The New Aesthetic

The ‘New Aesthetic' was initially introduced at South By South West (SXSW) on 12 March 2012, at a panel organized by James Bridle.¹ The panel was called ‘The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices' and was primarily concerned with ‘giv[ing] examples of these effects, products and artworks, and discuss[ing] the ways in which ways of [computer/robot] seeing are increasingly transforming ways of making and doing' (SXSW 2012).

The new aesthetic can be described as an aesthetic that revels in seeing the grain of computation or, perhaps better, seeing the limitations or digital artefacts of a kind of digital glitch, sometimes called the ‘aesthetic of failure' (see Jones 2011). Indeed,

the debate on the aesthetic of digital code has been predominantly focused, on the non-representational and non-functional performativity of coding and its infinite possible infractions (errors, glitches and noise), emphasising that it is precisely these infractions that give code its real aesthetic value... [or] the sensorial alterations or affects produced by technology on the human body-subject. (Parisi and Portanova 2012)

Enabling robot/computer algorithms to ‘see' by imposing computational ‘pixels' on reality is also part of this new aesthetic (see Catt 2012). However, there is also an element of representation of a kind of digital past, or perhaps digital passing, in that the kinds of digital glitches, modes and forms that are chosen, are very much located historically where we are moving into a high-definition world of retina displays and high-pixel density experience (e.g.

concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It's been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava- covered ground artistically fertile and productive. (Sterling 2012)

Using a flaneur-like approach, James Bridle collected objects, artworks, buildings, places and images in a growing blog-based accumulation of things that he presents as exemplars of this new aesthetic (a collection or litany being an interesting computational form) (Bridle 2011a, b). Indeed there is an unmonumentality, a lo-res assemblage quality about these works, as forms of 'precarious' objects and artworks formed by digital 'unskill' (see Smith 2007). Bridle explains,

I started noticing things like this in the world. This is a cushion on sale in a furniture store that's pixelated. This is a strange thing. This is a look, a style, a pattern that didn't previously exist in the real world. It's something that's come out of digital. It's come out of a digital way of seeing, that represents things in this form. The real world doesn't, or at least didn't, have a grain that looks like this. But you start to see it everywhere when you start looking for it. It's very pervasive. It seems like a style, a thing, and we have to look at where that style came from, and what it means, possibly. Previously things that would have been gingham or lacy patterns and this kind of thing is suddenly pixelated. Where does that come from? What's that all about? (Bridle 2011a)

His website, titled 'The New Aesthetic', displays an archival impulse and links to or archives found objects from across the internet (and which he captures in everyday life), piled together into a quantitative heap of computational aesthetic objects (Bridle 2012). Sterling (2012) explained,

the “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture.

Sterling rightly sees this as a symptomology with constituent parts including, 'information visualization. Satellite views. Parametric architecture. Surveillance cameras. Digital image processing. Data-mashed video frames. Glitches and corruption artifacts. Voxelated 3D pixels in real-world geometries. Dazzle camou. Augments. Render ghosts. And, last and least, nostalgic retro 8-bit graphics from the 1980s' (Sterling 2012). But the question that arises in relation to the writings of both Bridle and for Sterling is: what is going on here? What does this seemingly new computational aesthetic signify and what is its critical location? Sterling correctly, in my mind, rejects the notion of an aesthetic of the machines, or of computer vision, etc., what has been called sensor-venacular elsewhere, equally rejecting a kind of hauntology of the 1980s (Jones 2011), or sensor-aesthetic (Sloan 2011; see also Ellis 2011; Gyford 2011). Nor does an explicit link between this new aesthetic and SR/OOO necessarily help us understand this pattern aesthetic - although, perhaps, this is also revealing in SR/OOO's relation to computationality (Borenstein 2012; Kaganskiy 2012).

Ironically, this is happening at a time when most people's command of digital technology is weak and their understanding of the politics of technology is minimal. The new aesthetic might then, in its popular manifestations, and as evidenced by Bridle and Sterling, actually represent a weak form of understanding of the computational and its representation - perhaps even an attempt at a domestication.

