Aesthetics, Self-deployment
and the Digital City
David Cowlard, Dec 2022
“In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”
– Harun Farocki
We are living at a time when our real and virtual experiences of the city are more integrated than ever before. From communication and wayfinding to entertainment and infrastructural efficiency, the digital city acts as both an accounting mechanism of the present and a focus for future speculation.
It is now over a decade since James Bridle started discussing the New Aesthetic, a phenomenon that he described as an ‘eruption of the digital into the physical.’ 1 Through a series of talks and the launch of a Tumblr site, with images collected from various creatives and observations of the ‘machine,’ Bridle sought to examine an ontological shift in the way that we experienced the digital world. Bruce Stirling’s subsequent summary of a South by Southwest (SXSW) panel discussion on the emergent New Aesthetic, published in Wired magazine 2 gave the issue a wider following, both popular and avant-garde.
In the intervening years, artists, architects, tech futurists and urban planners have further explored the digital city. These experiments have ranged from projected futures to mining imagery from the recent past, images created by an ever-expanding system of cataloguing and surveillance.
Digital representations of the city can provide blueprints for a technologically superior future, but it is worth examining why, and how, we can still extract a poetics of living and form urban imaginaries from the vast array of digital information.
The practice of architectural rendering, whether through analogue or digital drawing methods, has by necessity envisioned the future, guided by material and technological advances, or by more utopian ideas for new ways of living. The latest example of this type of architectural projection can be seen in the recent spate of major architectural practices designing for the ‘Metaverse’. Although technology and games companies are currently competing to define this virtual world, which draws upon virtual and augmented realities as well as games technology, any real implementation is far off, if not an impossible dream. 3
Despite this vague terrain of possibility, Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, epitomizes the techno-futurist outlook when he describes the practice’s recent venture into the Metaverse; "We believe this, at least in the initial stages of metaverse development, allows for the fullest exploitation of the city analogy, utilising our innate and learned intuitive cognitive capacities with respect to orientation, wayfinding and the reading of subtle aesthetic social atmospheres and situations." 4
Technologists have also championed the idea of the ‘smart city’. For some, the use of sensors, smart devices and the web 3.0 ‘internet of things’ heralds the future for the digital city where every aspect of our lives can be monitored, and machines will adapt and change the urban environment for maximum efficiency and security. However, despite a number of high-profile pilot projects there remains a wide gap between possibility and outcomes. 5
In the time between the initial discussions of the New Aesthetic and now, there is a wider skepticism in the potential of the digital world. This is most evident in growing concerns around data collection and privacy. 6 This outlook is the foundation for Shoshana Zuboff’s idea of surveillance capitalism which she sees as running “contrary to the early digital dream… it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge.” 7
While keeping these developments in mind when looking for meaning in the discussions about the contemporary digital city, there are real advantages to focussing on the interdisciplinary possibilities that arise from juxtaposing differing outlooks and artistic practices. The architectural theorist and critic Anthony Vidler explores the benefits of this interdisciplinary approach noting that with artists and architects becoming interested in the parameters of each other’s practices, ‘the interpretive terms’ of one is needed to understand the other. 8
It is with this artistic cross referencing in mind that mapping out strategies and methodological positions can be particularly useful in any attempt to discern our present and future urban lives from the myriad of artistic interventions, data sets and commentary on the digital city.
Curation and the Database Documentary
Many of the approaches to artistic practice are not new. In fact, most of the starting points are recognizable as ways of living that we take for granted; where the digital / real interface is often seamless. A large part of this rests upon the information and data that we create and share, and that is in turn collected and published whether by individuals, organisations or the state.
