Digital Aesthetics

In March 2015 Allahyari & Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push creative technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird.

The 3D printer is a profound metaphor for our times. A technology for channeling creative endeavour, through digital processes, into the layering of raw matter excavated from ancient geological eras. Considered as a tool for art, design and engineering, and gesturing towards a forthcoming era of synthetic chemistry and biological augmentation, 3D fabrication technologies are already a site of common exchange between disciplines and material modalities. 3D fabrication can be thought of as the critical framework of #Additivism: a movement that aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’ / science fictional thinking.

#Additivism is a portmanteau of additive and activism, gesturing to the scale at which new forms of action and intervention take place. Our Manifesto and Cookbook question whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position. We are concerned with critiquing the role ‘radical’ new technologies might have in these changes, from fablabs, workshops, and classrooms, through to social, ecological, and global scales.
We embrace the 3D Printer in the same way that Donna Haraway embraced the figure of the Cyborg in her influential text A Cyborg Manifesto (1983). By considering the 3D printer as a technology for remodeling thought into profound, and often nightmarish, new shapes #Additivism aims to expose in-betweens, empower the powerless, and question the presupposed.

by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

""The rise of digital media has been widely regarded as transforming the nature of our social experience in the twenty–first century. The speed with which new forms of connectivity and communication are being incorporated into our everyday lives often gives us little time to stop and consider the social implications of those practices. Nonetheless, it is critically important that we do so, and this sociological introduction to the field of digital technologies is intended to enable a deeper understanding of their prominent role in everyday life. The fundamental theoretical and ethical debates on the sociology of the digital media are presented in accessible summaries, ranging from economy and technology to criminology and sexuality. Key theoretical paradigms are explored through a broad range of contemporary social phenomena – from social networking and virtual lives to the rise of cybercrime and identity theft, from the utopian ideals of virtual democracy to the Orwellian nightmare of the surveillance society, from the free software movement to the implications of online shopping. As an entry–level pathway for students in sociology, media, communications and cultural studies, the aim of this work is to situate the rise of digital media within the context of a complex and rapidly changing world.

‘ Digital Media and Society is a comprehensive, compelling and critical examination of the social and cultural consequences of digital media and communication technologies. The book provides a cohesive and coherent look at the present digital state of society, and it explains how the digital present came to be and what its consequences are. It is written in a clear, jargon–free manner and filled with information and questions that make it a remarkably useful teaching text.’ Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago

‘Adrian Athique’s introduction brings digital media, and its culture, politics and economics, into sharp focus. This book provides an essential outline of the digital world; it is accessible to all while remaining complex enough to be accurate.’ Tim Jordan, King’s College London"

" The book is jammed packed with many current and interesting issues of concern and includes an impressive review of an extensive range of related scholarly publications. The style of the book makes it a great textbook for students of sociology or communication and media studies. All in all, the book is ambitious and impressive, it includes an extensive account of contemporary scholarly work in related fields, and it was easy and enjoyable to read. The book is warmly recommend to other readers." Nasrine Olson, Information Research

"Digital Media and Society’s main strength to provide a concise and eclectic yet satisfactorily rich and well contextualized account of digital life. Athique successfully situates this complex, multifaceted subject with the same proficiency he showed in his explorations of India’s media culture, at the crossroads between cultural practice, economic development, and geopolitical struggle...Digital Media and Society (is) a great didactic tool to introduce sociology and communications students to the advent of the digital society. The author’s ability to situate the complex, interconnected issues and perspectives at stake will without any doubt encourage those students not only to critically engage but also to continue exploring this new indispensable field of sociological inquiry." Louis Melancon, Canadian Journal of Sociology

"Overall, in a context characterised by a lot of published, but at times fragmented, ‘noise’ around digital media and society, Athique’s book provides a clear, well-structured and
comprehensive overview of the historical development of both digital media and the variety of approaches to theorise their impact. If we allow for the duly acknowledged ‘Anglophone bias’, the book convincingly explores a contemporary ‘digital society’." Henk Huijser, Media International Australia"

The phenomenon of new media art calls into question our understanding of the art object and our relationship to it. Should this relationship be approached ontologically— questioning the art object's very being? Should it be approached phenomenologically or experientially through sense perception? Perhaps only the interstices and intersections of cognitive ability and affectivity offer any hope of clarity. The following thesis will center on new interpretations of new media art that re-focus on the role of the viewer's bodily and cognitive encounter with " immaterial " digital imagery. Through the effort to determine " materiality " and investigations (some in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics) as to where perception and interpretation occur, new media art has managed to form a new problem for the question of mind-body dualism that has long plagued philosophy. Specifically, I will examine how new media art is being created in order to affect complex phenomenological experiences for the viewer, that is, how it enfolds perception, sensation, and cognition into a singular human experience. This thesis will entail two interrelated aspects. The first is a critical analysis and interpretation of the existing literature on digital art and new media aesthetics. Once the conceptual problems have been laid out, I will turn to the art in question. A primary focal point will be the critical presentation of the new media artwork of Israeli artist Eyal Gever. I am proposing to critically read Gever's work because it both supports and problematizes the notion of " materiality " prevalent in the literature. I intend to demonstrate that Gever's recent work epitomizes a phenomenological simultaneity of being embodied by new media art.