Inevitably there have been attacks on the notion of the new aesthetic which have tended to focus on its seeming 'internet meme', 'buzz', 'promotional strategy' and this I see as indicative of a wider set of concerns in relation to computation as a hegemonic order. Many of these discussions have a particular existential flavour, questioning the existence and longevity of the new aesthetic, for example, or beginning to draw the boundaries of what is 'in' or 'out' of the domain of new aesthetic things (See Twitter 2012). Grusin (2012), for example, claims: '[t]he “new aesthetic” is just the latest name for remediation, all dressed up with nowhere to go'. At such an early stage there is understandably some scepticism and, being mediated via Twitter, some sarcasm and dismissal, rather than substantive engagements with the questions raised by a moment presaged by the eruption of the digital into the everyday lifeworld, but there is also some partial support (e.g. see, Berry 2012b; Exinfoam 2012; Fernandez 2012; Owens 2012).

Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that one of the themes particular to the new aesthetic is a form of cultural practice related to a postmodern and fundamentally paranoid vision of being watched, observed, coded, processed or formatted. If Lash (2007) is correct that ‘a society of ubiquitous media means a society in which power is increasingly in the algorithm', then the new aesthetic could be the aesthetic of the algorithm, and by extension a representation of these new forms of power. Indeed, this aspect of algorithmic surveillance and being subject to data collection is clearly a very timely experience, as we understand more and more the extent to which we are being tracked. The representational practices of the new aesthetic are often (but not always) retro showing computational processes as blocky and pixelated visually.

Nonetheless, the new aesthetic is also important in a critical vein because it appears to have an inbuilt potentiality towards critical reflexivity, not only towards itself (does it exist?) but also towards its own artistic practice (is this art?), curation (should this be in galleries?) and technology (whatis technology?). While these critical moments are often alienated into a supposed question posed by computational devices themselves, this moment offers the new aesthetic a critical sensitivity that is often absent in aesthetic practice. Indeed, we might say that there is an interesting utopian kernel to the new aesthetic, in terms of its visions and creations - what we might call the paradigmatic forms - which mark the crossing over of certain important boundaries, such as culture/nature, technology/human, economic/aesthetic and so on. Here I am thinking particularly of the notion of augmented humanity, or humanity 2.0 - a latent post-humanism that is intrinsic to the discourses of the new aesthetic (Fuller 2011). This criticality is manifested in the new aesthetic continually seeking to ‘open up' black boxes of technology, to look inside at developments in science, technology and technique and to try to place them within histories and traditions - in the emergence of social contradictions, for example. But even an autonomous new aesthetic, as it were, highlights the anonymous and universal political and cultural domination represented by computational techniques which are now deeply embedded in systems that we experience in all aspects of our lives.

The new aesthetic, of course, is as much symptomatic of a computational world as itself subject to the forces that drive that world. This means that it has every potential to be sold, standardized and served up to the willing mass of consumers as any other neatly packaged product, perhaps even more so, with its ease of distribution and reconfiguration within computational systems, such as Twitter and Tumblr. But even in an impoverished consumer- ized aesthetic form, the new aesthetic still serves notice of computational thinking and processes. This is certainly one of the interesting dimensions to the new aesthetic both in terms of the materiality of computationality and in terms of the need to understand the logics of postmodern capitalism, even ones as abstract as obscure computational systems of control. The new aes­thetic can be said to mediate the computational and its relationship to a par­ticular way-of-being in the world and its instantiation in technical media (here specifically concerned with computational technology). This aspect of the new aesthetic lends itself to contributing to creating what Lash called ‘crystalline intellectuals, who work less as an organ in the body of a social class and more as coders, writing algorithms, as designers and the like' by continuing to open up and question the internal structures of computationality and creating a ubiquitous politics (Lash 2007: 75).

