The book should be available in the coming weeks in Europe, and soon after in the United States. For more information, also see the main entry about the book.
Note: Previously this entry read “book print.” This was a mistake on my part. It should be “book sprint.”
I recently read the “book sprint” New Aesthetic, New Anxieties by a group of media researchers, theorists and curators, who got together for three and a half days from June 17–21, 2012, at V2, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The concept of coming together for just a few days to brainstorm a book is certainly something worth considering as an act of creative critical practice. The book from this standpoint functions surprisingly well, especially because its premise is delivered to match the speed of change that its subject (The New Aesthetic) experiences in the daily flow of information throughout the global network. I personally find amazing that a book of this sort can be put together with some cohesion.
The subject of the book is The New Aesthetic, a term /concept that has been making the rounds on the Internet for a bit over a year and a few months, but which really took off when Bruce Sterling wrote about it for Wired on April 2, 2012. Since then many have written about it; the latest manifestation is the book sprint.
With all respect to the authors, I will state that the text is not fully cohesive, as it becomes obvious that much of the content consists of copy/paste material that was clearly worked over to somewhat match a book format in just three and a half days. Clearly some stuff had to be written on the spot, but many of the references in the footnotes could not be gathered so quickly–or at least everyone had to come prepared with some strong references to use well before the writing sessions would begin. What the book sprint does accomplish is provide a good sense of the initial stages of The New Aesthetic in order to reposition the concept in terms of a more critical practice. The New Aesthetic, based on what I have been reading about it for a few months now, is not a term initially invested in criticality, but rather it befriends trending strategies of the design world which more often than not is primarily invested in landing major corporate contracts.
I won’t dwell on my own views on The New Aesthetic in this case. For now, I prefer to share some links that also complement The New Aesthetic, New Anxieties Book sprint. They appear below. I did not include the authors’ names, but you can certainly find them once you click on the links.
Written for Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, December 2009
Note: The following text is one of two originally published in the magazine Spana!, a publication for the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions (now called Swedish Exhibition Agency). I never got around to releasing the English version of the text until now. It contextualizes how I saw exhibitions developing in Sweden during my residency. It starts with a lecture I attended during an international symposium on contemporary curatorial practice, and revisits notes on the different art institutions I visited during my residency in Sweden in October and November of 2009. This publication in many ways is a complement to the list posted below.
The second text is Code Switching: Artists and Curators in Networked Culture.
At the end of 2009, the international approach to exhibitions across museums and public institutions appears to emphasize themes over history. This trend was recognized by Curator Jan Debbaut on Saturday November 7, during his presentation at the Symposium “Mountains of Butter, Lakes of Wine,” which took place at the Stadsteater, Stockholm. This shift has not only changed the way exhibitions are funded internationally, as Debbaut noted, but also how they are approached and contextualized. In 2009, the thematic approach repositions exhibitions as forms of communication beyond the four walls of the galleries, affecting all types of exhibiting institutions, not just museums. In my view, this resonates with various institutions I visited in Stockholm and Gothenburg during the months of October and November of 2009, as Correspondent in Residence for the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions. The following is an evaluation of how such institutions organize exhibitions as tools of communication.
Digging through my archives, I found the list of my early updates on Facebook. When I joined Facebook back in 2008, personal updates read “What are you doing?” prompted with “Your Name is … ” I liked the idea behind positioning the Facebook user in a constant state of action. It was like a performance online. Because of this set up, I found myself always thinking of what I was actually doing at the moment that I entered Facebook, and thought of creative ways to approach the apparent triviality of the updates.
I thought that I would eventually develop a project with my updates, or that I would simply keep writing them as long as I was a Facebook member. But then Facebook changed its status updates to state: “What’s on your mind?” and I could no longer perform my ongoing development towards a work of art. Thus my potential project apparently came to an abrupt end.
Below are the updates that part of me still hopes to use in some form to develop an interesting art project. But I don’t see that in the near or far future. So for now (and possibly for as long as this post is visible), they function more as mundane documentation and, to some degree, as commentary on my early days on Facebook. I share them because I realized upon my re-reading that the banality of the posts as they now are updated by members of Facebook has not faded, but rather has become watered down to appear more “thoughtful.” After all, how deep can one be when asked, “What’s on your mind?” This is equivalent to being asked by an acquaintance when passing them on the street, “how are you?”