In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, and internet-based forms as central to moving-image horror as is the cinema—and, further, the form and style of horror moves between mediums. This chapter establishes the current transmedial nature of moving-image horror by analyzing two recent films, Unfriended (2015) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). These films eschew traditional cinematic editing and camerawork in favor of a style and structure consisting of browsing, messaging, and other networked communications taking place on a single laptop screen. This chapter also introduces the book structure that centers around a movement from sensation to narrative—aesthetics of emergence and of absorption or immersion—from works that are almost exclusively shock-based to those whose interest in the genre is firmly entrenched in telling complex absorbing stories about monsters.

This dissertation aims to understand in detail the relationship between play and the sense-making process in interactive art encounters. It argues that play and the ludic character observed in such encounters are fundamental dimensions, which predominate in many interactive art experiences. From this perspective, we propose to examine in depth the type and nature of play but also to understand how its emergence affects the symbolic understanding of the experience.
Moreover, it argues that despite the emphasis on the bodily, sensorial and performative, interactive artworks still hold a sense that needs to be interpreted by participants. As such, our analysis aims to verify if play, operationality and bodily performance override the symbolic dimensions of the encounter or if, instead, there is still a space for detached reflection about our lived and felt experience.
To accomplish this task an interpretative phenomenological method was applied to examine the reception of three different artworks in natural settings. This method was prepared and adapted according to each interactive artwork. Furthermore, by reviving the concept of psychical distance developed by Edward Bullough, we examine the concept of aesthetic distance in interactive arts, refining this discussion with the data provided by our qualitative analysis.

FR ~ Expérience et Signification dans les Arts Interactifs  / Influence du Jeu libre et Distance Esthétique dans les Expériences Interactives


Cette dissertation vise à comprendre en détail la relation entre jeu libre (free-play) et construction de sens dans les expériences esthétiques interactives. Nous soutenons ici que le jeu et le caractère ludique que nous observons sont des aspects fondamentaux et prédominants dans la plupart de ces expériences interactives.
Nous nous proposons donc d’analyser en profondeur la nature du jeu déclenché par ces expériences, mais aussi de comprendre son influence sur la compréhension symbolique de l’expérience.
Malgré l’accent mis sur les aspects corporels, sensoriels et performatifs, nous défendons l’idée que les œuvres interactives portent un sens qui doit être interprété par les participants. Dans cette perspective, notre analyse cherche plus spécifiquement à vérifier si le jeu-libre, les opérations techniques et la performance corporelle surpassent les dimensions symboliques de l’expérience ou si, au contraire, il y a encore la place pour une réflexion sur le vécu et le ressenti.
Afin de développer cette recherche nous avons utilisé une méthodologie IPA (Analyse Interprétative Phénoménologique) pour examiner la réception de trois installations interactives auprès des participants. Cette méthodologie était préparée et adaptée en fonction de chaque œuvre interactive.
Enfin, en ranimant le concept de distance mentale développé par Edward Bullough, nous examinons le concept de distance esthétique dans les arts interactifs, affinant cette discussion grâce aux données récoltées lors de notre analyse qualitative.

PT ~ Experiência e Construção de Significado nas Artes Interactivas / A Influência do Jogo livre e Distância Estética nas Experiências Interactivas


Esta dissertação procura compreender e descrever detalhadamente a relação entre jogo livre e o processo de criação de significado na recepção de obras de arte interactivas. Argumenta-se que o jogo e o carácter lúdico observados durante este tipo de recepção artística predominam em muitas destas experiências interactivas. Nesta perspectiva, propõe-se examinar aprofundadamente a natureza e o tipo de jogo que surgem destas interações mas também compreender como é que a sua emergência afecta a compreensão simbólica da experiência.
Argumenta-se ainda que apesar da enfâse dada à redescoberta do corpo e dos sentidos, à performance corporal e a outros aspectos da ação fomentados por este tipo de experiências, estas também encerram significados que requerem uma interpretação por parte dos participantes. Como tal, esta análise procura verificar se o jogo, a performance corporal e as operações necessárias para ativar a experiência se sobrepõem à dimensão simbólica do encontro ou se por outro lado, ainda existe “espaço” para uma reflecção distanciada sobre a experiência vivida e sentida.
Para realizar este estudo desenvolveu-se um método IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) para examinar a recepção de três obras interactivas em condições naturais. Além disso, através da revisão do conceito psychical distance desenvolvido por Edward Bullough, analisou-se o conceito de distância estética aplicado às artes interactivas. Esta discussão foi refinada e enriquecida através dos dados provenientes das análises qualitativas.