The new aesthetic is particularly a visual form showing digital surfaces in a number of different places and contexts. It is also not purely a digital production or output, it can also be the concepts and frameworks of digital that are represented (e.g. voxels or three-dimensional pixels in everyday life). We could perhaps say that the new aesthetic is a form of ‘breakdown' art linked to the conspicuousness of digital technologies; not just the use of digital tools, of course, but also a language of new media (as Manovich would say), the frameworks, structures, concepts and processes represented by computation, that is, both the presentation of computation and its representational modes. It not only represents computation, but also draws attention to this glitch ontology to a striking extent, for example, through the representation of the conspicuousness of glitches and other digital artefacts (also see Menkman 2010, for a notion of critical media aesthetics and the idea of glitch studies). Beaulieu et al. (2012) have called these approaches ‘Network Realism' and sought to draw attention to some of these visual practices, particularly the way of producing these networked visualizations. However, the new aesthetic is interesting in remaining focused on the aesthetic in the first instance (rather than the sociological, etc.). This is useful in order to examine the emerging visual culture, but also to try to discern aesthetic forms instantiated within it.

The new aesthetic then might be the herald of a new kind of comprehensive digital archive, what we might call an archive in motion - what Bernard Stiegler called the Anamnesis (the embodied act of memory as recollection or remembrance) combined with Hypomnesis (the making-technical of memory through writing, photography, machines, etc.) (Stiegler n.d.).Thus, particularly in relation to the affordances given by the networked and social media within which it circulates, combined with a set of nascent practices of collection, archive and display, the new aesthetic is distinctive in a number of ways.

First, it gives a description and a way of representing and mediating the world in and through the digital, that is understandable as an infinite archive (or collection). Secondly, it alternately highlights that something digital is happening in culture - and which we have perhaps only barely been conscious of - and the way in which culture is happening to the digital. Lastly, the new aesthetic points the direction of travel for the possibility of a Work of Art in the digital age - something Heidegger thought impossible under the conditions of technicity, but which conceivably remains more open under computationality.

In this, the new aesthetic shows us that computation is a pharmakon, in that it is both potentially poison and cure for an age of pattern matching and pattern recognition. If the archive was the set of rules governing the range of expression following Foucault, and the database the grounding cultural logic of software cultures into the ‘permanent extendibility' of software (Manovich 2013: 337), we might conclude that the New Aesthetic is the cultural eruption of the grammatization of software logics into everyday life. The new aesthetic can be seen as surfacing computational patterns, and in doing so articulates and represents the unseen and little-understood logic of computation, which lies under, over and in the interstices between the modular elements of an increasingly computational society.

The pattern aesthetic of the new aesthetic is deeply influenced by and reliant on patterns and abductive reasoning more generally. This is a common thread that links the lists and litanies of objects that seem to have nothing more in common than a difficult-to-reconcile and tenuous digitality, or perhaps a seeming retro towards older forms of digital rendering and reproduction. In actuality, it is no surprise that we see a return of 8-bit retro as it could perhaps be described as the abductive aesthetic par excellence, in as much as it enables an instant recognition of, and indeed serves as an important representation for the digital, even as the digital becomes high definition and less ‘digital' by the day.

Patterns are also deeply concerned with computer pattern recognition, repeated elements, codes and structural elements that enable something to be recognized as a type of thing (see Harvey 2011 for a visualization of facial pattern recognition). This is not just visual, of course, and patterns may be recognized in data sets, textual archives, data points, distributions, non-visual sensors, physical movement or gestures, haptic forces, etc. Indeed, this points to the importance of information visualization as part of the abduction aesthetic in order to ‘visualise' the patterns that are hidden in sets of data. This is also the link between the new aesthetic and the digital humanities (see Berry 2012b; Gold 2012).

The fact that abduction aesthetics are networked, sharable, modular, 'digital' and located in both the digital and analogue worlds is appropriate as they follow the colonization of the lifeworld by the technics of Computationality. We could look at David Hockney's Fresh Flowers (Grant 2010) and the fact that he links the artwork he produces to the medial affordances of the computational device, in this case an iPad, stating 'when using his iPhone or iPad to draw, the features of the devices tend to shape his choice of subject.... The fact that it's illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects' (Freeman 2012). Parisi and Portanova further argue for an algorithmic aesthetic with their notion of 'soft thought',

the aesthetic of soft thought precisely implies that digital algorithms are autonomous, conceptual modes of thinking, a thinking that is always already a mode of feeling ordered in binary codes, and is not to be confused with sensing or perceiving. Numerical processing is always a feeling, a simultaneously physical and conceptual mode of feeling data, physical in the actual operations of the hardware-software machine, conceptual in the grasp of numbers as virtualities or potentials. (Parisi and Portanova 2012)

