Postdigital 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—. 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 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

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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 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. Hughes, Rob Kitchin, Raine Koskimaa, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Marysia Lewandowska, Geert Lovink, Thor Magnusson, Chris Marsden, Iain McDaniel, William Merrin, Sally Jane Norman, Jussi Parikka, The Pelham Arms, Alison Powell, Andrew Prescott, Ned Rossiter, Darrow Schecter, Paul Squires, Rachel Thomson, Nathaniel Tkacz, Iris van der Tuin and the many, many people he may have forgotten to include. Finally, he would also like to thank his family, Trine Bjørkmann Berry and Helene, Henrik Isak and Hedda Emilie, for always being there even when, due to pressures of writing, he wasn’t. Michael would like to thank his wife, Rachael Kendrick, for all the end- less support and encouragement. He would also like to thank the many colleagues and friends for conversations, provocations, patience and inspira- tion during his time with new media at the University of Amsterdam and the Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, while this edited collection came together: Thomas Apperley, Clemens Apprich, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Josephine Bosma, Mercedes Bunz, Marcus Burkhardt, David Gauthier, Mieke Gerritzen, John Haltiwanger, Stefan Heidenreich, Anne Helmond, Yuk Hui, Andreas Kirchner, Dimitri Kleiner, Eric Kluitenberg, Christina Kral, Geert Lovink, Alessandro Ludovico, Rosa Menkman, Helge Peters, Thomas Poell, Ned Rossiter, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Nathaniel Tkacz, Marc Tuters and Simon Worthington. We would both like to express our thanks to our editor at Palgrave, Felicity Plester, and to Sneha Kamat Bhavnani, for help and support during the writ- ing process, and to the contributors, who have been supportive in supplying their chapters in (mostly) a timely manner. We would also like to thank all the artists and designers who agreed for their work to be included. Finally, we would like to thank again all those who have contributed ideas to the book, whether through scholarship, artistic practice, media and sonic inter- ventions, conversations or networks; we remain indebted to the generosity and support of these colleagues, who made editing the book both a challenge and a reward. Contributors

Christian Ulrik Andersen is Associate Professor in Digital Design and Research Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus Univer- sity, Denmark. He researches in digital aesthetics and culture, and practices interface criticism. He is a frequent speaker at media art festivals and conferences, and is the co-editor of a series of research workshops and peer- reviewed newspapers with the transmediale festival, Berlin, and the journal A Peer-Reviewed Journal About (aprja.net).

Thomas Apperley is an ethnographer who specializes in researching dig- ital media technologies. He is the author of the open-access print-on- demand book Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global (2010). Tom’s more recent work has appeared in the journals Digital Creativity, First Monday and Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication.

Caroline Bassett is Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Fellow at the University of Helsinki and Professor of Media and Communications in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. She researches media technologies, cultural forms and practices and has published widely on feminism and technology, technological imaginaries and contemporary computational culture. She is currently writing about hostility to computing.

David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and is the author of and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source and the editor of Understanding Digital Humanities.

Mercedes Bunz is the author of The Silent Revolution: How Algorithms Changed Knowledge, Work, Journalism, and Politics without Making Too Much Noise (2014) and writes on technology, media, the public sphere and journalism. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, has a PhD in media studies from Bauhaus University Weimar and an MA in philosophy and art history from the Free University Berlin.

Vito Campanelli (www.vitocampanelli.eu) has a PhD in communication and new technologies, and is a writer and new media theorist. His main research interest is technological imaginary. He is also a freelance curator of digital culture events and co-founder of MAO – Media & Arts Office. His essays on media art are regularly published in international journals.

xiii xiv Notes on Contributors

His most recent publications are Snap Shooters (2014), InfoWar (2013), Remix It Yourself (2011) and Web Aesthetics (2010).

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both systems design engineer- ing and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006) and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011) and the co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2005). She has been Visiting Pro- fessor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany) and Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science at Harvard University. She is completing a monograph entitled Habitual New Media.

Geoff Cox is Associate Professor in the Department of Aesthetics and Com- munication and Participatory IT Research Centre, Aarhus University, adjunct faculty at Transart Institute (DE/US) and part of the self-institution Museum of Ordure. With Tatiana Bazzichelli, he co-edited Disrupting Business (2013), and, with Alex McLean, wrote Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression (2013).

Florian Cramer is Reader for Arts and Media at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. His most recent book is Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (2013).

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television and Co-head of the Depart- ment of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London; Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne; and Honorary Pro- fessor of the University of Dundee. His publications include The Cinema Effect, EcoMedia, The Practice of Light and the open-access anthology Digital Light. He is the series editor for Leonardo Books. His current research is on environmental impacts of digital media and on media arts and their history.