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).

El artículo busca delinear una experiencia estética vinculada a la utilización de lenguajes digitales en la creación literaria. La principal hipótesis es que las características hipertextuales de la literatura digital, así como la posibilidad de manipulación vinculada al lenguaje de códigos propio de lo digital, dan forma a lo que la autora llama "estética digital". La reflexión sobre los conceptos base de esta experiencia estética-hipertextualidad y "hackeo cultural"-se realizará a través de la presentación de trabajos de literatura digital chilena, en el entendido que sus poéticas se desprenden del uso y experimentación con el lenguaje de código.

The article aims to outline a digital aesthetic experience related to the uses of digital languages in literary creation. The main hypothesis is that the hypertextual structure characteristic of digital literature, along with the possibility of manipulation intrinsically related to code language, are two elements that define what the author calls "digital aesthetics." The reflection on the concepts that constitutes the basics of this experience-hyper-textuality and "cultural hacking"-will be developed through the presentation of some works of Chilean digital literature, understanding that their poetics are linked to the uses and experimentation with code.

In response to the Animate Assembly’s ongoing investigation on 'life' and animism in current animation practices, I put together some preliminary speculations around animation, ecocriticism and spiritual beliefs that came to my mind after watching Shinkai Makoto’s latest animated feature Weathering with You (Tenki no ko, 2019), a film released last year amidst national and international acclaim. In studies of Japanese animation, the received association of animism with animated movement has led many commentators to search for instances of Shintō – Japan’s indigenous tradition of animistic beliefs – in anime, often giving currency to the idea of an innate Japanese harmony with nature. This view, however, has tended to underrate the ontological and emergent qualities of both Shintō and anime, reducing them to discursive products of an already known ‘Japanese’ culture. The juxtaposition of spiritualism and digital animation techniques in Weathering with You permits to readdress this claim by looking at Shintō and anime as multivalent formations 'in ontological, political as well as affective terms’ (Jensen and Blok 2013: 96). If animation is about perceiving 'life' in technically animated images, what does this film tell us about our own life at the time of human-made ecological crises? What kind of material ecologies does the film itself animate? In the context of current discussions on new animism and ecocriticism, I will argue that Weathering with You is a reminder that different animation techniques afford different relationships between animation and animism, immaterial and material ecologies.

In our current technological age, digital reproductions of artworks are readily available with a mere Internet search. Additionally, the Internet allows for users to acquire copies of any image editing software, which in turn enables the altering and amalgamating of virtually anything, by anyone.  The results of this infinite availability that I wish to explore are the combinations of fine art pieces with elements of present-day popular culture into memes with art historical backgrounds and pop culture references. In a large way resembling the Dadaist tradition, these digital works physically and philosophically resemble Dadaist photomontage. As I place these works in a Postmodern setting, they reject the traditional medium and technique of painting and perhaps even adopt societal critique and parody, while the physical principles bear resemblance to pastiche.

Anche grazie ad eventi di grande impatto mediatico (un “dipinto” prodotto dall’Intelligenza Artificiale è stato venduto all’asta da Christie’s per 432.500 dollari), l’applicazione all’arte e alla cultura di questa potente tecnologia sta suscitando sempre maggiore interesse. Il tema è indubbiamente suggestivo, ma si presta anche a considerazioni generiche, nostalgiche o moralistiche, oppure ingenuamente tecno-entusiaste: e quasi sempre si tende a considerare l’AI come un tutto indistinto senza articolare i diversi aspetti del fenomeno.
In questo articolo proverò invece a catalogare le applicazioni artistiche dell’AI in base ai settori di utilizzo

A case study on the use of artificial intelligence to make "Deepfakes," or realistic but fake videos using facial images of a celebrity or private person. The ethical challenges of using this technology to make fake porn videos or fake news content is discussed. Authors: James Hayden & Scott Stroud. More case studies at: https://mediaethicsinitiative.org/case-studies/

The article questions the two dominant views on media aesthetics – one takes the empiricist stance, and the other pushes forwards a media-technological a priori – in order to posit a third view. This view is transcendental empiricism, which one can trace in the work of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. This article demonstrates this argument with the example of digital objects – the new form of industrial objects composed of data and metadata – and proposes to investigate their aesthetics by articulating three logical operators – induction, deduction and transduction – as correlations to the three views mentioned above.

The aesthetic quality of architectural products is closely related to their production mode and affected by the production technology. Within investigation of contemporary architecture in the digital realm, many software layers mediate in the production process and become influencers to the final aesthetic output.

