"The Render Ghosts are the people who live inside our imaginations, in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital. A world of architecture, urbanism and the city before it is completed - which is also never. They inhabit a space which exists only in the virtual spaces of 3D computer rendering software, projected onto billboards, left to rot and torn down when the actual future arrives; never quite as glossy or as perfect as our renderings of it would like it to be, or have prepared us for."

…

"In fact, Los Alamos is still not a place either: the vast National Laboratory sits behind miles of fences. A small town, a local museum, is the closest you can get to it. The Internet is like history. History is like the Internet. You can go right to the site of it, to the centre, where it happened, and that’s not where it is. It’s diffuse, it’s everywhere; it’s the structure, not the event. I had been using the Render Ghosts as way to understand something about the Internet, but it felt like the Render Ghosts, the Internet, were trying to explain something to me. The Render Ghosts are lost too, adrift in history and virtual networks, which increasingly resemble memory. We can’t hear their voices but we can see them everywhere, if we look: those parts of ourselves and others, the remembrance of things, struggling to survive in the churn of information."

"I've begun to collect the postcards from Portfoliopolis that pile up in designworld, winning contests and filling exhibitions and blogs — and of course portfolios — with their seductive visions. Judging by the proliferation of the evidence, it’s a place that grows faster than any 21st Century mega-city — but always “smart”-ly, neatly anticipating environmental catastrophe and never beset by the ad-hoc peripheral slums so familiar to us here on Earth.

The road to Portfolioplis, I imagine (and obviously I can only imagine) is paved with the creative solutions. It is designworld’s El Dorado, constructed, or perhaps I should say fabricated, from the best of intentions. It often draws its power from the clean grid of potential career advancement, the ultimate renewable resource…

Portfoliopolis seems so promising, but of course it’s nothing of the kind. Postcards from Portfoliopolis never promise: Instead they suggest, they inspire, they beguile, and they distract…"

[New URL: http://www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/
See also: http://booktwo.org/notebook/sxaesthetic/
http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2012/03/13/godhelpus/#sxaesthetic
http://www.joannemcneil.com/new-aesthetic-at-sxsw/
http://noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com/design/2012/03/sxsw-the-new-aesthetic-and-commercial-visual-culture.html
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2012/03/sxsw-the-new-aesthetic-and-writing.html ]

"The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”

The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.” It’s diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It is rhizomatic, as the people at Rhizome would likely tell you. It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It’s like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight.

There are some good aspects to this modern situation, and there are some not so good ones."

"That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow."

"These are sculptures by Shawn Smith. There’s going to be an ongoing problem with this, that if you sit way at the back, you might not see quite how pixelated these things are. There’s a whole different art-​​historical dissertation about what that means, the distance of the viewer."

"James Bridle’s closing keynote from Web Directions South 2011 was a a terrific end to an amazing couple of days, but don’t despair if you weren’t there. You can watch a full length video, read a transcript with the bonus of all the links James refers to, or even listen to a podcast.

So sit back, relax and enjoy Waving at the Machines."

[Video also at: http://vimeo.com/32976928 ]