The "New Aesthetic"

Digital interpretations and manipulations of real-world imagery. Snapchat filters, for example. Our image is absorbed by a digital entity and displayed back with pre-programed tweaks and tricks. We read the imagery as us, but it still intrinsically carries the warped foreignality of digital medias. A program captures our image, our identity, as data and plays it back to us in novel ways. We recognize that the image isn't necessarily us, yet we still identify with it. On a more subtle level, we experience this digital aesthetic, this interactive phenomenon, with front-facing cameras. Selfie cameras warp our image instead of reflecting it. Whether it warps through specific intent--making our eyes slightly larger, for example-- or through user-friendly convenience--mirror-imaging our photo to better match our own perspective of self--the digital world leaves its own distinct interpretations on our reality.

We also have real-world manipulations of digital interactions. Heat signature cars emitted from tanks. Marine camouflage meant to confuse both humans and machines. Alternatively, however, this same aesthetic exists as an enunciation of digital properties. "Pixelated" buildings or public art pieces fit into this category as well. In our interactions with digital media and a digital world, we have developed an aesthetic comprised of ways to trick and/or embrace the other party.

Colloquialized digital manipulations exist, for example, as masks. Martin Backes created a pixelated street mask that, although giving the impression of a digital face to normal humans, fools facial recognition software. People read the mask as a digital interpretation of reality, while actual digital software cannot interact with it as intended. Snapchat filters cannot recognize Backes's mask as human enough to manipulate, while real people see the mask as a reflection of low-res or problematic coding. Backes's mask employs the new aesthetic to float in a digital/reality middle-ground, disconnected from humanity, disconnected from new medias, all while existing as a product of both.