This paper illustrates the interrelation of electronic, media or computational technology with contemporary architecture and the way these emergent production mediums determine aesthetic dimensions and the aura of the design. Examining the concept of the aura, as it was defined by Walter Benjamin in his work ‘The Work of Art at the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and analysing the postdigital designs under the frame of the study of Rosalinde Krauss on the relation of the grid with originality, the paper argues that contemporary designs lack the aura. The loss of the aura is attributed to an inevitable element repetition that veils the design, but not to identical copies serving mass production as was the case described by Benjamin.

Starting point to the study is an investigation on existed architectural production modes, from artisan re-production to digital co-production, with an emphasis on the deterministic degree of each technique to the aesthetic output and the status of the aura, and through particular examples in art and architecture.

Arriving to the postdigital era, the paper analyses the multilayered algorithmic processes which are utilized to create autonomous computational designs and relates them with the morphological potentialities of the products. This analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the interactions between the binary and the design language and a determination of the aesthetic boundaries of algorithmic design. Following that and after comparing postdigitally produced designs among them and with modernity ones, the paper recognizes a recursion of modernist aesthetics in current, postdigital images.

The logic of representation that underpins most (if not all) photography theories, considers photography as a recording of space and this is done at the expense of those aspects of photography that relate directly to temporality and duration. The automatic privileging of space over time has some significant consequences for the ability of photography to respond to political, social and cultural change, not least because national capitalism is gradually being replaced by intensive, interactive and networked model that operates not according to the spatial logic of borders, territories and classes but according to a new logic that creates sites of intensity in which identity and the legal status of persons is thrown into question (online chat rooms and privately owned public spaces such as Canary Wharf are prime examples). As photography is the dominant form of visual communication everywhere, its inability to represent the changing landscape of citizenship and the reconfiguration of the ‘polis' into privately owned space without the possibility of political action, contributes to the absence of a critical discourse regarding the effects these changes have on people’s lives. In light of such dynamics, I end the chapter by outlining three strategies of photographic intervention that bypass representation and allow to engage directly and materially with the changes brought about by networked and computational technologies through the ability of the technical image to reflect on its own mode of production. These strategies are: erasure, self-replication and repetition. Taken together, these strategies make a case for photographic practice that is alert to its own mode of production and to the productive forces that shape our world.

Pada sebuah diskusi panel yang diberi tajuk "Instagram as an Artistic Medium" di Art Basel Miami tahun 2014 silam, Simon de Pury, seorang art dealer yang berbasis di New York dan London, mengeluarkan pernyataan yang cukup provokatif; bahwa "setiap pengguna Instagram pada dasarnya adalah seorang seniman!...Apa yang terjadi dengan Instagram adalah setiap orang telah menjadi seniman!" i Dengan pernyataan itu, de Pury mau menempatkan setiap foto atau video yang diunggah para pengguna Instagram di akunnya masing-masing sebagai karya seni. Pernyataan tersebut memang terbilang boombastis dan terkesan terlalu terburu-buru. Kendati cukup mengganggu, apa yang disampaikan de Pury tetap menarik untuk diketengahkan di dalam perdebatan tentang posisi jejaring sosial sebagai medium artistik. Memang benar bahwa saat ini, objek seni tidak lagi terbatas pada medium-medium tertentu atau tidak lagi bermedium tunggal. ii Dengan begitu, pengalaman estetis bisa kita dapatkan pada berbagai jenis objek, serta terbebas dari pandangan tradisional tentang "kriteria estetis seni" yang formal. Namun, itu tidak berarti bahwa semua aktivitas di jejaring sosial, khususnya unggahan foto dan video di Instagram, bisa ditempatkan sebagai karya seni. Lantas, bagaimana perbedaannya?

Resumen

La saga Silent Hillen su conjunto, y de manera específica Silent Hill 4: The Room, supone un caso paradigmático de construcción de lo fantástico en los videojuegos. Sirviéndose de las convenciones características de este medio, y alterándolas oportunamente
para obtener determinados golpes de efecto, es posible generar en el jugador un amplio abanico de sentimientos. Concretamente, la modificación de algunos parámetros
del espacio de juego (ya sean audiovisuales o aquellos que afecten a las mecánicas lúdicas de ese universo) es uno de los recursos más eficaces a la hora de sumergir al jugador en la experiencia. En el caso de Silent Hill 4, diversas modificaciones en el espacio de juego (el apartamento del protagonista) revelan de qué manera lo fantástico y lo
siniestro pueden converger en el medio videolúdico.

Abstract:

Silent Hill, and specifically Silent Hill 4: The Room, are paradigmatic cases of the construction of the fantastic in videogames. Developers are able to generate a wide range
of feelings in players if they alter some of the usual videogame conventions. Modifications to various parameters of game space (whether audiovisual or relative to game
mechanics) are one of the main and most effective resources to create a deeper and
more immersive game experience. In Silent Hill 4, various changes in the space of game  (the main character’s apartment) show how the fantastic and the uncanny can converge in videogames.