Notes below:
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Facebook “what are you doing notes”
At this time I did not request friends and had my setting fairly open to be seen on major search engines.
The notes below are listed exactly as they appeared on Facebook. I began writing my status updates on March 20, 2008
March 20: Eduardo is looking at your profile.
March 26: Eduardo is still looking at your profile.
April 1: Eduardo is exchanging his labor for pleasure.
April 8: Eduardo is exchanging his pleasure for value.
April 12: Eduardo is debating the default state of the verb “to be” in the Facebook Interface.
April 18: Eduardo is reloading his home page to check out the adds on the left.
Apr 26, 2008: Eduardo is unable to fill this space with an action.
May 4, 2008: Eduardo is down with an empty statement.
May 13, 2008: Eduardo is excited about a new art project.
May 20, 2008: Eduardo is moving.
May 26, 2008: Eduardo is about to fly.
May 29, 2008: Eduardo is in Madrid.
June 5, 2008: Eduardo is on the move again…
June 6, 2008: Eduardo is in Barcelona
June 9, 2008: Eduardo is in Madrid, again.
June 16, 2008: Eduardo is back in LA.
June 17, 208: Eduardo is in San Diego and depressed, Lakers lost…
June 20, 2008: Eduardo is sick. Some bug he caught.
June 24, 2008: Eduardo is now sick of writing, but cannot let go of the keyboard.
June 25, 2008: Eduardo is cool now. Not as in being cool, just cool.. now.
June 30, 2008: Eduardo is.
July 7, 2008: Eduardo is [re]revising.
July 15, 2008: Eduardo is down with the stoop.
July 19, 2008: Eduardo on the move, again–going east.
July 25, 2008: Eduardo is still on the east coast, working really hard.
August 5, 2008: Eduardo is looking at his belly.
August 20: Eduardo is simply busy.
September 8: Eduardo is killing mosquitoes with his bare hands.
September 18, 2008: Eduardo is, again.
September 20, 2008: Eduardo is forgetting to write in this space what he is doing.
October 3, 2008: Eduardo is looking at leaves falling.
October 10, 2008: Eduardo is releasing a new project: http://navasse.net/traceblog/about.html.
October 19, 2008: Eduardo is listening to his own music list: https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=328
October 28, 2008: Eduardo is preparing for a long long day.
November 4, 2008: Eduardo is looking at the polls (and has voted).
November 5, 2008: Eduardo is more than the verb to be today, because we can.
November 10, 2008: Eduardo is just out of smart things to say.
November 16, 2008: Eduardo is in the middle of wishing-happy-birthday week.
November 22, 2008: Eduardo is, has been, and will be in the middle of snow for a while..
November 29, 2008: Eduardo is quite sick of Turkey, but still willing to eat it.
December 9, 2008: Eduardo s tired. Academic term almost over… Flying to warmer lands!
December 22, 2008: Eduardo is still cold. Whatever happened to California weather?!
December 26, 2008: Eduardo is still cold, second update. People in Big Bear, CA must be happy…
January 5, 2008: Eduardo is up, packing. About to go back east, yet again, back to Lalaland soon next month
January 7, 2008: Eduardo is back in the middle of snow, ice and lots and lots of rain.
January 19, 2008: Eduardo is enjoying MLK Day. Must stay up and work, work, work.
January 20, 2009: Eduardo is thinking about living history, or living in history, or living with history, or living-history: 44th presidential Inauguration of the President
February 1, 2009: Eduardo is going to watch the game with ambivalent critical distance…
February 7, 2009: Eduardo is simply chilling. Yep.
February 14, 2009: Eduardo is trying to say something that will be well data-mined.
February 28, 2009: Eduardo noticed that “is” is no longer the default on Facebook.
At this time I took myself off search engines results and privacy settings were set to their safest set up. I began to request friendships based on recommendations of people I might know, or suggested friends.
Facebook Update Status changed to “What’s on my mind”
March 16, 2009: Now I no longer need to be in a state of action, but simply express what’s on my mind. We have entered a new stage of data-mining.
April 3, 2009: Spring.
April 16, 2009: Eduardo just figured out (quite late) why Facebook changed its status hook. (cause of twits…)