While recognising real concerns over privacy and the outlook of writers such as Zuboff, there is the potential for the creation of insight and meaning from the vast array of data and information that exists within an urban context, for example a fine-grained approach to urban documentary co-exists with the ability to annotate digital images, whether of a single building or neighbourhood. This annotation in the form of comments, location and file metadata can provide the basis for immediate interaction, or for a more nuanced form of historical research and story-telling. Additionally, this data can be aggregated and retrieved in ways that can either complement, or counter, technical, professional and archival information. Mitchell Schwarzer noted with the rise of image sharing websites that digital images have not only become the medium of everyday observation and communication but “if images represent buildings, their data represent some of the social dynamics that occur in and around them.” 9
Equally important to aggregation, in creating meaning from huge amounts of data, is the role that selection, juxtaposition and curation can play within the digital realm. This can be the work of a single artist, a collective or even an algorithm. At around the same time that the New Aesthetic was a source for inspiration for new media creatives, the artist, photographer and image collector Doug Rickard published A New American Picture. This was a book that took documentary street photography as its starting point in exposing some of the poorest neighbourhoods in America. The difference is that all of the pictures were sourced from Google’s Street View. The writer and critic David Campany observes, in an essay that accompanied the publication of the images, that the pictures register at a similar level to ‘found’ photographs and the sequences created by Rickard are where the ‘meaning and the politic’ exists. 10
Rickard’s work is an example of how a post-collection approach to digital data can reveal telling insights into the current status of living in the city, and in doing so can also provide the case for change.
The term ‘post-collection’ is used because any sense of meaning is created after capture. In Rickard’s case, the ‘mining’ of a vast amount of data, presented as image files, takes on new meaning through selection and sequencing which did not exist beforehand, and was not the purpose of the images captured by Google’s fleet of cars with 360° cameras.
Technology writer Joanne McNeil 11 is clear on the original purpose of this data when she notes that “Street View isn’t photography as aesthetic representation, but the production of leftovers that happen to be images. These images are the husk — the dead skin of a surveillance charade. This archive can be fascinating and even useful to spectators—the users of it. But this data created and cleaned at scale is a source of Google’s power.” 12
There are now many artists working in a similar fashion, using the mass of imagery produced by Google’s cataloguing of the world as a starting point for piecing together individual and collective stories through this type of ‘data mining’.
Another possibility in focusing on the mass of information and data published is in the creation of what Lev Manovich has called ‘database documentary’.13 This further expands the terrain into which an examination of the world can operate in and opens up the possibilities for a wider, polyphonic account of urban experience. Whether curated in the more traditional sense, or aggregated through algorithms that can search for relevant information and tags, the possibility for a shift in documentary form has the potential to allow for more diverse voices within the processes of urban storytelling.
The potential for such an approach also draws on the work of Walter Benjamin as a key influence on many new media theorists such as Manovich. In her extensive study of The Arcades Project, Susan Buck-Morss focusses on the importance for Benjamin of the theoretical methodologies of montage and recombination.
She references how Benjamin was already positioning the importance of ‘data’ collection when discussing the ‘note boxes’ that he accumulated and cross referenced in multiple iterations as part of his study of the Parisian arcades “[…Already , as the contemporary mode of knowledge production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own note file.” 14
The Glitch
The method of digtial disruption is another strategy of engagement for artists. Recognising the possibilities for new ways of dealing with knowledge, and data, Ed Finn talks about the way we have adapted to this ‘extended mind’ and that we are now, for example, able to individually undertake mental tasks that would have been impossible in the pre-internet era.
For Finn, there is also something to be said for looking beyond, or adjacent to, the seamlessness that the digital world offers and he identifies how this exploration can become the basis for artistic production, stating that “many artists today explore the seams and rough edges of digital platforms, creating art out of the glitches and unintended juxtapositions that they can eke out of increasingly complicated creative systems.” 15
By manipulating and/or representing this failure, or disruption, that many artists can slow down the processes of the seamless digital world. Sometimes this is finding the moments of contradiction or making visible the invisible. Sometimes what is most interesting is also revealing the materiality of the digital. 16
Having outlined some of the strategies to engage with the digital, to what end can new metropolitan imaginaries be of use in thinking about, and acting within, the real cities we live in? The radical Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi points to the potential for artists to offer a critical (aesthetic) position within any wider technological discussion. While recognising the circumscribed conditions for social change, he notes that “The interpretation of inscribed possibilities is the main task of philosophy in our time. We must stubbornly search for concepts and percepts which may help to develop the immanent possibility inscribed in networked knowledge.” 17 He sees the creation of aesthetic forms as one of the key strategies in presenting ‘layers of futurability,’options for living that exist and are created by reworking the present.