The famous quantum physics experiment 'Schrödinger's cat' suggests that some situations are undecidable, i.e. they exist outside of the normative distinctions between 'truth' and 'false'  because both states can co-exist under certain conditions. This paper suggests that photography has very close links with this state of affairs, because photography allows one to move from the world of certainty into the quantum dimension of undecidability and indeterminate states.

Rational autarchy has been fundamentally disrupted by both quantum mechanics and neuroscience. The implications for photography are profound - not because of an absurd reductionist notion that the essence of photography can be located in a photon or a neurone and thus physics can predict politics - but rather because quantum systems and brain science serve as portals to the edge of logos, from which vantage point the flaws inherent in a conception of photography that derives from reason become apparent. It is then possible to conceive of photography as an emergent phenomenon beyond a linear rhetoric of content, measurement and description. The auto-destructive energy of capitalism must be gestalted by the life-force of photonic energy, flowing through the meta-superconductor that is photography.

La presente investigación se propone analizar dos estéticas contemporáneas: el cyberpunk y el vaporwave. Ambas basan su imaginario creativo en una sociedad tecnológica, motivo por el cual se abordan cuáles son sus principales temáticas e iconografías con la finalidad de acercarnos al estudio de sus diferencias y cómo interpretan los nuevos avances tecnológicos, prestando especial atención a la realidad virtual.

The present research intends to analyze two contemporary aesthetics: Cyberpunk and Vaporwave. Both base their creative imagination on a technological society, because of this we try to see what their main themes and iconographies are in order to approach the study of their differences and how they interpret new technological advances with special emphasis in virtual reality.

Dok sedim za računarom u kafeu pišući ovaj tekst i razmišljajući o značaju i značenjima slika i savremenih digitalnih formi vizuelizacije, petogodišnji dečak koji trčkara unaokolo biva zaintrigiran i zastaje. U nemogućnosti da vidi ekran, pokušava kretanjem i pogledom da uspostavi interakciju sa mnom. Tačnije, raširenih, radoznalih očiju, on traži interakciju sa potencijalnim slikama na ekranu ispred mene, preko mene. Kažem mu da nemam ni crtaće, ni igrice, ni slike, samo reči. Razočaran odlazi i ostavlja me sa pitanjima: kakva je to privlačnost i zavodljivost, ta moć koju slike imaju nad nama kada, čak i u njihovom odsustvu, žudimo za njima? Do koje mere i na koje načine slike potpiruju našu imaginaciju? Koliko se na njih oslanjamo u preispitivanju i potvrĎivanju onoga što zovemo "realnost" ili "istinitost"? I konačno, koji su efekti tog širokog polja vizuelnog, posebno danas kada su fluidne, procesualne i nadasve promenljive digitalne slike postale "kamen temeljac u formiranju znanja"? 1

Cinematographic aesthesis. How does digital Cinema transform our Sensitivity?

Abstract
Nowadays, many cinema studies are dedicated to understand digital phenomena. The technological development of software for media production allows us to open the research landscape and to formulate new and renewed questions to understand what is happening. For example, think about how digital applications impact on film creation and in the spectator experience. In several analytic and theoretical approaches we can find some kind of aesthetic intentions that explore both, formal (technical and artistic) and sensitive (perceptual or emotional) implicated issues related to the digital. Let´s focus on this topic highlighting the following question: Who digital cinema transforms our sensibtivity? To approach an answer I propose to talk about transformations in what I call cinematographic aesthesis. Here, the film as an object and the spectator as a subject, both, are deeply involved into the notion of aesthesis: sensitive condition that can be understood in terms of expression throughout film and, fundamentally, as human perception and affection. So, with cinematographic aesthesis I define thereby a mental process, mainly perceptible, implicated in the connection film-spectator; process in which there is a relevant relation between cinematographic aesthetics and sensitive spectator. Based on this, I would like to explain, inspired by cognitive film studies and by the new media context, possible transformations raised by certain qualities and features of the digital. And why this explanation about cinematographic esthesis could be significant? Because with it we can understand, analytically, possible changes arising from the digital cinema that impact in narrative and interaction film experiences.

Keywords: cinematographic esthesis, digital cinema, transformation, sensitivity.

For citation or Bibliographic reference: Gómez Mayorga, Jacqueline. “Cinematographic Aesthesis. How Does Digital Cinema Transform our Sensitivity?”. Bieszczad, Lilianna (ed.).( 2015). Practicing aesthetics . Institute of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University. Poland: Wydawnictwo LIBRON. ISBN 978-83-65148-42-1

Drawing on New Materialism and Affect Theory, Gruber argues that the influence of relatively new neuroscience methods (EEG, MRI and fMRI) on the visual arts has not yet been fully realised. In fact, the very idea of a brain as it is seen and encountered today - or "The Brain," as Gruber calls it - remains in need of critical, wild and rebellious re-imagination. Chapter One outlines the history of the brain concept, focusing on a time before there was a thing we recognise today as a brain. Chapters two and three explore six works of brain art, sketching out Neurosensuality and Affective Realism. Chapter Four asks what else can brain art do, and what is it not doing? The final chapter reinterprets Deleuze's account of Nietzsche to reassess this thing called the brain, calling the brain object into question.

