You know that art has changed when a new aesthetic movement announces itself not with a manifesto, but with a tumblr. Manifestos offer their grievances and demands plainly, all at once, on a single page—not in many hundred entries. “Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber,” wrote Filippo Marinetti in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto. “We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.” The stakes are clear: out with idleness and chatter, in with speed and violence.

You’ll find no such gripes or hopes in James Bridle’s modest microblog “The New Aesthetic,” which has recently enjoyed considerable attention thanks to a panel at the SXSW interactive conference, a Wired essay response by Bruce Sterling, and a series of responses to both at The Creators Project—not to mention dozens more replies all around the web.

From “The New Aesthetic Needs To Get Weirder.”

[Image: From Mishka Henner’s “Dutch Landscapes” series. Via new-aesthetic.tumblr.com.]

Google BBS Terminal: What Google might have looked like in the 1980s

[via]

new-aesthetic:

“The pixel is the fundamental unit of digital imaging, a square representation of a single color. Pixels are always the same size, and always arranged in orderly grids. This project looks at what happens when you change these universally agreed upon standards. More broadly, I’m interested in how the construction of digital images alters our perceptions of reality. Does computer-mediated vision change how we see without computers?”

Flexible Pixels | benjamin grosser

Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics

A desktop is a changing record of visual decisions. It speaks to the aesthetics of a particular work-flow and personal space. A desktop exhibits a diagram of your organizational habits and a screenshot of it captures a brief moment of its functional evolution. The image of your desktop becomes an intimate self-portrait and the impulse to decode an unfamiliar desktop is unavoidable.

In January, Adam Cruces wrapped up his Desktop Views project. Cruces collected 51 images of artists’ desktops including a number of artists he worked with in his earlier project STATE.

Cruces frames Desktop Views with a quote from Alexei Shulgin’s legendary Desktop Is project, created 15 years earlier in 1997, at the dawn of “net.art.” The quote, taken from the about page of Shulgin’s project, uses the title Desktop Is as an iterative I Ching-style manifesto about the desktop. Its final lines claim in paradox, “desktop is a question, desktop is the answer.” Cruces’s description of Desktop Views is more straightforward and less poetic. To him the desktop is “the (virtual) space that serves as the foundation of the working environment.” Cruces and Shulgin, however, channel the same curiosity. The two projects are echoes that present voyeuristic peeks into artists’ personal virtual working spaces on public websites.

From Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics, by Jason Huff on Rhizome.

[Image: Xerox Star 8010 Workstation | Via plyojump.com]

pinkjetpack:

Skynet’s cranky progenitor? Angry Young Computer—the B200 by the Burroughs Corporation. From Fortune magazine, October 1964.

superseventies: The Computer - How it Works - 1974 book cover. 

nevver: Control Panel

jstn: High-res Polaroids of the world’s first GUI (Xerox Star, 1981).

libraryland:

In 1984, science fiction titan Arthur C. Clarke delivered a story to Analog magazine called “siseneG” that he called the first he’d written in 10 years and said that they don’t come much shorter. And in a handful of words, he wrestled with religion, computer science and the very fabric of reality. [via]

Pure genius.