Lauding The New Aesthetic • 3 April 2012 • The SnowBlog

Lauding The New Aesthetic

          
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I mentioned The New Aesthetic a while back. I certainly shouldn't be in the business of defining it, but I suppose if I were to try, I'd say it's a kind of reverse flow of imagery from the virtual world to the real. That's to say, when you see designed objects in the real world which take their stylistic cues from the features, artifacts and peculiarities of digital imagery you're probably in the realm of the New Aesthetic. (Alternatively, just go here and look at the pictures until you see what they have in common.)

What I also mentioned was that the person most responsible for bringing the term and the ideas behind it to people's notice is James Bridle, who for a couple of years spent his time finding and publishing innovative fiction for lil' ol' Snowbooks. Whereas now he has influential thinkers like Bruce Sterling singing his praises in venues like Wired magazine. Here's the excerpt that caught my eye: "James Bridle is the master of that salon. James Bridle has never yet claimed to be the Andre Breton-style Pope of the New Aesthetic, but in practice, nobody ever asks the central questions of anybody else but him. So, Bridles the guru there. "

I regularly see James's thoughts retweeted by people I look up to like William Gibson and Tim O'Reilly. And now he's the manifesto-writing guru behind an art movement. When James chaired a panel at SXSW this year, Bruce Sterling described it like this: "When I left the room at the SXSW New Aesthetic panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped. Id suggest getting right after it." Nice work, James. Read the full article here.  
Rob