In less than two decades, digital networks have moved from providing a macro background environment – actively accessible by only a small coterie of scientists, experts, and state or corporate agents – to pervading and augmenting our lives at an increasingly micrological level. As our world is plugged into the matrix, we know from direct experience that the pace of change is feverish, the scope infinite and the effects in need of constant reckoning. The Post-Media Lab offers a space in which to examine, reflect and operate upon the networked, mediatised society from an unhurried perspective.
The term ‘post-media’ was coined by Felix Guattari's and subsequently taken up by other critical theorists to describe social and medial assemblages, which unleash new forms of collective expression and experience. The Lab aims to build a place where the aesthetic and utopian moments of ubiquitous media can be recaptured, and the multilayered forces and textures of media space become newly legible. We take up 'post-media' as an inherently critical notion adequate to the media strategies of scenes, movements and collectives – rather than the individualities and normativities produced by commercial media – which construct and intensify social agencies, help develop new forms of relation and generate counter-meanings.

Guiding principles of the Lab will be to maintain a wide historical perspective and to scrutinise established programmatic and strategic positions; the concepts, experiments and radical promise of past engagements with telecommunications, digital media and aesthetics will be kept in mind, as much to reprise their energies and enthusiasms as to create a gauge for where we find ourselves today.

Between 2012 and 2013 the work of the Post-Media Lab was structured around four topics: Connecting People Apart (January to June 2012), The Subsumption of Sociality (July to December 2012), The Question of Organization After Networks (January to June 2013), Life versus Object. Comrade Things and Alien Life (July to December 2013).

Post-Media Lab operates on different levels, working with different simultaneous tectonics::
* Building a peer community interested in post-media (inter alia through a system of 'Visiting fellows')
* Translocal publics (extending collaboration between Lüneburg region and other localities on the planet)
* Transnational networks (assembling and short-circuiting different spheres like civil society, media activism, media art, hacktivism, media based research)
* Free, experimental and clandestine forms of publication (PML Books and other hybrid publications like 'Beyond the Timeline')

Terrence Malick’s "Voyage of Time" puts the latest technology into the search for the oldest images we can think about, those of our origin. Taking this paradox as a starting point, we will explore precedents of visual effects in science documentaries and their role in Malick’s particular quest for wonder. Are VFX capable of truth?

In social media, individuals are accustomed to hypertextual dynamics of a participative culture, established by languages that replicate behavioural patterns and potentialize their ideas. The resources in these platforms enable dialogues progressively more interactive, with a dissemination potency that can be one of the keys to think the intense flow of collaborative production that comes from the users in the web nowadays. In this context, after the social network website Facebook release a new function that enables the publication of images in the comments of its posts, it began an immense profusion of inside jokes and virals proliferated by memetic image sharing, basing itself in the irony and nonsense humor, characteristic of the entertainment in the so-called “digital trash culture”.

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Nas redes sociais, os indivíduos estão acostumados às dinâmicas hipertextuais de uma cultura participativa, estabelecida através de linguagens que replicam padrões de comportamentos e potencializam suas ideias. Os recursos nessas plataformas possibilitam diálogos cada vez mais interativos, cuja potência de disseminação pode ser uma das chaves para se pensar o intenso fluxo de produção colaborativa que parte dos usuários na rede atualmente. Nesse contexto, após a rede social Facebook liberar uma nova funcionalidade que permite a publicação de imagens nos comentários de suas postagens, deu-se início a uma imensa profusão de piadas internas e virais proliferados por meio do compartilhamento de imagens meméticas, pautando-se na ironia e humor nonsense, característicos do entretenimento na chamada "cultura digital trash".

The paper approaches the face as one of the most relevant and controversial bio-techno-political battlefield. Specifically, it tries to unfold the implications of the evolving processes of ‘machinization’ of the face related to the development of a number of tracking technologies that are nowadays reaching the mainstream public – from iPhone X unlocking by recognizing the face of its owner, to a new Mastercard technology allowing payment by tracking users’ faces , to apps such as MSQRD and Face Stealer which allow users to modify their facial traits by assuming the ones of somebody else . If bio-tracking technologies are based on the idea that one’s face is unique and not replicable, the amount of entertaining face-tweaking apps available on the market seems to suggest exactly the opposite – face is trackable, its features tweakable, and its uniqueness hackable. Thus, the face turns into the site where contradictory regimes of truth coexist and feed each other in a form which keeps an appearance of immediacy while hiding layers of algorithmic complexity. This new regime of visibility related to the face brings along a paradoxical regime of truth. But how does this new regime of truth relate to processes of ‘datification’ and value extraction? The paper argues that from a hermeneutic perspective the art of circulationism and data extraction seems to lie on this ambivalence: the more “real” (or better “gore”) and unfiltered an image / information looks the more its networking value grows, the more a number of extractive practices are implemented behind its surface – or right on it, such as in the case of face tracking technologies.

