Post Internet Art:
Post-Modern – History
- The term postmodern was first used around the 1880s.
- John Watkins Chapman suggested “a Postmodern style of painting” as a way to depart from French Impressionism.
- J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion:
“The raison d’etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition.”
- In 1921 and 1925, postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of art and music.
Artistic Influences: Architecture
- In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, and led to the postmodern architecture movement.
- Postmodernism in architecture is marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles.
- Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post modern world happened between 1937 and 1957 (when he was writing).
- He described an as yet “nameless era” which he characterised as a shift to conceptual world based on pattern purpose and process rather than mechanical cause, outlined by four new realities: the emergence of Educated Society, the importance of international development, the decline of the nation state, and the collapse of the viability of non-Western cultures.
- In 1971, Mel Bochner described “post-modernism” in art as having started with Jasper Johns, “who first rejected sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the basis for his art, and treated art as a critical investigation.”
White Flags
Zero Nine Painting
- More recently, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one of four typological world views, which he identifies as either
- (a) Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed
- (b) Scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry
- (c) Social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization
- or (d) Neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.
- Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory
- These developments—re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968—are described with the term Postmodernity, as opposed to Postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement.
- Postmodernism has also been used interchangeably with the term post-structuralism
- Post-structuralism resulted similarly to postmodernism by following a time of structuralism. It is characterized by new ways of thinking through structuralism, contrary to the original form.
- “Postmodernist” describes part of a movement; “Postmodern” places it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.
PostModernism
- Postmodernism describes both an era and a broad late-20th century movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism which marked a departure from modernism.
- While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including the existence of objective reality and absolute truth, as well as notions of rationality, human nature, and progress.
- Instead, it asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, and political discourse and interpretation, and are therefore contextual and constructed.
- Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, self-referentiality, and focus on subjectivity.
The term postmodernism has been applied both to the era following modernity, and to a host of movements within that era (mainly in art, music, and literature) that reacted against tendencies in modernism.
- It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism, and emphasis on difference over and against unity that distinguishes the postmodernism aesthetic.
Graphic design:
- Another characteristic of postmodern graphic design is that “retro, techno, punk, grunge, beach, parody, and pastiche were all conspicuous trends.
- Yet, while postmodern design did not consist of one unified graphic style, the movement was an expressive and playful time for designers who searched for more and more ways to go against the system.
- Key influential postmodern graphic designers include Wolfgang Weingart, April Greiman, Tibor Kalman, and Jamie Reid.
Influential postmodernist philosophers
Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
- Foucault was known for his controversial aphorisms, such as “language is oppression”, meaning that language functions in such a way as to render nonsensical, false or silent tendencies that might otherwise threaten or undermine the distributions of power backing a society’s conventions — even when such distributions purport to celebrate liberation and expression or value minority groups and perspectives.
- His writings have had a major influence on the larger body of Postmodern academic literature.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998)
- Knowledge is materialized and made into a commodity exchanged between producers and consumers; it ceases to be either an idealistic end-in-itself or a tool capable of bringing about liberty or social benefit; it is stripped of its humanistic and spiritual associations, its connection with education, teaching and human development, being simply rendered as “data” — omnipresent, material, unending and without any contexts or pre-requisites.
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007),
- In Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the “Real” is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies.
- Baudrillard proposes the notion that, in such a state, where subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal, or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment, and passivity in industrialized populations.
- He claimed that a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible, resulting, ironically, in the “disappearance” of mankind in what is, in effect, a virtual or holographic state, composed only of appearances.
Post-postmodernism
- Recently metamodernism, post-postmodernism and the “death of postmodernism” have been widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoberek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled “After Postmodernism” that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”
Criticisms
- Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism – opposition to the spread of knowledge.
- For example, Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.
- Christian apologist William Lane Craig has noted “The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that’s not postmodernism; that’s modernism!”
- Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can also be found in works such as Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable Nonsense.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett declared,
“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”
Transmodernism
- Transmodernism was founded by Argentinian–Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel.
- A critic of postmodernism, he instead refers to himself as a transmodernist and wrote a series of essays criticising the postmodern theory and advocating a transmodern way of thinking. Transmodernism is a development in thought following the periodisation of postmodernism; as a movement, it also develops from modernism, and, in turn, critiques modernity and postmodernity, viewing them as the end of modernism.
- Its emphasis on spirituality can be said to have been influenced by the many esoteric movements during the Renaissance.
- …idealises different figures from mid-19th century United States, which also seems to be related to different aspects of Marxist philosophy, having much common ground with the Roman Catholic Church’s liberation theology wing.
- Transmodernism’s philosophical views contain elements of both modernism and postmodernism; it has been heralded as “new modernism” and admires avant-garde styles.
