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DIGITAL: How artists use 'the digital' to talk about being human The affordances of digital aesthetics >> Essay by Shaun Wilson Digital aesthetics have undergone a transformative shift in the way that interdisciplinary approaches to art have, on the one hand, recontextualized cultural paradigms through what we now understand is a metamodernity, and on the other hand galvanised new networks and digital currencies that intersect aesthetics within a multi-modal epistemology. While there is an argument in current debates of metamodernism that considers a structure of feeling to be a mechanism that conveys sincerity and meaningfulness within the subject, the failing of such in a structural case proliferates a cultural protocol of determinism without acceptable levels of predefined critical structures gated within an epistemological structure. If metamodernism is examined as a cultural paradigm, these suggested frameworks are without predefined theory, in contrast to, for example, what defines postmodernism, which removes a singularity of definition empowered by the mechanical understandings as we have had, say, in other more pronounced eras of modernity. If one was to take modernism, for example, and by the structural architecture of its design, it is most explicit in determining what is and what is not modernism, in the same effect as the distrust of this singularity by postmodernism, proliferated by and from a necessity of facsimile when questioning the authenticity of modernist structures. Yet modernism and postmodernism both share a similarity in that they are either pre-determined by a structure of reason not apparent in a metamodernist sense, because a structure of feeling is not defined by singularities alone, nor is it akin to a predetermined structure in the same way as its former cultural periods were built on, and functioned within. Digital aesthetics in this regard are a different kind of mechanism when imbued through metamodernism, as the basis of such has no predetermined outcome through its primordial effect. In this assumption, digital aesthetics play a transformative role in contemporary art because it can exist outside of a formalism otherwise regulated by its postmodern ancestry. In doing so, it accentuates a dichotomy away from formalism simply because in metamodernism there is no formalism within or outside of its structure of feeling. The liberation of such comes with both adjunctive and reductive agencies for the subject, where, in an adjunctive sense, digital aesthetics works much better in propelling the subject when embodied in a critical theory not predetermined by the constructs of formalism, and thus orientates with more social visual logics attuned to emotive feelings adapted by and for the audience. The reductive consequential agencies that move away from a structure of feeling destabilise a more efficient workflow of critical thinking, because there are no boundaries gated by an order of pseudo-manifesto; it is by and large detached from emotion and meaningful intent. In conceptual art of the 1990s, and in particular the paintings of Hume and Hirst, formalism played an important role in defining the separation of emotion and intellect, which we’ve seen time and time again as a predetermined influence for digital aesthetics. In many works of this era, the emotional feelings and trappings of meaningfulness have no consequential value to the ironic and distrust of aesthetic positivity. In the same ways, we now see the scenario reversed, with formalism and irony considered a negative and disharmonious barrier against the proliferation of meaningfulness in art. Therein exists the Achilles heel of metamodernism, with formalism attested through irony, which has no concern for thoughtfulness and emotiveness in any way, shape or form. In fact, through formalism, emotion as a structure of feeling is more or less defunct if not ignored altogether. Of course, a knock off in such an effect influences digital aesthetics in both the subject and the way in which the subject has a mechanical relationship, none other than what we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The identity of, and within, digital aesthetics during the pandemic has seen a very different emergence of agency that society has not become accustomed to, since the more destructive instances of bubonic plague in cases of, for example, the Great London plague, and before that, the Black Death plague. But like any pandemic of great magnitude, the era preceding a pandemic has historically been archetypal through hardship, war, and disruption, leading to an Enlightenment period after the fact. We saw this with the early modern period’s rise to the Renaissance, the English Enlightenment, and the reconstruction of London after its great fire. We have also seen this in the immediate years after the Spanish Flu in the early 1920s, albeit short lived thereafter. Digital aesthetics during the current pandemic have attested back to a search for meaningfulness through the subject, as we’ve seen in the proliferation of NFT art, most notably in the work of Beeple, Damien Hirst, and Bored Ape Yacht Club. These aesthetics seek not to question structures within a formalism, but instead to imbue a structure of feeling and branding based on the social neediness of communities, hardships and anxieties towards power structures, wealth inequality, and the distrust of political and institutional entities. Where postmodernism was a formalism to question truth through modernist structures, the pandemic has universally prompted collective questionings of formalism in a reversal, not so much to find truth in historicity, but rather to replace it altogether in an enlightenment connected to feelings of social togetherness and affordances of collective aesthetic comforting. This sudden reversal for digital aesthetics is embedded with meaningfulness at its core based on the social needs and emotive insecurities of a global populace in crisis, manufactured with barriers that attest a reckoning of the natural balance of power, the natural world, and social equity. For example, digital aesthetics in the 1990s were limited to the technologies available at the time for a society not enveloped in a constant mindset of crisis, and the consumers who drove this aesthetic consumption through hard and soft media. Technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and internet art, had already been in service through a handful of artists, yet there were still no mass delivery systems to enable gigascale accessibility to the likes of what we saw in the rise of social media, where everybody suddenly had aesthetic tools to communicate through the digital without the barriers to geography and software expertise, as it was even at the start of the 2000s. Therein lies an argument that digital aesthetics are predetermined by the technological accessibility of mass society, with the immense pressure of gigascale participatory determinism circumventing the limitations of technology when this accessibility is restricted, and consequentially, impacting on the accessibility of aesthetic epistemology. A comparison between, say, the work of Matthew Barney in the Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) and Beeple’s Everydays: the first 5000 days (2001) are