The point I want to make is that Bridle's (2012a) collection is symptomatic of an emerging real-time aesthetic of the algorithm, and that the digital requires representation. It is also significant that the means of collecting these litanies of digital and pseudo-digital objects is through a computational frame and further that the collection is made possible through new forms of computational curation tools, such as Tumblr and Pinterest (2012). The real­time as an aesthetic concern was discussed by Jack Burnham as far back as 1969, who explained that '[r]eal-time systems gather and process data from environments, in time to effect future events within those environments' (Shanken 2012). Here, value is produced on the basis of an 'immediate, interactive, and necessarily contingent exchange of information'. Burnham juxtaposed this model with the 'traditional aesthetic notion of “ideal time',' in which the contemplation of beauty occurs in theoretical isolation from the societal and temporal contingencies' (Shanken 2012). Although Burnham has a particularly cybernetic notion of the real-time, even for computation, and by definition its carriers, code and software, which withdraws into the background of our experience, it is probable that we will increasingly see the foregrounding of a representation of, and for, the real-time digital/ computational in the way that Burnham suggests. Indeed Burnham,

observed that, paralleling the introduction of computerised real-time systems into the operations of government, finance, and the military, some experimental artists... were increasingly approaching art with an emphasis on real-time issues. “What a few artists are beginning to give the public is real time information, information with no hardware value, but with software significance for effecting awareness of events in the present.” (Shanken 2012)

In some ways, 8-bit images and domesticated real-time streams are perhaps reassuring and still comprehensible as different from and standing in opposition to the everyday world people inhabit - the source of the ‘digital divide' identified by Bishop (2012). In actuality, however, the glitches and retro 8-bit-esque look that we see in new aesthetic pixelated works are far away from the capabilities of contemporary machines, and their blocky ontologies provide only limited guidance on the way in which software now organizes and formats our shared, and sharable, world (Berry 2011a). Indeed, in some senses we might be experiencing a transition from an object-oriented to a software- oriented culture due to the processual nature of these real-time streams and their post-object construction of algorithmic relations. So ironically, just as digital technologies and software mediate our experience and engagement with the world, often invisibly, so the ‘digital' and ‘software' is itself mediated and made visible through the representational forms of pixelation and glitch.

While today we tend to think of the 8-bit pixelation, satellite photos, CCTV images and the like, it is probable that alternative, computational forms may prevail, such as increasing use of geons and other geometric representation forms.The importance of patterns in computation capitalism will likely produce a kind of cognitive dissonance with individuals expecting pattern aesthetics everywhere, understood as a form of apophenia, that is, the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data (called a Type-1 error in statistics). Indeed, they may seek digital or abductive explanations for certain kinds of aesthetic, visual or even non-visual experiences which may not be digital or produced through computational means at all, a digital pareidolia. Pareidolia involves seeing importance in vague and random phenomenon, for example, a face in a random collection of dots on paper. By ‘digital pareidolia' I am gesturing towards seeing digital causes for things that happen in everyday life. Indeed, under a regime of computationality in the future it might be considered stranger to believe that things might have non-digital causes. Thus apophenia would be the norm in a highly digital computational society, perhaps even a significant benefit to one's life chances and well-being if finding patterns becomes increasingly lucrative.²

This representation of the digital is, of course, an interesting feature of the new aesthetic as much as (1) there may be the mediation of the computal in the creation of aesthetic objects or (2) the affordances of digital vision that creates certain kinds of recognizable patterned digital artefacts (see Ellis 2011; Sloan 2011). This is an element of 'down-sampled' representation of a kind of digital past, or perhaps digital passing, in that the kinds of digital glitches, modes and forms that are chosen are very much located historically (Berry 2012a). We might think of these alternative formulations or threads within the new aesthetic as (i) representations of the digital, (ii) mediation by digital processes and (iii) digital/computer vision. In any case, it is clear that so far the main focus of the new aesthetic has been visual patterns, and the wider sensorium needs to be considered in relation to computational processes.

