interdisciplinary laboratories and exhibitions in Moscow in 2013-2019.

The article discusses practices of media art taken within the context of the discourses of trans-mediality and the sublime. Digital technology creates phenomena that provoke new modes of perception and new sensory experiences, including those evoking a sense of something that is beyond representation, a feeling traditionally belonging to the aesthetic framework of the sublime. I focus on the analysis of affective qualities of the experience of transition across media borders and of the potential realm beyond the closed loops of these borders. What kind of meaning does this translation produce on the level of phenomenological and aesthetic inquiry, but also in terms of increasingly complicated cultural relations? Does the technical challenge carry any affective charge? What are the strategies via which new media art enacts the sensorial tensions of transmediality? I address these questions while analyzing practices of media art that represent diverse types of rendering relations: mutually affected recombinations of movement, speech and written text (" BodyText " by Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine); interactive projects, involving smell and gesture by the Russian group " Where the Dogs Run " ; and visual and acoustic interpretations of physical data (" psychogeophysics " projects by Martin Howse and the micro_research group).

Da alcuni decenni, in Italia, politica e media si sono stretti in un rapporto dettato da un condizionamento biunivoco, nel quale il paesaggio mediatico influenza la comunicazione politica e viceversa. La proposta di ricerca qui presentata è articolata in un’area di indagine “macro” ed in una “micro”. La prima esplora la trasformazione del rapporto tra media e politica in seguito all’avvento dei nuovi media nell’ecosistema mediale. La seconda, invece, indaga come l’utilizzo delle immagini nelle piattaforme social dei leader politici stia cambiando i processi di trasmissione, ricezione ed elaborazione dell’informazione. Nello specifico, l’area di indagine “macro” esplora i fenomeni della mediatizzazione della politica, della disintermediazione e dello storytelling visivo; quella “micro”, invece, indaga il potere delle immagini nel facilitare il processo di apprendimento, generare un senso di appartenenza e garantire, allo stesso tempo, un elevato livello di coinvolgimento emotivo nello spettatore.

This article addresses social and symbolic differences in contemporary Kinshasa as these are expressed in and mediated via widely watched music television shows such as Bana Léo (‘The Children of Léo[poldville]’) and Sentiment Lipopo (‘The Feeling of Lipopo’), both of which have become extremely popular in Kinshasa (‘Léopoldville’ as the city was called during colonial times, or affectionately ‘Lipopo’) since the early 2000s. Recorded in local nightclubs, these programmes show elderly people performing cha cha cha, merengue, polka piquée, bolero, rumba, and other international dance styles to Congolese rumba music dating from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods. Intimately tied to the emergence of a new category of elderly people in Kinshasa, these shows clarify the boundaries between the ‘urban elderly’ and (a) the younger generations and (b) the ‘elders from the village’. A ‘practical nostalgia’ is performed that aims at restoring value to, and the esteem of, elders in the African city. The Bana Léo genre thus illustrates the ambiguity of the production of difference in the cultural domain. While generational differences may be expressed in the space of this genre, it simultaneously articulates a cultural attempt to overcome that distance and to create conviviality among the generations.

Master of Arts—Integrated Studies 656: Datascapes: Information Aesthetics and Network Culture critically examines the intersections of the information arts and information technologies in our rapidly changing times, and explores how cross-pollination between these fields alters not only art and culture but the world we live in. Through exploring the differences among how contextualized information, data, and knowledge are written in and by a diversity of media, this course maps the unique shapes that information assumes in digital culture. It engages new approaches to understanding the transformation that information is enacting on our temporal, spatial, and visual perceptions. The increasing fragmentation of cultural structures and the rise of connectivity as a new paradigm is evident all around us, from the world of medicine to multinational capital to the World Wide Web. The ascendance of the database as a new pre-eminent cultural form begins to blur the boundaries between art and reality, and representation and simulation, and creates new social networks necessary for interactive engagement.

La teoria dell’imitazione centrale nella riflessione estetica fin dall’antichità e fulcro del sistema delle Belle Arti elaborato nel Settecento da Charles Batteux sembra entrare in crisi con l’emergere delle nuove tecnologie e in particolare con la realtà virtuale. Il saggio, attraverso l’esame di alcune istallazioni artistiche multimediali e interattive, mette in luce le riconfigurazioni del concetto di imitazione nella contemporaneità in cui l’intero apparato categoriale tradizionale (autore, opera, fruitore) appare completamente trasformato.

The chapter focuses on the issue of transmedial and sensory exchange in the context of digital culture and biometric technology. It analyzes critically the epistemic claims behind the various brain-scanning technologies, focusing on the status of the inner images that underlie cognitive activity. Multimedia performances and artistic experiments designed in collaboration with neuroscientists open up new dimensions in the discussion of translation between different sensory modalities, as well as translation between human perceptive apparatus and computational systems. Engaging the methodologies of contemporary image science and critical neuroscience, the paper shows how artistic scenarios help to both localize and expand our understanding of mental imagery and to offer an alternative to the existing correlations-based approach.