There's been a lot of talk recently about this 'New Aesthetic' we're in. James Bridle has a blog here, a kind of visual essay on what it is. Bruce Sterling writes 5000 words on it here and describes it as "The explosion from the digital to the physical". These recent conversations seem to have been bourne out of a conference at SXSW The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices (which for the life of me I don't know why they haven't got a video up for us ... but there we go)
So we're all familiar with this aesthetic by now, even though the term may be new to us. The computer glitches, hicups, where moving images erupt and tear up our screens. When we try to work with a 175dpi image when what we need is a 300dpi and that image corrupts the more we push it and becomes something new. An environment of imagery where pixels multiply and reality converts to the virtual and corrupts the physical understanding of what we think we once recognised as the image of any given thing.
Thomas Ruff, Jpeg bi01, 2007
Whilst thinking of this idea of The New Aesthetic my mind moves to Thomas Ruff and his Jpeg images that I think I first started to notice around 2009 (see an interview here with him for the Guardian). They have a kind of hyper-modern nostalgia to them already, akin to what sepia was for the images of our childhood, those lovely washed out dreamy aesthetics that nudge our memories. This new aesthetic of blured 8-bit graphics and fuzzy edges does that for our screen based eyes.
So Ruff's new show, Nudes, currently on at the Gagosian is well worth a look I think, on till the 20 April. To see Ruff in conversation about his work and view other photography experts discuss the nature and future of photography visit Artist-Talks here.