Maybe I’m (a lil) late to the party, but a lot of #artstech online chatter became much clearer to me after I read Ben Davis’ Can Artists Help Us Reboot Humanism in an Over-Connected Age? on ARTINFO.com this past weekend.  The article was a fantastic recap on Rhizome.org’s annual “Seven on Seven” conference which I blogged about a few weeks ago in eager anticipation.

There was this gem of a paragraph and links:

“How does aesthetic experience fare in such an environment? Within art-tech circles, the buzz these days is about something called the “New Aesthetic,” a coinage of James Bridle, who launched a Tumblr of the same name dedicated to aggregating phenomena that blur together digital culture and real-world design, and seem characteristic of the present’s plugged-in sensibility. In his response to the “New Aesthetic,” techno-pundit Bruce Sterling takes it to task for lacking any rigor or specificity, and just basically being a meusli of wicked cool images. My response to this response would be that it is this lack of rigor that makes this Aesthetic characteristically New. That’s the aesthetics of the shallows; that’s an avant-garde that’s been programmed to speed read — an aggregation of cool-looking things, with little to no logical connection, brought to you via Tumblr.

I have been following Julia Kaganskiy for quite sometime on twitter so this was great to pull some data points that connected everything:   In Response To Bruce Sterling’s “Essay On The New Aesthetic” – I love her comment here:

The idea that our dominant contemporary aesthetic is one that explores “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” was kind of a no brainer. We’ve been covering projects that tackle this physical/digital grey area for years, but the recent proliferation of this aesthetic in mainstream culture is what seems to give it new weight and, according to Sterling, the makings of a new avant-garde.

Since graduate school I have noticed the most progressive contemporary art has a technological component so it’s great to learn its the new “avant garde”.  Artists like Antenna Design, Tony Oursler, Jon Kessler straddle this unique space between contemporary art installation and mixed media sculpture that is starting to shape up nicely in today’s art discourse.

Oursler's 'Void or Everything Ever Wanted' 2009 Luminato

The conclusion of Davis’ ARTINFO article was also good:

Truth be told, the format of the “Seven on Seven” art-technology jam itself reflects the over-frantic present a bit, in its enforced R&D-as-speed dating scenario. Serious people will have to put in some deep-time thinking in order to solve what appears to be one of the defining dilemmas of the age: How to live with the tremendous power of technology without being consumed by it? Still, “Seven on Seven” was particularly satisfying this year, and the very fact that the conversations hatched within this sped-up scenario touched off this train of thought for me does give me a bit of optimism that there may be some solution that doesn’t involve simply switching off for good. “