Further, following Charles Sanders Peirce notion of abduction, he also introduces the concept of musement to describe the mode of thinking relevant to the aesthetic enjoyment of the abductive as pattern-matching. Peirce defined musement as 'pure play' which is strikingly receptive and leisurely (Salas 2009: 468).

It is “a lively exercise of one's powers” and yet “has no rules, except this very law of liberty” (6.458). Though musement is leisurely in that it allows the muser to assume different standpoints, it also involves deliberate observation and meditation. “It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one the three universes [a primary universe of sensations or raw experience; a secondary universe of reactions to sensory data; and a tertiary universe of representations or signs used to relate the primary and secondary universes]. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take between self and self” (6.459). While in a sense passive and receptive, musement is also that in which “logical analysis can be put to full efficiency” (6.461). We might say that, while “musing” one is both “active” and “contemplative”............ (Salas 2009: 468, original referencing preserved)

The similarity is striking between Peirce's notion of musement and the Greek concept of theoria or contemplation, which according to Aristotle was the highest activity of leisure. Indeed, Peirce distinguishes musement from 'reverie' or 'vacancy and dreaminess' (Salas 2009: 290). This element of playfulness is relevant to a discussion of the aesthetics of computationality, and indeed forms a large part of the new aesthetic that Bridle (2011) and Sterling (2012) describe. It is interesting to note that a properly distanced musement is indeed possible towards the abduction aesthetic when mediated through the real-time streams made available through Tumblr and other digital asset/ object technologies.

In a slightly different register, it is worth looking in some detail at the claims advanced by SR/OOO in relation to the new aesthetic itself (Bogost 2012; Borenstein 2012; Jackson 2012). More specifically, some SR/OOO practitioners critique the new aesthetic in terms of what is considered a misplaced focus on the merely computational and attempt to redefine the new aesthetic in the philosophical problematics of SR/OOO. For me, this is to have the argument the wrong way round. SR/OOO and the new aesthetic must be critically engaged with in relation to computation itself. Indeed, we might say that SR/OOO is standing on its head. This raises the question of what is at stake in accepting the claims of SR/OOO and what are the implications both theoretically and empirically for the new aesthetic more generally. First it is worth exploring what SR/OOO are claiming. Borenstein argues,

I believe that Sterling is wrong. I believe that the New Aesthetic is actually striving towards a fundamentally new way ofimagining the relations between things in the world. To convince you of this, I'll make a case that the New Aesthetic strongly resonates with a recent movement in philosophy called Object-Oriented Ontology and that establishing a closer alliance with OOO might be a way to increase the precision of the New Aesthetic vocabulary and enrich its process by pointing towards new modes of imagining its objects of fascination. (Borenstein 2012)

Here, Borenstein is arguing that the new aesthetic has an SR/OOO predilection or 'resonates' with the claims and descriptions of SR/OOO. In other words, the claim is that the new aesthetics is merely an aesthetic subset of SR/OOO, and as Bogost further argues that the new aesthetic needs to get 'weirder', claiming,

It's true that computers are a particularly important and influential kind of thing in the world, and indeed I myself have spent most of my career pondering how to use, make, and understand them. But they are just one thing among so many more: airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the brand name "TaB." Why should a new aesthetic interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car? (Bogost 2012)

Bogost claims that the new aesthetic is about the 'relationship between humans and computers' and he argues that instead it should be concerned with ontology, in this case the object-oriented relationships between lots of different kinds of objects. Additionally, Jackson identifies, although he also in my mind mistakenly rejects, the importance of 'disorientation' for the new aesthetic,

The really interesting element of the new aesthetic is that it presents genuinely interesting stuff, but Bridle's delivery strategy is set to "gushing disorientation” At present, it's the victim of the compulsive insular network it feeds off from. It presents little engagement with the works themselves instead favouring bombardment and distraction. Under these terms, aesthetics only leads to a banal drudgery, where everything melts together into a depthless disco. Any depth to the works themselves are forgotten... Memes require instant satisfaction. Art requires depth. (Jackson 2012)

