[LINK] "The New Aesthetic"

[rfmcdonald]

After too long quiet, Castrovalva is back up with a post drawing on an interview with Neal Stephenson where that man bemoans the "lack of optimism" in modern science fiction specifically and a lack of faith in imagining the future generally (in fashion, say).

Reading this, I began to wonder if the issue is that in many respects our lives are saturated with information technology to such an extent of digital alienation that the old and physical acquire a nostalgic cachet. Something of this can be seen in the new aesthetic, an attempt to document the eruption of the digital into the physical, whether that be QR codes, surveillance cameras, augmented reality, missing people adverts on 404 pages, 3D printing through to pixellated photos of physical objects. As discussed here:

"Intuitively, one feels that this could be important. Smartphones, tablet computers, drones, CCTV cameras, LCD screens, e-readers, GPS, social networking, recognition algorithms and scores of allied technologies and concepts are rising to super-ubiquity around us. They are wreaking untold changes on the behaviour of nation states, corporations and individuals. Yet all this is happening in a cultural environment broadly evacuated of ideology, apart from the exhausted fairytales of neoliberal consumer capitalism… Converging, leapfrogging technologies were evoking genuinely new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names."

I think some of this can also be seen in how we choose to depict the digital. On the one hand, we have Apple’s preference for skeuomorphism whereby interfaces are designed to mimic the physical with textures, beveled edges and leather or wooden finishes. It’s all rather reassuringly retro. By contrast, Microsoft’s Metro interface is an austere environment characterised by its flatness and minimalism having kicked away the crutch of realworld metaphors.

Does this explain steampunk?