Berardi also talks of the need for self-deployment. While there is an element of personal responsibility in this position, but he is also drawing attention to the need for an independence of thought and action, and focusses attention on the role of the artist in being able to configure possible futures through an aesthetic approach.
It is within this aesthetic realm of self-deployment that the most interesting moments of conjecture can exist for unravelling the future of the city.
1 https://webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/
2 https://www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/
3 “the idea of a …single unified place called “the metaverse" is still largely impossible. That is in part because such a world requires companies to cooperate in a way that simply isn't profitable or desirable,” Eric Ravenscroft, ‘What is the Metaverse, Exactly?’ https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse/
4 https://www.dezeen.com/2022/03/11/liberland-metaverse-city-zaha-hadid-architects/
5 One of the most high profile examples of the ‘smart city’ model was the Quayside development in Toronto, Canada. Launched in 2017 by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, (the parent company of Google) the project was abandoned in 2020 following increasing costs, and public opposition.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-a-band-of-activists-and-one-tech-billionaire-beat-alphabets-smart-city-de19afb5d69e
6 It is interesting to note that James Bridle has also become much more sceptical of the digital world. Writing in 2018 he notes “The primary method we have for evaluating the world – more data – is faltering. It’s failing to account for complex, human-driven systems, and its failure is becoming obvious – not least because we’ve built a vast, planet-spanning information-sharing system for making it obvious to us. The mutually assured privacy meltdown of state surveillance and leak-driven countersurveillance activism is one example of this failure, as is the confusion caused by real-time information overload from surveillance itself.”James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso 2018. p.465
7 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019, p.9
8 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space. Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, 2001 p. vii
9 Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘Computation and the Impact of New Technologies on the Photography of Architecture and Urbanism.’ Architecture_MPS, 2017, 11(1): 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2017v11i4.001target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2017v11i4.001
10 David Campany, ‘In the Frame’, in Doug Rickard, A New American Picture, Koenig Books 2012
11 McNeil was also a panelist in the SXSW New Aesthetic discussion
12 Joanne McNeil, ‘The Windshield and the Screen’
https://unthinking.photography/articles/the-windshield-and-the-screen
13 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001
14 Buck-Morss quotes here from Benjamin’s collection of essays One Way Street
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London England, 1991. p.336
In the preface Buck-Morss comments that “This is an unorthodox undertaking. It is a picture book of philosophy, explicating the dialectics of seeing developed by Walter Benjamin, who took seriously the debris of mass culture as the source of philosophical truth. It draws its authority from a book that was never written, the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), the unfinished, major project of Benjamin’s mature years. Instead of a ‘work’, he left us only a massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in Paris – and formed that city in turn. These notes consist of citations from a vast array of historical sources, which Benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged.” p.viiii
15 Ed Finn is founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic creativity target="_blank">https://aeon.co/essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic-creativity
16 Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Network Notebooks, 2011 p.29
“A glitch is the most puzzling, difficult to define and enchanting noise artifact; it reveals itself to perception as accident, chaos or laceration and gives a glimpse into normally obfuscated machine language. Rather than creating the illusion of a transparent, well-working inter-face to information, the glitch captures the machine revealing itself.”
17 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso, P.391
Bibliography
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso, 2017
James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, Verso 2018
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, The MIT Press, 1991.
David Campany, ‘In the Frame’, in Doug Rickard, A New American Picture, Koenig Books 2012
Ed Finn, ‘How algorithms are transforming artistic creativity’ https://aeon.co/essays/how-algorithms-are-transforming-artistic-creativity
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press 2001
Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Network Notebooks, 2011
Joanne McNeil, ‘The Windshield and the Screen’
https://unthinking.photography/articles/the-windshield-and-the-screen
Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘Computation and the Impact of New Technologies on the Photography of Architecture and Urbanism.’ Architecture_MPS, 2017, 11(1): 4. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2017v11i4.001
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space. Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, 2001
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019