One fundamental trait of contemporary digital culture is that its central concepts are enormously volatile. Ideas put forward yesterday as new, pioneering concepts hardly rate a mention today. Notions that just a moment ago still held the promise of offering a conceptual framework, not solely for electronic art but for the ongoing digitalisation of all spheres of life, are promptly discarded again. Or are simply no longer discussed, particularly as even newer and “more contemporary” terminological creations take their place in the twinkling of an eye. A pop-up principle, akin to the emerging hallmark of user interfaces in widely used operating systems, is reflected in the discourse on aspects of electronic art and life. Indeed, it goes further than this: this principle echoes an approach that increasingly shapes culture as a whole. Urgent considerations appearing out of the blue and sudden emergence have becoming the determining parameters of the cultural realm as the half-life of usable items and gadgets shrinks at an ever-increasing pace. A more viable formation of terminological concepts obviously cannot keep up with this dynamic. Relentless attempts to stay the course despite this testify to an indefatigable desire to somehow nonetheless get a grip on and master this development.
Let us consider some of the more striking cases from the recent past–attempts to do justice to rapid technological progress in terms of its aesthetic dimension. “Post-internet”, “New Aesthetic” or “flatness”, to cite just a few of the terms that have circulated recently, punctuate a convolute of progress which increasingly cannot be mapped using traditional measures. Aesthetic terminology generally takes shape retrospectively: with a corresponding degree of abstraction and with the aid of whichever theoretical tools seem most apt, styles, genres, paradigms etc. are singled out, or demarcated as categorically as possible from what they are not. Alternatively, concepts are introduced as a manifesto, in other words, in the form of declarations on the shape that art should assume in the future–here again the discursive mode deployed is one of differentiation: the ideas proclaimed in the manifesto should be distinguished as clearly as possible from the bad old ways. A third variant is postist demarcation, which contains elements of the other two modes: it comprises a desire, looking back, to take leave of an epoch, a predominant style etc. yet without having the new, manifesto-style tools available and therefore preceding only ex negativo, in a sense turning its back to the future. In this respect, the idea of “post-mediality” could also be seen more as an admission that the specific features of individual media (in as much as distinct media can be separated out at all today) have largely been exhausted, rather than as a notion that points the way to new, as yet unexplored fields of mediality. It is enormously difficult to develop a positive positioning using the postist method.
None of this applies to digital culture, which is constantly changing and ceaselessly expanding–a factor that contributes significantly to the volatility of the accompanying terminology, as mentioned at the start of this essay. It is not possible to look back on a culture of the digital from any kind of vantage point–as can be already done, with due caution, in respect of a television age and perhaps also for video. Digitalisation, perpetually expanding and encompassing ever more spheres of life, still allows scope to adopt a position “outside” it–as manifesto-oriented art did, seeking to make a radical break with the past by postulated a future uncontaminated by what went before (as may have still been the case for net.art in the mid-1990s). Last but not least, the postist mode is no longer particularly informative, in as much as its validity has in a sense become absolute–what kind of bygone or anachronistic art form would not in a certain sense also be in good hands in the digital realm? Which other medium, however specific and singular it may once have appeared, is not also available now in electronic form–irrespective of how many of its “genuine” qualities are preserved or lost as a result?

Don’t Look Back
Marisa Olson’s neologism, “post-internet”, coined around five years ago, displays clear signs of this phenomenon, in which terms render themselves superfluous. Originally dreamt up to designate the particular nature of today’s pictorial objects, the term was initially directed at such omnipresent aspects as “symptoms of connectedness” or “the signature of life in network culture”–characteristics that, in Olson’s view, now apply in equal measure to “online and offline” art. 1 But how exactly, to raise the obvious and frequently posed question, are these network symptoms and conditions actually made manifest in an art work? How can something better, or at least more specific, than mere comprehensive generality be gleaned from their purported universality–an aspect that Olson repeatedly emphasises? Artie Vierkant, who also seeks to ascribe distinctive traits to the “Image Object Post-internet”, as he dubs it, presents a selection of characteristics to assist in this undertaking: “inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.”2 Vierkant’s own “image objects”, which he has been working on for years, could pass muster as emblematic of this cluster of characteristics–perhaps with the proviso that the idea of “universal authorship” is at most compatible with the reality of individual copyright-holders, at least in as much as the notion is recycled to relate after all to rare art objects kept in short supply, thus slotting neatly into prevailing operating conditions. The ever-expanding field of “post-internet art”, which should not be referred to in these terms, 3 fits almost a little too neatly into these multiple qualifications. In any event, the extent to which the postulated dissolution of the borders between works, materials or authorship can be inverted into its real-world converse becomes clearly legible here.