- Beliefs: that there is a place for both tradition and modernity, and it seeks as a movement to re-vitalise and modernise tradition rather than destroy or replace it.
- The honouring and reverence of antiquity and traditional lifestyles is very important in transmodernism, unlike modernism or postmodernism.
- Criticises pessimism, nihilism, relativism and the counter-Enlightenment, yet embracing, all to a limited extent, optimism, absolutism, foundationalism and universalism.
- It has an analogical (expressing or implying analogy) way of thinking, viewing things from the outside rather than the inside.
- As a movement, transmodernism puts a strong emphasis on spirituality, alternative religions and transpersonal psychology.
- Environmentalism, sustainability and ecology are important aspects of the transmodern theory;
- It accepts technological change, yet only when its aim is that of improving life or human conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Aesthetic
New Aesthetic
- The New Aesthetic is a term, coined by James Bridle, used to refer to the increasing appearance of the visual language of digital technology and the Internet in the physical world, and the blending of virtual and physical.
History
- Developing from a series of collections of digital objects that have become located in the physical the movement circulates around a blog named “The New Aesthetic” and which has defined the broad contours of the movement without a manifesto.
The author Bruce Sterling has said of the New Aesthetic:
The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”
- The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.”
- It’s diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined.
- It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs.
New Aesthetic is a collaborative attempt to draw a circle around several species of aesthetic activity—including but not limited to drone photography, ubiquitous surveillance, glitch imagery, Streetview photography, 8-bit net nostalgia. Central to the New Aesthetic is a sense that we’re learning to “wave at machines”—and that perhaps in their glitchy, buzzy, algorithmic ways, they’re beginning to wave back in earnest.
- One of the more substantive contributions to the notion of the New Aesthetic has been through a development of, and linking to, the way in which the digital and the everyday are increasingly interpenetrating each other.
- Here, the notion of the unrepresentability of computation, as both an infrastructure and an ecology, are significant in understanding the common New Aesthetic tendency towards pixelated graphics and a retro 8-bit form.
- This is related to the idea of an episteme (or ontotheology) identified with relation to computation and computational ways of seeing and doing: computationality.
Michael Betancourt has discussed the New Aesthetic in relation to digital automation. The ‘new aesthetic’ provides a reference point for the examination of Karl Marx’s discussion of machines in ‘The Fragment on Machines’.
The ‘new aesthetic’ documents is the shift from earlier considerations of machine labor as an amplifier and extension of human action — as an augmentation of human labor — to its replacement by models where the machine does not augment but supplant, in the process apparently removing the human intermediary that is the labor that historically lies between the work of human designer-engineers and fabrication following their plans.
- Where the machines Marx described were dependent on human control, those identified with the New Aesthetic work to supplant the human element, replacing it with digital automation, effectively removing living labor from the production process.
One movement that draws parallels to “New Aesthetic” is “Spunk” – microculture and/or subculture with an identifiable style of music, design, and fashion. It developed online in 2011 via a small group of social media enthusiasts who shared a nostalgia for 1990s internet culture.
Further reading:
- Berry, David M. “Computationality and the New Aesthetic,” Imperica (2012)
- Bridle, James. “The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines” (2011)
- Sterling, Bruce. “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” Beyond The Beyond, Wired (2012)
- Bridle, James. “The New Aesthetic and its Politics” (2013)
Post-contemporary
- Post-contemporary – (PoCo) – is a forward looking aesthetic philosophy distinguished by a re-constructive, global, human ethos which posits that the aesthetic experience is universal to humanity, and that this experience can inspire understanding and transformation.
- In art historical terms, “modern” and “contemporary” arts are limited to their era and are defined by stylistic and philosophical parameters – chief among them, a critique of the classical European tradition and constructive philosophy, and secondly, the Contemporary ethos is characterized by an emphasis on transient or exclusively contemporary issues which reflect the zeitgeist.
- Post Contemporary emphasizes generating new, constructive hypotheses.
- However, modeled after the Scientific Method, both modes are inter-dependent as the question|answer cannot exist without each other. Thus, Post Contemporary views the history of the humanities as branching and pluralist, rather than a linear path of development. Consequently, PoCo has chosen a forking path, builds upon knowledge from all eras, and values quality, sublimnity, and empathy above novelty. PoCo emphasizes empathy for all, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.
- Post Contemporary was first described by Italian Poet Primo Levi.
- The discussion took this definition also to distinguish the third millennium epitomes of creative sectors, by their projection into coming avant-garde configurations, toward future. To day in its own progress, the Post-contemporary concepts, often known simply as Po-co is much better defined.
In Visual Art
- In the visual arts, Post Contemporary has taken the form of skill-based representational painting, photography, and sculpture which addresses current issues in globalized culture.
- The theories centerpiece is “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy”, a painting by Graydon Parrish concerning the attack on the world trade center on 9/11.
