Aesthetics

This presentation of "The New Aesthetic" was loaded with tons of examples of how the digital world and the physical world have started to converge, breeding a new culture, a new aesthetic. Particularly interesting to me were two projects each attempting to question and understand certain memetic aspects of our culture that have developed as a result of digital technology.

The first is some of the experimentations with Google Earth and Google street view. In one project, the artist draws attention to the strangeness of looking at a photo taken by a robot: slightly off the ground, similar to how we see things but different enough to make it of the Uncanny Valley. These 360 cameras function to allow us to see places as we do in real life, essentially imitating the human eye. What results instead of a robot seeing as a human, is a human seeing through the eyes of a robot. It allows us to understand this world view of the digital and for the digital to understand the world view of the human, encouraging convergence between the two. Will we ever truly see as machine? Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, wrote a paper called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" that explores this crossover of consciousness that is not truly attainable and that only inference and speculation is possible. However, maybe as our digital presence grows, so will our digital consciousness.

The second project that struck me was an artist who created finger paintings by making the gestures we use when interacting with technology, like scrolling on a touch screen or the tapping of texting. This project illuminates how certain aspects of our physiology as well as our culture have developed as a result of the technological apparatus, and how these gestures and movements have become natural to us, as natural as breathing, walking, or stretching.