042024: The New Aesthetic
Where I was. We entered the U8 train at Alexanderplatz. A person comes up to me: “Hey, aren’t you christowski from Twitter?!” It’s extremely weird and slightly uncomfortable, for two reasons: I was not famous on Twitter; I had a very small amount of followers. And secondly, I just tried to explain to my friend how my Twitter bubble worked; and how it had connected me to so many great people.
This was in 2012. Different times.
It was this weird phase where the analog and digital world had a relatively small overlap. You were a real person online, but life still happened offline, and if you were on Twitter, in Germany, in 2012, you definitely qualified as “chronically online.”
Of course, I long for that time. It had a specific tactility to it. The New Aesthetic, as James Bridle called it: Glimpses of the digital sphere, making their ways to the offline world: Pixelated sunglasses, planes with digital camouflage prints—he called it “a mood-board for unknown products.”
In 2012, I was very excited about Bridle’s research. It bridged a gap, somehow in reverse: All of a sudden, not the analog world oozed into digital spaces (remember skeuomorphic interfaces?), but the other way round! It was a visual way to observe what the future might look like—not always positive or optimistic, but peculiar and interesting.
Current developments in technology and aesthetics, such as generated and synthetic imagery, machine-made texts that clutter and clog the internet, are a newer iteration, in some way. By now, the analog world turned digital, and the digital world is oozing its debris into its own streets. Finding a clean lane in our digital world has gotten tricky.
Twitter is gone now, but the initial New Aesthetic research Tumblr blog (yes! Tumblr!) is still being updated, with more current examples. I highly recommend scrolling through it, if that’s your thing. Me, personally: As I remembered the encounter about Twitter on the train, I finally accepted that this type of digital-social fabric was lost, and closed that chapter for good. There are better online and offline spaces now, anyway. The real world still exists.
What else is happening?
Grafikmagazin — A little interview with me was published in the recent issue of the German Grafikmagazin, a publication dedicated to graphic and print design. I got to talk about writing as a design tool, which I love doing (as you might know).
Beyond Tellerrand — This week (!), Harry and I are attending the design + tech conference Beyond Tellerrand. I haven’t been in a while, but I remember it as a great place to meet indie web makers, designers and nerds offline, and I am really looking forward to it. Say Hi if you’re there, too!
From the sketchbook: “follow telegram channel?! are they also conspiracy theorists now…”
(Brat) summer is over, I still have not jotted down my ultimate XCX album review, and it might not happen afterall now. Autumn has arrived, and all its golden glory is gone already. I made it count though, I hope you did too. Yours truly—Christoph 💌