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Postdigital Aesthetics This page intentionally left blank Postdigital Aesthetics Art, Computation and Design Edited by DavidM.Berry University of Sussex, UK Michael Dieter University of Warwick, UK Introduction, selection and editorial matter © David M. Berry and Michael Dieter 2015 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-43719-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49378-4 ISBN 978-1-137-43720-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137437204 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Postdigital aesthetics : art, computation and design / [edited by] David M. Berry, University of Sussex, UK; Michael Dieter, University of Warwick, UK. p. cm Includes bibliographical references. 1. Digital media—Philosophy. 2. Technology—Aesthetics. 3. Photography—Digital techniques—Philosophy. 4. Mass media—Technological innovations. 5. Technology and the arts. I. Berry, David M. (David Michael), editor. II. Dieter, Michael. B54.P67 2015 111.85—dc23 2015002350 For Geert Lovink This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Notes on Contributors xiii 1 Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design 1 David M. Berry and Michael Dieter 2 What Is ‘Post-digital’? 12 Florian Cramer 3 Genealogies of the New Aesthetic 27 Christiane Paul and Malcolm Levy 4 The Postdigital Constellation 44 David M. Berry 5 Communication Models, Aesthetics and Ontology of the Computational Age Revealed 58 Lukasz Mirocha 6 How to Be Theorized: A Tediously Academic Essay on the New Aesthetic 72 Katja Kwastek 7 A Hyperbolic and Catchy New Aesthetic 86 Daniel Pinkas 8 The Genius and the Algorithm: Reflections on the New Aesthetic as a Computer’s Vision 96 Stamatia Portanova 9 Selfiecity: Exploring Photography and Self-Fashioning in Social Media 109 Alise Tifentale and Lev Manovich 10 Judging Like a Machine 123 David Golumbia 11 Not Now? Feminism, Technology, Postdigital 136 Caroline Bassett vii viii Contents 12 Postscript on the Post-digital and the Problem of Temporality 151 Geoff Cox 13 Dark Patterns: Interface Design, Augmentation and Crisis 163 Michael Dieter 14 Data Visualization and the Subject of Political Aesthetics 179 Sean Cubitt 15 School Will Never End: On Infantilization in Digital Environments – Amplifying Empowerment or Propagating Stupidity? 191 Mercedes Bunz 16 The City and the City: London 2012 Visual (Un)Commons 203 Jussi Parikka 17 Going Beyond the Visible: New Aesthetic as an Aesthetic of Blindness? 219 Shintaro Miyazaki 18 Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation and the Postdigital 232 Thomas Apperley 19 Through Glass Darkly: On Google’s Gnostic Governance 245 Marc Tuters 20 New Aesthetic in the Perspective of Social Photography 259 Vito Campanelli 21 Aesthetics of the Banal – ‘New Aesthetics’ in an Era of Diverted Digital Revolutions 271 Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold 22 Networks NOW: Belated Too Early 289 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Index 316 Figures 2.1 Popular take-away restaurant in Rotterdam, echoing an episode from 19th-century Dutch colonial history, when members of the Chinese minority living in Java (Indonesia, then a Dutch colony) were brought as contract workers to a government-run plantation in Suriname, another Dutch colony 15 2.2 Google.nl image search result for ‘digital’ gives mainly blue images in original, October 2013 16 4.1 The digital iceberg 47 8.1 NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided 103 9.1 The selfie dataset (including Tokyo) 111 9.2 A frame from a blended video montage 113 9.3 Imageplots showing distributions of selfies by city, age and gender 114 9.4 A screenshot from the selfiexploratory app 114 9.5 A chart showing one of the selected findings 115 16.1 Sport is Great, from the ‘Great’ campaign 207 16.2 London underground circuit map by Yuzi Suzuki 214 21.1 Zoomed version of NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided 272 21.2 Image from Johannes Osterhoff’s Iphone-live.net. The project uploads screen dumps every time he presses a button on his iPhone. These screen dumps are enabled by the platform itself to increase performativity 276 21.3 Christophe Bruno’s Dadameter map. The map displays the correlation between the homophony and proximity of words in Google and how, for example, words that are strongly connected in a network tend to end in the area of Boredom (banality), and how unambiguity ends as Utilitarianism 282 21.4 Aram Bartholl’s First Person Shooter is an example of a low-tech mock-up that demonstrates an interfaced first-person-shooter way-of-seeing. Image by permission of Aram Bartholl 285 21.5 Aram Bartholl’s Dropping the Internet performance literally destroys the early utopian internet iconography by dropping a flashy internet sign from a 1990s internet cafe 286 22.1 The U.S. Highway Network 297 ix x List of Figures 22.2 Statistical systems representation of the neuroanatomy of the frontal networks in the Macaque 298 22.3 Bertillon card, 1913 306 22.4 Francis Galton, ‘The Jewish Type’, 1883, Plate XXXV 307 22.5 Email for MOB #4 in New York City 310 Acknowledgements No book is written in a vacuum, and this book is no different. It emerged from a networked academic, artistic and intellectual milieu in which we were able to discuss and share the ideas that eventually led to the emergence of this volume and which we hope will lead to further discussion, debate and contestation of the questions over what we are here calling postdigital aesthetics. Both editors share a love of great coffee and would like to note a very special kind of coffee craftsmanship at Bonanza Coffee Heroes in Berlin, which made sure our caffeine levels remained productive during a key part of the process of thinking about computation and aesthetics. We would like to express our thanks to Michelle Kasprzak (then curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam), who first put together the book sprint on New Aesthetic New Anxieties in 2012 that first fired our interest in thinking about the questions raised by new digital aesthetics as part of a massification of the representation and mediation of the digital. From that book sprint, we are grateful to Michel van Dartel, Adam Hyde, Nat Muller, Rachel O’Reilly and José Luis de Vicente for their generosity and willingness to engage and share their thoughts and ideas on the new aes- thetic. Next we would like to thank Transmediale, and particularly Kristoffer Gansing, for the invitation to work on another book sprint, Imaginary Muse- ums, Computationality and the New Aesthetic, prior to the Transmediale festival in Berlin in 2012, but then also to present the work and discuss it at the festi- val in 2013. Indeed, we would like to thank our co-writers and collaborators, Baruch Gottlieb and Lioudmila Voropai, for engaging in such a vibrant and creative spirit of writing and working together, along with the many people who came to hear our presentation at the festival and offered interesting thoughts and perspectives on the new aesthetic and postdigital. In addition, David would like to take the opportunity to thank all col- leagues in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, who have made it possible for him to work on this edited collection in a busy teaching term, but particularly Caroline Bassett, Michael Bull, Anjuli Daskarolis, Andrew Duff, Chris Effner, Lee Gooding, David Hendy, Tim Jordan, Mary Krell, Carmen Long, Thor Magnusson, Paul McConnell, Sharif Mowlabocus, Lee Reynolds, Lee Salter and Sue Thornham. He would also like to thank the University of Sussex for support for the Sussex Humanities Lab and for digital humanities and computational media at Sussex, partic- ularly Michael Davies, Alan Lester and Debbie Foy-Everett. He would also like to acknowledge the following for their continual support and conversa- tions: Marcus Leis Allion, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Armin Beverungen, Ina Blom, Melanie Bühler, Mercedes Bunz, Andrew Chitty, Faustin Chongombe, xi xii Acknowledgements Christian De Cock, Natalie Cowell, Leighton Evans, Anders Fagerjord, Matthew Fuller, Steve Fuller, Alex Galloway, Craig Gent, David Golumbia, Andres Guadamuz, Tim Hitchcock, Lorna M.