disparate within the subject, because the Cremaster Cycle was made for cinematic experiences as a singular object - a 35 mm film reel, a DVD, or a Blu-ray disc purposed for an immediate analogue of audience engagement - and Everydays… as a multiplicity - an NFT token and accompanying JPEG made for trading within a crypto network. And it’s this network aspect where born-digital artefacts have become networked artefacts as a network in itself; ‘network’ taken as a system of databases connected to a financial exchange. We can see here that the system, or in Beeple’s case, the cryptocurrency network, becomes part of the digital aesthetic, where the distribution of the artefact and the encrypted network is just as important for digital aesthetics as the artefact itself. In effect, networks are meta. Moreover, in the case of a Beeple’s NFT artwork, the work is as much to do with the network it trades within, as it visually looks like forsaken in its epistemology determined by a network within an aesthetic. At no point in western art has the system of distribution been so integrated within the aesthetic of an artefact, whether this be born-physical or born-digital, as it is in the digital aesthetics realm of crypto art. What can be drawn together from this assumption is that the system and visuality are the same thing in contemporary digital aesthetics. This divisive statement may be seen as a polarising proclamation, but the logic of its inquiry is implicit in the way that audiences who consume and drive demand for digital aesthetics engage with the artefact, insofar as its barriers, which attest to the redundancy of digital aesthetics and its interference with the proliferation of scaled markets. In a pre-digital age, this thought may have been incomprehensible based on the small scale operations of the art market operating as an analogue. But since the advent of NFT art integrated within crypto currencies, the unregulated superlatives governing the expansion of crypto art markets allowed the sheer scale of NFT art collecting to be something Chayko (2021) describes as crashing the art world. The fact is that digital aesthetics as a network dwarfs the relatively small and hokey art world analogue in comparison, bringing into question the redundancy of the art world as we know it simply because of the financial weight and classifiable branding of minting, like ISBN branding of books and text based works, that cryptocurrencies expedite irrespective of issues that control the physical art world based on supply and demand. The rarity of an artwork is based on its own singularity of the artefact itself, but in the case of digital aesthetics unleashed in the crypto world, rarity has nothing to do with the singularity of an object, but more so with the uniqueness of its binary form. So what we can see here is that the binary form and physical singularity are at odds, and so too are the markets which define their trade as a digital aesthetic. My point here is that digital aesthetics is the artefact and also the network of the artefact; it’s now both. To look at demographics in this context, a known fact of the art world is that digital aesthetics is more inclined to influence younger audiences because of their dependence on the digital as an essential service, which currently measures over half of the world’s population. So in the aspect of scale, the legitimacy of digital aesthetics will be shaped and influenced by younger audiences, who are the people most engaged through its accessibility and consumption. This is an aspect that is rarely discussed through digital aesthetics, and it’s something that needs to be further explored, as the consumption of aesthetics mediates a higher demand for digital born-artefacts as they become integrated within a system within an audience who in themselves is so closely intertwined within a networked system affecting every facet of their daily lives, but without digital immediacy relinquished into an objectivity quite removed from the subjectivity of social connectedness. It’s this connectedness in itself that defines digital aesthetics in a contemporary setting, more so than any other time in the history of the digital, because the network and the aesthetic are one of the same, not one from the other nor one of another, and so forth. If these comparisons are understood in a visual way, then the collective reasoning for digital aesthetics creates a structure of reason for an audience tightly integrated within a network within itself. How can digital aesthetics survive when such close integration of its audience depends on an amalgam of branding and social collectiveness, when the participants of such consider themselves a brand within the identity of ethnographic groups, sharing little differences between the subjectivity of human agency and objective artefacts speculative to branding as a digital data binary necessity? There could be no separation in this association for the viewer, as it leaves little in the way taking into account the sustainability of the image. If the weight of collective branding in an uncontrollable networked space renders the authenticity of digital aesthetics in a perpetual state of multiplicity, then how can such multiplicity have an authenticity relative to universal truth or at least, a speculative truth? If such truth via digital aesthetics is merely a brand hierarchy governed by identity within a network system, then this, of course, brings about a consideration for digital aesthetics that is no different to the dilemmas of, say, the printing press during the early Gutenberg years, when handwritten manuscripts gave way to mass produced printed books. The market for the sale of books, which we can term an analogue network, heavily influenced the stylistic determinism of writing, which would quickly become commodified in what we now know as genres, which are, in its purest forms, a classification or indeterminably, a formalism shaped and influenced by branding. When artworks were reproduced in the same way as books, we saw the same effect come into play through genres manifested within western art, which also acted as predetermined values conceived, produced, and consumed by audiences. In relation to digital aesthetics, technological advances in the 2000s and 2010 had a direct impact on what these aesthetics looked like, but also on how we feel about these forms in the way they intersect with our daily lives thanks to the networks of mass deliverance. What can be concluded from this perspective is that digital aesthetics are an interface between the subject and the audience. However, the communication logic of understanding audiences manifests the digital aesthetic through their symbiotic branding of collectiveness, which impacts on the way imagery is contextualised through the virtues of form, and from this, a formalism. One might argue that digital aesthetics has made a transformative integration into a networked collective that yields a definition beyond the artefact itself, and into a mirror that reflects who we are as a society, our strengths and insecurities, and the predetermined anxieties which can erode and abate the sustainability of the image in both triumphs of data proliferation and the mono-textual failures of socio-emotional fragility. © 2022 All artists in this catalogue retain rights to their work