AESTHETICS IN THE NEW MEDIA

In view of all these new media, what stays the same? Aesthetics. The principles of perception. Because the media can pack together all sorts of sensory events from print to 3-D film, but the human brain still takes it in according to the way the human brain works. So how does it work?

Good question.

But there are some principles that remain the same, points of attention that are relevant whether you are composing music or transmitting print or painting a mural. They are mostly about organization, which amounts to the order in which the material is presented to the consumer. There needs to be a beginning and end. Attention must be paid to the transitions in any sequence, either between different “beats” of content (this is acting and directing talk) or between shifts in media. Many people expect a rising action, a turn of events, and some kind of resolution before the end.

In the New Media, some things are different. More is expected of the consumer. One is the idea of the continuous loop: sequences of equal value just keep happening, one after the other, and the consumer is expected to supply the beginning or ending by signing on or off. But the events are in segments so the consumer can presumably see the intervals between segments as beginnings. This is like the old-fashioned newsreels where the stories ran all day and people came and went as their schedules and tolerance allowed. Or like song anthology sequences, which can be made deliberately random on an iPod or be planned out according to some scheme.

In addition, a suspension of interpretation is needed until one catches on to what is happening (or not). For instance, the first time I saw “Wild Strawberries,” I arrived late, during the dream sequence, without knowing what it was. I just had to tolerate confusion and questions for a few minutes until I understood that this was psychological sequence and imagery rather than realistic imagery. When I was little and saw the impressionistic movie, “The Red Shoes,” I had a hard time separating what was in the characters’ heads from what was “real.” Many contemporary movies (maybe TOO many) are pretty confusing that way, in particular if the viewer has no background in that context and therefore no reference in reality.

Our understanding of narrative is far more flat or maybe wave-shaped than the traditional Greek drama pattern. We are much more likely to see events as a treadmill than a ski jump. We are a bit suspicious of ski jumps. They seem over-dramatic. But we love risk and violence: crashes, pile-ups, even bodies, one after another. Banal and repetitious as suicide bombers can be, journalists try to keep our emotions engaged (rage, indignation, catharsis, determination) by supplying ever more unexpected detail: the hand still holding a coffee mug though detached from the coffee drinker. But then what in the next one?

Likewise, there are so many absurd situations in a society full of mixed cultures that it’s hard to capture simple humor. The cat who plays the piano, putting her little head down on the keys as if to savor the sound, strikes people as a stunt instead of a gentle and unexpected merging of human and feline behavior. Some people have been so calloused by politics that they can’t perceive anything short of slapstick. Irony hasn’t ended, but ironists are maybe a little worn out.

A good artist plays expectation against surprise, whether the latter is amusing or horrible. Judging just how to do that is a skill but also means knowing the audience and that might be the hardest part of contemporary art forms, especially in the more portable modes like videos, except that people DO self-select and demographics can sort themselves out. Personally, I like to stumble upon some new cultural circle, but my tolerance for bafflement and ambiguity is pretty high. On the other hand, I don’t see or hear as well as I once did. Even more of a problem is that I have such a library of precedents in my head that I’m likely to activate one of them as relevant when it really isn’t.

Channel-surfing and radio scanning are one consumer-controlled sort of segmenting, but moving deliberately from one strand of a story to a sub-plot or from print to visual is a different sort of thing. In the case of Tim and myself alternating voices, moving between them is a significant transition in tone, even if we keep the subject the same, and some people will simply leave one of us out, the way I used to read Zane Grey westerns by skipping all the sunsets. There have always been and will always be people who cherry-pick scenes and make their own loop, repeating them again and again. But until now, no one could take film or music and “mash” it into something new, maybe critical and maybe a tremendous expansion and enhancement.

At a time when we need a “library” of shared references, the old canon is pretty threadbare until its very threadbareness becomes a subject, like the Romeo & Juliet currently on Broadway -- acted out versions of people’s faulty memories. And this adds to our sense of “reflexivity” -- watching ourselves watching, critiquing ourselves even as we critique. Though time has not reversed its direction, we have left far behind the Greek or Christian or whatever culture it was that invented a continuum with a neat beginning, extent and end. In an ontological sense, our beginning and end have become so infinite, so cosmic, so present but imperceptible, that they’re largely irrelevant -- which may give us a craving for an environment where a seed DOES get planted, sprout, mature, scatter more seeds, and die into compost. But when we can see powerful and beloved people’s images so clearly as they are born, grow up, enjoy a mature life, decline and die, maybe we value much more the images of infinity and eternity and yearn to know what cannot ever be destroyed. Can time be destroyed? The Queen of England can be destroyed. Can the British Isles sink beneath the sea? Clearly humans can be destroyed. This story seems to be significant to us, whether schlock poorly done or not. In the end, content rules.