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No wonder female readers are falling for this story. When the story was first popularized in the 18th century, women had virtually no individual rights. They could not vote, could rarely own property and were themselves seen as property -- so much so that if a wife had an extramarital affair, a husband could sue her lover for damages.
Though many things have changed, women remain economically disadvantaged, are far more likely to be violated than titillated by the porn industry and are publicly called "sluts" for demanding insurance coverage for birth control.
The enduring appeal of a plot like that of "Fifty Shades" suggests that even in 2012, most women cannot imagine how such inequality might disappear. Instead they clamor for the delusion that submission to men's greater power means being taken care of by them.
"Rhizome.org’s annual “Seven on Seven” conference isn’t really meant to have a theme beyond simply exploring the intersection of art and technology. Rhizome director Lauren Cornell plays yenta, matching various figures from the two fields who then brainstorm collaborations and build whatever prototypes can be whipped up in the very abbreviated 24-hours they actually have together (the teams first meet Friday morning, then talk, hatch an idea, and finally present on Saturday afternoon). It was notable, then, that at this year's conference — held April 14 at the New Museum — a theme did emerge organically: Quite a few of these pairs, in one way or another, were responding to a sense that the quality of mental experience was on the decline in our over-wired world."
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Once upon a time, when I was overwhelmed by my reading load in college, I took a speed reading course. The conclusion I came to was that the tricks of speed reading were fine for absorbing raw information, but useless when it came to processing literature. In fact, I realized that literary language was almost specifically engineered to thwart anyone who is trying to relate to it in this way. So I gave up on speed reading. Yet pretty much all those tricks — reading an article out of order, scanning paragraphs as single blocks — are now how I naturally process the flood of emails and online articles I have to consume everyday for my job.
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Maybe our present-day glut of communication is just something we are becoming acclimated to, and we will all, in the future, be happily welded into our Google Glasses, Borg-like. Or maybe at some point, we'll suffer the mental equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, and society will realize that we need to regulate our exposure to technology before it completely dehumanizes us. (As David Auerbach puts it in a recent essay debunking the idea of computer intelligence, computers are not going to adjust to our humanity naturally, so if we don't engage with them critically, there can only be one result: "Their dumbness will become ours.") Or maybe — this is the third way, and the one that the Rhizome conference by nature defaults to — some soulful inventors will find a way to use technology against itself, creating applications that somehow help cure us of our info addiction without forcing us to go cold turkey.
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This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines. Networks manifest an aloof, alien kind of omniscience—increasingly ubiquitous and radically, irredeemably insensible in crucial ways. This is off-the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness… and from some quarters there is a yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-point—all of which Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We’re not in fact empathizing with machines; we’re empathizing with screens. And when you consider what’s really going on in the machine, the screen behavior is epiphenomenal.
Both the exhibition and the book are the outcome of Andrea Grover’s research as a Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow at Miller Gallery and the Studio for Creative Inquiry. In her curatorial statement for Intimate Science and in the introduction to New Art/Science Affinities, Grover explains that contemporary artists working in the art/science matrix are distinct from their 1960s predecessors, a shift she attributes to the networked communication and open-source culture enabled by the internet: “Artists two generations ago were dependent on access to technicians, labs, computer time or manufacturers to realize works of scientific or technological complexity.” In contrast, “practitioners now have greater agency to work fluidly across disciplines and beyond rarified institutions and industries.”
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And now that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this concept of a New Aesthetic, i.e. (if I understand it correctly), an aesthetic influenced by the way computers see the world and, by extension, how see the world, I’ve started to see signs that maybe the New Aesthetic is indeed a thing, a thing so enmeshed in our way of life that we’ve noticed it but not yet given it a name. It’s just seeped into our world so much that even those of us watching art and technology hadn’t thought about it thoroughly before
"It's a bizarre thing when you stumble upon the "new art movement" filtering through discursive chatter. Is it actually a movement, or is it simply a bunch of like-minded individuals telling me its a movement?
Behold The New Aesthetic then - a new art meme in visual culture whimsically constructed by James Bridle, which manifests itself in a Tumblr blog, a presentation for Web Directions South, Sydney and an original blog post. Recent attention to it has reached feverish proportions coming off the back of a SXSW panel in March and a generally positive endorsement by Bruce Sterling in Wired, plus some group responses on the creators project. More recently, the computational media scholar and philosopher Ian Bogost has posted his own thoughts for The Atlantic."
"A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation--even to art. "
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My version of object-oriented ontology, outlined in my new book Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like to Be a Thing, concerns the experience of objects. What is it like to be a bonobo or a satellite or a pixel?
There's a reason I start from aliens instead of computers, and from phenomenology instead of aesthetics. We usually understand alien either in a political or a cosmological sense: a terrestrial alien is a foreigner from another country, and an extraterrestrial alien is a foreigner from another planet. Even when used philosophically to refer to otherness more generally, aliennness is assumed to be a human-legible intersubjectivity. The other is someone we can recognize as enough like ourselves to warrant identification.
But the true alien might be unrecognizable; it might not have an intelligence akin to our intelligence, or even one we could recognize as intelligence. Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales. Everything is an alien to everything else. It is ultimately impossible for one thing to understand the experience of another, but we can speculate about the withdrawn, inner experience of things based on a combination of evidence--the exhaust they leave behind--and poetics--the speculative work we do to characterize that experience.
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The compendium is a better model than the aggregate. A list of things is most useful when it is large enough to show diversity and juxtaposition, but small enough to provide coherence: a tiny bestiary, not an infinite zoo.
I've suggested the term ontography as a name for creating lists, groups, or other collections of things for the purpose of documenting the repleteness under one tiny rock of existence. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory: it can take the form of lists, photographs, collections, even tumblrs, perhaps, with enough practice. Collection is aesthetically productive, but a collection that strives to trace an asymptote toward infinity creates obligation instead of clarity.
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"What I love most about this is how inclusive it is, and how much of it is about recognizing and embracing what an amazingly creative time this is for artists. All too often, we hear of artists who decry such things, who complain about the fact that their club doesn't feel as exclusive any more. For artists and an art exhibit to not just embrace, but joyfully celebrate the way creativity works today, while recognizing how these tools mean that anyone and everyone are creating art all the time, is really wonderful to see."
"Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished.
That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow."
"One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive."
At MASS MoCA the artist has applied her atmospheric veils of paint to four mounds of soil which seem to spill from the upper balcony into the enormous space below. Stacks of Styrofoam shards rise out of the seductive mountains of color, mirroring the white of the gallery walls -- the metaphorical canvas of Grosse's tremendous painting. While the sprawling installation provokes associations with a psychedelic, glacial landscape, Grosse's work is not representational.
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