How to Be Theorized: A Tediously Academic1 Essay on the New Aesthetic

On 6 May 2011, James Bridle — who self-identifies as ‘a writer, publisher, technologist, and artist, based in London’2 — launched a Tumblr blog entitled The New Aesthetic, featuring an initial 25 entries.3 Over the course of the following year, new entries were added to the Tumblr on a regular basis, between 100 and 150 each month. Parallel to this, Bridle presented his concept in several lectures. But the New Aesthetic only really took off in spring 2012, when it was the topic of a panel at the South by Southwest conference,4 which was reviewed for the popular online magazine WIRED.com by science fiction author Bruce Sterling (2012). From this moment on, Twitter messages and blog entries referring to the New Aesthetic increased tremendously (see, as an example, Kaganskiy 2012). In parallel, a number of further conferences and festival events on the topic were organized, including a book sprint.5 Even while the initial Tumblr blog was (temporarily) closed,6 the concept continued to spread across the digital networks and has been related to quite diverse visual and objectual, material and immaterial artefacts — in blog posts and Twitter messages all over. The New Aesthetic thus underwent a kind of viral dispersion — it resembles an internet meme (see Watz 2012), although with a proper name.