🔗 Digital esthetics, environmental change and the subcultures of computer art

For decades, the development of information technology has been characterized by a very strong growth orientation, which is now coming to an end with the fading of Moore's Law and environmental change. Academic research in computing has only recently begun to wake up to the fact that there are limits to growth, and that a more fundamental paradigm shift is required to achieve sustainable computing; mere technical tinkering is not enough.

Growth-centricity has also dictated the development of digital esthetics, which will thus need to change as well. I suggest that the guidelines for this change should be sought in subcultures of computer art whose esthetic ideals are very different from the mainstream Maximalism and Virtualism – the self-serving glorification of the big and plentiful and the hiding of the technical basis of things. I have chosen demo art, chip music, pixel graphics and glitch art as examples of these subcultures. The ideals of "digitality" are also being challenged by post-digitality, so I will also look at these subcultures through this concept.

I will conclude with reflections on the possible impacts of environmental change on digital esthetics and computing more generally, and on the ways in which computer art subcultures could play a pioneering role in these developments.

1. Tagged with
2. computing
3. climate change