Going Beyond the Visible: New Aesthetic as an Aesthetic of Blindness?

Abstract

‘Seeing like digital devices’, which is the call made by the New Aesthetic, is essentially impossible. We, as humans, have our own bandwidth of perception, which was exceeded not only with the dawn of ‘digital’ media technologies since the last 30 years, but for more than 100 years with the emergence of old analogue media technologies such as the gramophone and film around 1900. But, as ‘a postulated creative position’, a design-fictional concept, ‘seeing like digital devices’ provokes epistemological differentiations. By metaphorically pretending that machines are our friends, we can see what they ‘see,’ and think what they ‘think’... We do get a payoff for that effort. We achieve creative results that we would not have gotten without that robot disguise. (Sterling 2012) This chapter explores the discursive potential of ‘seeing like digital devices’ from a media-archaeological perspective and argues that we need to go beyond, below and around the visible for a comprehensive understanding of the media-theoretical implications that come along with this metaphor. In so doing, it explains in the first section the reasons for taking the position of the ‘hypothetical blind’, not in the conventional negative sense, as done by René Descartes or Denis Diderot in the 18th century and criticized by Georgina Kleege, a visually impaired scholar working at the Department of English at the University of California Berkeley (2005), but in the hopefully more accurate meaning of appreciating the non-visual and including the alternatives of the auditory and tactile senses into a more comprehensive approach to understand the implications of the ‘New Aesthetic’.