Art & Technology #14: The evolution of digital media and contemporary aesthetics

With the exception of digitization as a technological method, every age had its own “new-media”, and our perceptions and aesthetic sensitivity had already experienced those new-medias. At the base of aesthetic experience of new media, there is a process of remediation and intermédialité. Remediation to media what translation is to a language, where when a text in one language is translated into another language, the process involves not only the transfer of content and meaning, but also interpretation and understanding. Today's new media either acknowledges, competes against, or alters existing media such as painting, film, and television. By doing so, it establishes its own cultural significance, the process which we call remediation. Such conceptualization comes from the premise that each medium is not simply a machine for the means, but a language-like system of symbols, where the process of competition and interaction of each medium is postulated as a “game of symbols”. This concept was proposed by Grusin, where the contents of media are not “purely” retained through their conduits, but an interaction across media occur.

Humans are highly capable experiencing contradictory experiences, such as simultaneously experiencing anxiety and pleasure. The conflicting emotions such as joy and pain, happiness and fear, uplifted feelings and disappointment, are in Europe frequently described as “the sublime”, an aesthetic condition that seeks to express what cannot be described otherwise. This aspect means that a particular work of art is not based on the sender of the message, or the creator of the work, but on the receiver of the message, the reader or the audience. For this reason, Lyotard saw that “the sentiment of the receiver’s aesthetic experiences” was more important. We see this in the present, where the basis of judging a work of art is not on the artist as the originator, but on how it is received. The question of “what aesthetic experience it causes” has become the crux in today age of multimedia. Amorphous aesthetics, a key feature of the sublime, became an important task through the nineteenth and twentieth century, established as an important aesthetic sensibility in understanding contemporary art on the platform of digital media.
Within the aesthetic aspect of the sublime, the inversed relationship between the recipient and the creator became an aesthetic process that can be appropriately applied to the interactive arts, and these new aesthetic experiences have the potential to further liberate cultural arts. Political philosopher Jacque Ranciere argued that if existing boundaries and arrangements within the aesthetic system of art can be restructured and the practice of collective liberation planned, the aesthetic form of digital interface might hold the key.