Forthcoming, MIT Press, Leonardo Books, Winter 2019.
Virtual Menageries:
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Jody Berland

From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary  proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. 
Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities and in Graduate Programs in Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Science and Technology Studies, and Music, at York University, Toronto, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology.

one-liner: The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.

In this paper, a new concept, “if-image”, is introduced to grasp the unique aesthetic qualities of digital games and applied to several case studies – art games with unconventional visual language (Panoramical, Aentity, The Catacombs of Solaris, etc.).
A historical overview of pre-computer art techniques involving formal operations on discrete data shows that there is link between digitality and interactivity and that, in a sense, digital art is older than computers. However, the invention of computers allowed orchestrating a set of well-known artistic techniques in a new way.
The real-time 3D technology made a revolution in computer games—just like montage and the mobile camera, according to G. Deleuze, transformed cinema by replacing moving images with “movement-images”. Gamers actualize / generate (movement-)images by choosing branches of the algorithm. At the same time, these choices and branches are not perceived as a distinct actions and entities—rather, there is one multifaceted and susceptible to influence yet indivisible image – an “if-image”, named after the if / then statement in programming. It is percevied mostly at the bodily level.
Digital aesthetics, as shown in the paper, is based on a paradox: digital systems are discrete by nature and yet they are used to simulate the continual if-image; the monotonous mathematical structure of the digital “grid” somehow gives birth to its opposite. As an art form, games either suppress this paradox to create perfect illusions or take a self-reflexive approach and reveal the underlying tension and attraction between the opposites.

This chapter examines digital virtual environments as a site for art and proposes a formal aesthetics for art in digital virtual environments. The study arises from the author's decades-long practice producing art in virtual environments and the related theoretical considerations that have arisen from that practice. The technical, conceptual and ontological status of virtual environments is examined in order to establish a base of intrinsic qualities that identify virtual environments as a medium for art. The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon is used to achieve this. The elements and principles the artist must employ to work with this medium are identified as data, display and modulation. The specificities of virtual environments as a medium for art are examined in order to establish a formal aesthetics. In particular, digital colour, visual opacity, digital sound, code, artificial intelligence, emergence and agency are identified as the primary qualities that the artist manipulates to bring forth art in a virtual environment. Draft for chapter published in "New Opportunities for for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds", 2015.

In this paper I will study the artistic status and circulation of cultural products in the social network Twitter. To this end, I will take the ideas of Walter Benjamin on the loss of “aura” and the José Luis Brea’s approaches about the electronic cultural capitalism, a new stage of culture characterized by the passage of an auratic monumental logic to an "era of electronic distribution" and its new possibilities of distribution and access.

In an age of retrotopia, nostalgia has become a dominant structure of feeling in our culture. With an innate futureleness permeating through generations, the need to long for the past is seemingly more prominent than ever. The entertainment industry has capitalised on this notion, leading to an industry that is becoming increasingly engaged with nostalgia. Whilst nostalgia is primarily a form of mourning, a built up emotion that needs catharsis, the nostalgia industry (and the entertainment industry) has facilitated the growth of a new form of nostalgia - prosthetic nostalgia. When a consumer cannot find catharsis, unconscious melancholy occurs. Through developments in digital technology, the nostalgia industry has encouraged a form of nostalgia that requires no prior experience or memory. In other words, consumers find themselves feeling nostalgia towards periods in time, or concepts, that they have no ties to. A consumer simply cannot consciously long for a home that they have never been to. Prosthetic nostalgia is a new category of nostalgia that serves to draw a line between authentic feelings of nostalgia and a feeling of nostalgia that is manipulated into surplus value by industry.

 Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega  July 2005  The Metaphysics of Violence  Issue 36 Upon its release in 1996, Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis was praised as a groundbreaking achievement in the history of Spanish cinema due to its superior appropriation of Hollywood's audiovisual and storytelling aesthetics. While critically championed, Tesis did not manage to attract a massive audience to the movie theatres until the Spanish Film Academy awarded it seven Goyas, including best film. Scholars have hailed Amenábar as the ultimate representative of a new breed of Spanish filmmaker who understands the necessarily commercial co ordinates of the film market. In Tesis, commerce and art form are brilliantly integrated for the sake of establishing a different kind of Spanish cinematic product, one that recognizes the demands of the filmmaking as a fundamentally capitaldriven practice and, at the same time, selfconsciously incorporates the heritage of Spanish cinematic form. (2) 8/4/2015 » "Snuffing" Hollywood: Transmedia Horror in Tesis Amenábar initially utilizes Ángela in the role of video spectator within the film to draw us into his generic ride in a double manner: first, by making her embody the problematic attraction to violence that exists at the core of our own subject position as Tesis' viewers; second, by situating her character in the flexible generic slot of "victim/hero" and directing our secondary identification to her. Ultimately, Amenábar makes Ángela cross over to the other side of the video camera lens, resorting to the horror thriller's generic apparatus. Nondiegetic spectators reach for Ángela then, mimicking her previous reactions to the viewing and listening of snuff, and, at the same time, are caught up in the hypercalculated frenzy of Amenábar's masterful rendering of the genre product.

