John Rafman, Nacozari De Garcia - Montezuma, Sonora, Mexico (2011) Chromogenic Print. From: 16 Google Street Views. Courtesy of M+B, Los Angeles.
able to put your arms around that particular thing, therefore it is not that. So we’ll veer off into another direction for a bit, and that happened constantly throughout the year. What happened back in March and April, when it exploded, was that kind of happened to almost all of it. Or at least it happened to what was happening on the Tumblr, which was always one aspect of New Aesthetic. There’s been a huge amount of conversation and debate around it. But almost all of that is not what I was talking about, even though it’s been incredibly fascinating to figure out, to see how that happened. On the most basic level, the most interesting thing that happened was that you got to see this immense chasm between technology and art. In that the New Aesthetic was never about art, though artworks were included in it. Rather there’s this huge area of culture that the art world hasn’t really gotten a handle on, and so largely ignored for a long time or treated it completely face value without delving into what was behind it. It suddenly reached a point where a lot of that stuff looks like art to artists, even if it was never produced within the theoretical sphere of the art world. Suddenly the art world has taken up the New Aesthetic, which has produced all sorts of fascinating conversations. But it seems to be a way of saying, “Oh right! It’s that thing there, we’ll grab that and grasp that,” While still missing the changes that are happening under the hood to have made that occur. ANP: You’ve created one specific act of actually creating an amorphous framework that didn’t kill the thing it might contain. You’ve created a chase. JB: Part of me thinks it’s killed a chunk of what I was up to, but that’s OK, that’s just again another correction, and we’ll figure out where it goes next. Yeah, it clearly hit a nerve, right? We would not be talking if it didn’t. That was part of it from early on, to name something that people needed a name for. That’s always very interesting. It doesn’t advance the thing itself necessarily. ANP: It also makes me think about how we form new archetypes or symbols, even. I think about the pixel, or a pixilated edge, becoming a new alchemical symbol. JB: Yeah, there’s something really nice in that. I did a bunch of sigils from pixel stuff. At South by Southwest, I invoked Crowley. But it was me saying, “This is Crowley, talking about words of power and how you bind archetypes and blah blah blah.” And to some extent, that’s what New Aesthetic did. And for a long time after it all kicked off, I was genuinely like, “This is all Crowley’s revenge. I invoked him arrogantly in the wrong way and he is showing me what words of power actually do.” I still fairly believe that to some extent. There’s a very—I hesitate to call it deliberate—a fairly accidental kind of sigil formation that happened there. Without a doubt. And I was also conscious of that process happening and very, very conscious that every single magician who does something like that uses it for powerful ends. And that in itself should be what we try to avoid. ANP: What should we avoid? JB: Trying to have any form of power relations over these things, which is really hard. I get very nervous around manifestos and people claiming to have strong opinions about
things, because that essentially is about control. All of this stuff is slowly figuring itself out. This conversation is as much a part of it as anything. ANP: What’s next for you? JB: I’m mainly interested in two things—well, I’m mainly interested in everything— but still attempting to chase down this idea of how we put ourselves (our memory, experience, and culture) into the things that we make, which is increasingly mediated by the network. The network remains something that we haven’t gotten a handle on. We need to keep endlessly generating new metaphors for it, in order to try to understand. We never truly understand anything, but it’s worth continuing to poke it. And the other side of it is a better understanding of what the hell we’re doing with technology. Like, what we do with it next. So, we’ve built this thing, and we’re still really using it as an extension of old media or telephones or existing things. It’s got to be good for something else. ANP: Are we collaborating with the network or are we becoming more dependent on it? JB: Dependency’s difficult, because we’re always dependent on technology. Except once we’re dumped without them, we seem to mostly do OK. But collaboration is really interesting, the idea that we are co-producing so much of our world now through technologies we’ve made but are largely illegible, whether that’s the stock market or architecture, city planning or the way in which we communicate—those things are intimately bound to the technologies we’ve built. I used to think everyone should learn to code, and I’m not so about that now. It’s the difference between literacy and legibility. I used to think everyone needed to be literate in this stuff; I’m not sure that’s true. It’d be nice but it’s kind of ridiculous. You should at least be legible; people should have a greater awareness of how these things shape everything that we do. I think that’s the only way we’re going to see a larger change in everything, from consciousness to politics to everyday life. www.new-aesthetic.tumblr.com
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