While I think the claim that Art requires depth' is a somewhat conservative notion of what art is or should be, it seems to me that disorientation, or what I would call, following Heidegger, frantic disorientation, is perhaps an important marker of the specificity of the new aesthetic. Somewhat reminiscent of claims of 'depthlessness' that attended the rise of postmodernism, for example (see Jameson 2006). So in what way would a reading of the new aesthetic through SR/OOO help understand the new aesthetic? The claim is that the new aesthetic points the way to thinking about the relationships between different objects without the mediation of human beings. That is, that we can think in a non-anthropomorphic way, without what Harman calls the ‘idea of human access' (Shaviro 2011). As Bogost argues,

Our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of these processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger. (Borenstein 2012)

Bogost (2012) argues that his ‘version of object-oriented ontology... concerns the experience of objects. What is it like to be a bonobo or a satellite or a pixel?' (Bogost 2012). Putting aside the unlikelihood of discerning ‘what it is like to be' something like a pixel - indeed, to me the very question seems to be confusing the fundamental quality of human beings (as dasein) able to raise the question of their own being with that of a pixel, which prime facie does not (Heidegger 1978). This raises an anti-correlationist paradox in the use of human categories to describe ‘alien objects' interiority. Not that this method has to be completely unproductive, indeed, Bogost's claims that the ‘weird' points to his attempt to do something new or different - however, I would argue, it cannot truly be ‘weird' enough, restricted as it is to a descriptive project in which cultural critique is usually dismissed. Indeed, the conservativeness of SR/OOO is apparent when the subject of politics or historicity in relation to philosophy is raised. Added to this, SR/OOO continues the use of human categories even as it is articulating what it considers to be a non-anthropomorphic mode. For example, Borenstein argues, the,

[new aesthetic] want[s] to know what CCTV means for social networks, what book scanning means for iOS apps, and what face detection means for fashion. And again these objects are not just interesting to each other as a set of constraints and affordances for the objects' human makers but for the hidden inner lives of the objects themselves throughout their existence. (Borenstein 2012)

Does the idea of ‘inner lives' even make any sense for iOS apps, CCTV or pixels? Following Heidegger (1978), I would even argue that it doesn't make much sense for humans, let alone SunChips and Doritos. Bogost's attempts to link SR/OOO and new aesthetics by a notion of Alien Aesthetics' is similarly problematic, where he argues,

[t]his Alien Aesthetics would not try to satisfy our human drive for art and design, but to fashion design fictions that speculate about the aesthetic judgments of objects. If computers write manifestos, if Sun Chips make art for Doritos, if bamboo mocks the bad taste of other grasses - what do these things look like? Or for that matter, when toaster pastries convene conferences or write essays about aesthetics, what do they say, and how do they say it? (Jackson 2012)

Again we see the anti-correlationist paradox in as much as objects are now considered to make ‘aesthetic judgments' of other objects. Patently, ‘pastries' do not ‘write essays about aesthetics' nor about anything else, indeed, in try­ing so hard to avoid anthropomorphism ontologically, Bogost appears to allow it in the backdoor through metaphor. Here we might nod towards Heidegger who emphasized the importance of practices in understanding being (for Dasein), and the writing of essays is crucial to the understanding of being a student, for example, not to being a pastry (Heidegger 1978). We are thus left with speculative fictional statements akin to vignettes about objects ‘truth' or ‘correctness' that nonetheless offer only descriptions of the reified objects disconnected from the social and political context in which they reside. For example, Sun Chips are a product of consumer capitalism and discussing the ‘object' and its aesthetic tastes begins to sound like the anthropomorphism of branding statements and marketing campaigns, that is a process of naturaliza­tion of the market. SR/OOO is unable, or unwilling, to engage with the way in which objects as objects are produced in a market economy that seeks to hide the social labour that produced them. A reason to be suspicious of its claims to be an explanatory framework for helping to understand the new aesthetic.

The specificity of the new aesthetic, as a comportment and a set of practices, is important because of its implicit recognition of the extent to which digital media has permeated our everyday lives. Indeed, the new aesthetic is a form of 'breakdown' art linked to the conspicuousness of digital technologies. That is both the representation of computation and its representational modes at the level of the screenic. Now I want to drill down further into these issues related to an aesthetics of computation itself by an examination of code aesthetics and related practices.