Did you know there are people who actually spend hours browsing the web for images of cats that look like Ron Swanson and make mash-ups of Curb your Enthusiasm and Twin Peaks for their own and our collective pleasure? Television memes like these have become an integral part of online television culture. Sites like Tumblr and Reddit are filled with remixes, mash-ups and parody memes that make up a profound corpus of digital traces of television fandom. The term meme originally coined by Richard Dawkins, refers to how small cultural units of transmission spread. The making of

In recent years there has been growing interest in artificial neural networks (ANNs) which are quickly becoming the primary device for machine learning. Used for finding patterns in large data sets, ANNs were also recently employed in many artistic contexts: as tools for artists, semi-independent creators of content, and even as invisible " critics " which / who predict our aesthetic preferences. The aim of this paper is to speculate about the disruptive effect of these 'alien agencies' on the (modernist) aesthetic regime of art centred around the notion of autonomy. The author examines how neural networks and connectionist epistemologies may potentially affect the most common ways of producing, circulating, and valorising art. He claims that the possibility of automatizing creativity and art criticism may lead to the emergence of a new aesthetic regime based on forms of dynamic, distributed and probabilistic governance.

In times of renewed debates on the status of the object and the real in the arts the question of a new radical empricism is at stake. How is experience not human but always more-than-human or ecological?

We ask: how such an ecological approach is political and what are its aesthetics?

Current enthusiasm about new forms of realism, like speculative realism, strikes the art field with immense force. What we perceive is a certain return of the "object," similar to architecture's return to the sketch-board, after three decades of conceptually driven discourse and its discomforting pitfalls. Finally, some might argue, we overcome the predominance of discourse and encounter "things" beyond language. What seems crucial, is the status of the real in these new aesthetic and philosophical debates.

With this symposium we want to extend the rather dialectic procedure with which this debate continues and investigate how the relations between matter, memory and the more-than-human enable a multi-shaded formation of the real, inclusive of the materialist sensibilities of Marxist, post-structuralist and radical empiricist philosophies of the last century. Making such an inquiry an aesthetic concern affords us to reconsider the status of the empirical in relation to the experiential. Rather than following phenomenological traditions the symposium puts particular attention to early pragmatist philosophies like William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Ralph Waldo Emerson, providing a different, radical empiricist, version of the real.

Finally the question would be, how such a take on realism in the age of the anthropocene affords us to re-assess what a more-than-human politics might look like and what forms of organization are in need for its realization.

Speakers:

Heather Davis (Penn State University)
"Ancient Archives of the Future: Strange Temporalities of Plastic"

Ridvan Askin (University of Basel)
'Every pumpkin in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin history': Emerson and the Memory of Matter'

Stamatia Portanova (University of Naples L'Orientale)
"The Genius and the Algorithm. Reflections on the Postdigital Aesthetics as Capitalist Neurosis"

Joel McKim (Birkbeck University of London)
Object, Matter, Energy: Towards a Philosophy of Infrastructure

This article analyscs the rclationship b('twcen digital tcchnology and política[ film-making in thc current era of unevcn globalization. First, I study thc role of contemporary counter-narratives of mi¿.,:rratíon in gíving visibílity to thc illcgal bodies-in-motion that circulatc through the westem fortrcsses. Second, 1 disscct the di,1,.,rital and imperfect acsthctic of a set of films-Welcome to Sarajcvo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997), In this World (Michacl Winterbottom, 2002) and Turtles can Hy (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004) -in order to define the nuances of thcir poli tícal discourses. Third, l arguc that thc authenticating appeal of digital technology is largely based on thc fact that spcctators toda y cxpericncc thc digital in thcir quotidian lije expericnccs. Thcrcforc, they approach digital products not only as consumers, but also as producers of audio-visual imagcry. Finally, 1 study how these films operate in a limínal space between the flctional and documentary mudesthc fictorcal. l contcnd that thcse films fail to hidc thcir structuring artiftciality. Paradoxically, this failure, in combination with their imperfcct digital look, is the cornerstonc of their capacity to successfully engage an active spectator in thc interrogation of thc spccific sociocultural rcalitícs they explore. By deploying a range of represcntational convcntions working within a varicty of fictional genrcs, they KEYWORDS digital impcrfection immigration political film-making Winterbottom fict<Jreal