The “post-internet” topos, which two or three years ago was still producing a considerable discursive stir, has in the meantime itself become a “terminus non gratus”. That is perhaps because people began to realise that endless reproducibility and mutability was not just a hallmark of artefacts that include the switching point of the “internet” somewhere in the reproduction chain, but that just about any artwork created, manipulated or conserved with electronic means is now affected by this phenomenon. Furthermore, the interpenetration of digital and non-digital materials (in as much as it is possible to distinguish meaningfully between such categories at all) has grown so complex that it is virtually meaningless to label something distinctly as “post-internet”.4 It is no longer possible to derive any terminological added-value by asserting certain “postist” qualities if “post-digitality” has actually become the general framing field of vision for art and cultural production–in the sense that there is no way back to a period before this era. The “post-internet” category, as propounded by Olson and others for some time–in an approach that ultimately aims to make a clearly distinguishable type of work identifiable–is not volatile due to its lack of content. Such volatility stems instead from a kind of “over-fulfilment”: the term becomes superfluous not because no real time or production eras exist after the internet nor because such a development seems likely but rather because it is simply not possible to conceive of any mode of production beyond the bounds of the internet. In other words, the internet is not just “out there” everywhere but is also “inside too” everywhere.

Follow the Channel
James Bridle’s “New Aesthetic”, which temporarily attracted a similar buzz, did not fare much better, although in this case different conditions shape the discourse. Launched with savvy hype at the SWSX conference in 2012, quite a fuss surrounded the term for a while–until here too the viral hullaballoo ebbed again.5 Bridle’s Tumblr page still brings together all kinds of phenomena that embody the purported “new ways of seeing” that Bridle views as defining this aesthetic. However, the paradigmatic examples cited, ranging from drones and camouflage cape design via more recent CAD architecture and face-recognition software to selected examples of artworks, such as Timo Arnall’s films (Robot Readable World or Internet Machine), attest more to a principle of summary compilation than to an urge to address these phenomena through the prism of theory in any way. The randomly extendable blog seems to be the ideal format for such accumulation of material, but it is highly debatable whether something akin to a more general theoretical framework begins to emerge as a result. That is most probably not even Bridle’s intention, for he has after all announced on several occasions that the “New Aesthetic” does not fit into the traditional formats for addressing theory and criticism. He focuses much more on observing ongoing developments in a plethora of settings that are both temporally and physically scattered.
On the whole the “New Aesthetic” sees itself as an extremely hybrid project that unfolds “within its own medium” and has no intent to act on a meta-level. It proclaims in addition “an attempt to ‘write’ critically about the network in the vernacular of the network itself”.6 This is precisely the critical aspect of the entire undertaking, a kind of predetermined fault-line in the type of theory formation practiced nolens volens by the “New Aesthetic”–although Bridle himself would doubtless not refer to “theory”. The cumulative effect of considering a whole host of the most heterogeneous phenomena, remote images and pictorial objects, cannot but proceed on the basis of certain selection criteria–how else would it be possible to investigate what falls within the category of “new modes of perception”? How else would it be possible to express astonishment about everything that is produced by technically/digitally mediated vision? At this juncture a further strategic move comes into play, meaning that this approach, for all its intended and thoroughly justified “non-closure” (theoretical inconclusiveness arising from the phenomena’s perpetual new formation), is entirely exposed to volatility: I am referring to the emphatic references to the network, not to say the kind of absolute status ascribed to it in this context, with the internet set up as the supreme and simultaneously most fundamental image-generating parameter.
In Bridle’s view, the images and pictorial objects that the “New Aesthetic” aims to grasp quasi-conceptually should be understood not in terms of their content or form, but rather in the light of the “underlying systems that produce them”. An image thus becomes a “link, hardcoded or imaginative, to other aspects of a far greater system, just as every web page […] is a link to other words, thoughts and ideas”.7 This is precisely where the argument starts to become circular, for a system must first of all be pinned down if an individual component is to be derived from the “greater system” that generates it or in which it is embedded; that may well be what Bridle and consorts are thinking of strategically too,8 but empirically it is likely to prove even more difficult than isolating an individual “item” within this system. However (theoretically) correct it may be that the digital object can only be understood on the basis of the network within which it is enmeshed, when we consider the logic of production, distribution and reception, it appears just as impossible, or rather, illusory even to achieve an approximate grasp of this network, with its various registers, sub-systems and, let us not forget, its rapid ongoing technical development.
Bridle–entirely legitimately–resists “premature codification of the subject”, in other words, over-hasty definition of the “New Aesthetic”. Yet inverting this argument–keeping the gaze open in considering the still inestimable and perpetually shifting network conditions to which images are subjected–seems to be just as little help on this front. How could “the network’s own refusal to be pinned down” be made productive in this respect–in the spirit of deriving, from something that is itself difficult to “control, guide and channel”, a framework of understanding for the objects circulating within it? Particularly as these objects are exposed to constant mutability and changeability. With reference to the uncertain status of the “New Aesthetic”, Bridle concludes that it is preferable, in cases of uncertainty, to trust the fluid network rather than the individual text, which can only provide a clumsy record of this fluidification.9 In this respect, the discourse in question completely abandons any kind of conceptual anchoring. Net aesthetics buzzes around in the orbit of digitality like a swarm of disconnected blog posts. Conceptual junk is intermingled here with data-trash. Although that, in a certain sense, also remains to be seen.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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