INTRODUCTION
The central logic structuring my work is the concept of aesthetic categories. I borrow the framework of aesthetic categories from Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. In her book, Sianne Ngai suggests that a set of minor aesthetic categories—different than the grand ones of beauty and sublimity—best index the postmodern culture of Western late capitalism. Seemingly insignificant aesthetic judgments (for Ngai, the “zany,” the “cute,” the “interesting) are not meaningless or subjective but express some quality regarding a large system of power that exceeds the cognitive capacities of an individual. In her examples, the “zany” indicates an aesthetic of production that reflects a playfulness and manic desperation of performative labor; the “interesting” illustrates the proliferation and circulation of discourse that inspires interest and boredom; the “cute” is entangled with the logics of capitalist consumption that invoke both tenderness and aggression. Each aesthetic category—a common judgment shared by subjects under Western late capitalism—reveals a relationship between the individual subject and the social world.
I think through Ngai’s work to help gather my work under one central question: How has media transformed the relation between subjects and the social world? This relation operates in two interrelated ways. One, new forms of media (television, digital media, etc.) have introduced new modes in which dominant ideologies circulate. If ideology, in the Althusserian sense, is how the subject constructs an imaginary relationship with the social world, then media plays an important role in maintaining the engine of ideology. Second, media forms also afford new methods for subjects to interrupt or transform ideology. Through various media and aesthetic strategies, subjects can reveal, remix, and re-imagine the political and social worlds in which they live.
Four aesthetic categories—perhaps of the technological variety—organize this archive. They are CLICHÉ, STATIC, GLITCHY, and GLOW. Each of these words are meaningless on their own but are entryways for me to bring different writings and projects together in intuitive ways to answer my central question. Their playfulness also hopes to construct an information architecture that does not offer a masterful organization of knowledge. Rather, the pieces here can be reworked and rearranged in new ways.
The following is a brief overview of each aesthetic category and the themes they capture. Cliché explores Susan Sontag’s description of the over-proliferation of images as a condition of ideology. Static elaborates on how our understanding of interfaces and screens are the dense site of ethics. Glitchy investigates archival questions regarding the mediation between present and past. Glow elaborates on visual strategies for critique and for bringing ethical futures into light. Please see each aesthetic/theme page for more detail on how these aesthetic categories allow for thematic exploration.
Subtending my work is a belief that the study of media and technology should further a political project of equitable futures. Far from politically “neutral,” the properties of media are steeped in the perpetuation or subversion of power. I hope my work gathered here contributes to this project in some way.
