Nick Srnicek - Navigating Neoliberalism: Political Aesthetics in an Age of Crisis

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Notes

From an aesthetic of sublime into an aesthetics of the interface

"This is where an aesthetics of the interface makes a key intervention. The modernist image of a progressive future was premised on both the capacity to extrapolate and forecast the future, as well as the belief in the human capacity to manipulate the direction of history.14 We’ve now converged on a widespread acceptance of the neoliberal premise that the world is too complex to ever plan, manipulate, accelerate, modify, or otherwise intervene in. Common sense therefore has it that the market is the best we can hope for. There is no way to manipulate a complex system, so why bother? Common sense has become lost in the complexity of the world without a cognitive map to navigate it. Yet if an aesthetics of big data is incapable of rendering this complexity tractable, then what is necessary is a transformation of the aesthetic sublime into an aesthetics of the interface. The latter indexes the mediation between big and complex data on the one hand, and our finite cognitive capacities on the other. In this space, art can become a weaponized political tool."

“Information visualization. Satellite views. Parametric architecture. Surveillance cameras. Digital image processing. Data-mashed video frames. Glitches and corruption artifacts. Voxelated 3D pixels in real-world geometries. Dazzle camo. Augments. Render ghosts. And, last and least, nostalgic retro 8bit graphics from the 1980s.” (Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic")

"[...] the artists exploring these new mediums and possibility spaces are the ones who are best situated to answer the questions of how to represent big data, computer simulations, and other data visualizations."

Cognitive mapping

Cognitive mapping can give the new aesthetics its political impetus and technological basis, while the new aesthetics can provide cognitive mapping with the artistic and sensible means to accomplish its political goals.