Michael Dieter is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. His work focuses on software studies, publishing, media art and aesthetic philosophy. He has published in the journals differences, Fibreculture, Australian Humanities Review and M/C, and is completing a manuscript entitled Unknown Errors: Postdigital Aesthetics and the Common.

David Golumbia teaches in the English Department and the Media, Art and Text PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Cultural of Computation (2009) and more than two dozen articles on Notes on Contributors xv digital culture, language and linguistics, and literary studies, and he main- tains the digital studies blog uncomputing.org. He is currently completing a book entitled Cyberlibertarianism: How the Digital Revolution Tilts Right.

Katja Kwastek is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VU Uni- versity Amsterdam, with a research focus on media aesthetics. Previously, she taught at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (Munich), Rhode Island School of Design Providence, LBI Media.Art.Research (Linz) and Humboldt-University (Berlin). Her publications include Ohne Schnur – Art and Wireless Communica- tion (2004) and Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (2013).

Malcolm Levy is an artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. His artistic practice focuses on abstract photography and video. Recent exhi- bitions include Transfer Gallery (New York), The Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver), the Maraya Arts Park (Sharjah) , CSA (Vancouver), Supermarkt (Berlin), Audain Gallery (Vancouver), Grim Museum (Berlin), and Nuit Blanche (Toronto). He has an MA in Media Studies from the New School of Media Studies, and teaches digital art and installation at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. He was the Director of the New Forms Festival from 2001 to 2015 and the Artistic Director of International Symposium of Electronic Arts in 2015.

Lev Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (2005) and The Language of New Media (2001). Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at the Graduate Cen- ter, City University of New York, and a Director of Software Studies Ini- tiative, a research lab focusing on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data.

Lukasz Mirocha is Research Project Director and a PhD candidate at the Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’, University of Warsaw, Poland. He is interested in digital media aesthetics, software and technology studies, and social and cultural consequences of society–technology interaction. He holds a BA in philosophy and an MA in liberal arts.

Shintaro Miyazaki studied media studies, musicology and philosophy at the University of Basel, and completed a PhD on a media archaeology of computation at the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2012. He is a senior researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Academy of Art and Design, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures in Basel and is working on practice-based projects for enquiring into media, their timing and effects on cultures, ecologies and materialities. xvi Notes on Contributors

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is Docent in Dig- ital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland, and the author or editor of several books on digital culture. These include Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010), What Is Media Archaeology? (2012) and, most recently, Geology of Media (2015).

Christiane Paul is Associate Professor at the School of Media Studies, the New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her recent books are Context Providers: Condi- tions of Meaning in Media Arts (2011/2012), New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (2008) and Digital Art (2003/2008/2015). As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney she curated exhibitions including Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007) and is responsible for art- port, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, Feb. 7–April 17, 2013), Eduardo Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); and Feedforward – The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009).

Daniel Pinkas is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Haute Ecole d’art et de design (HEAD – Genève). He is the author of La Matérialité de l’Esprit (1994), Santayana et l’Amérique du Bon Ton (2003) and numerous articles on the , philosophy of art and media studies.

Søren Bro Pold is Associate Professor of Digital Aesthetics at Digital Design, Aarhus University, Denmark, part of PIT and Digital Aesthetics Research Center. He has published on various topics and genres within digital aesthetics with a focus on interface criticism, including electronic liter- ature, net art, software art, urban and mobile interfaces, and controlled consumption.

Stamatia Portanova teaches Cultural and Media Studies at the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, where she is also a member of the Techno- cultures Research Unit. She is also a member of the Montreal- based Senselab. Her research focuses on digital culture and philosophy. She is the author of Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts (Tech- nologies of Lived Abstraction series) and of various articles published in journals such as Body and Society, Space and Culture, Computational Culture, Angelaki and Fibreculture.

Alise Tifentale is the author of Photography as Art in Latvia, 1960–1969 (2011) and co-curator of North by North East, the pavilion of Latvia at the Notes on Contributors xvii

55th Venice Art Biennale (2013). Her articles about art and photography have appeared in ARTMargins, Russian Art & Culture and Studija. She is a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Marc Tuters: Prior to a career in education, Marc Tuters developed the concept of ‘locative media’ through art-based research projects in Canada, Latvia, USA, Singapore, Japan, Germany and the Netherlands. Drawing on this background, his PhD dissertation, entitled “The World as Interior: The Search for Place in a Networked Age”, theorizes relationships between media philosophy and interface technology, concerned especially with normative theories of navigation in the face of shifting concepts of location.