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amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:48:39 UTC

We are HADES

amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:48:39 UTC

Abstract

amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:48:39 UTC

Aesthetics has historically been a pressure point in scholarship on digital technoculture. Following on from similarly concerned Y2K-era work on so-called new media, aesthetic inquiries into The Digital have tended to be based on thinking-feeling questions about its technical materialities. What is the vibe unique to hardware systems from CPUs to data centres? What is the affective texture of program code? How might cloud infrastructure be sublime? The many proffered responses to such questions do and should comprise their own region of legitimate criticism; but they also tend to be conflated with thinking about digital things. This seminar is an invitation to consider how aesthetics of The Digitalare distinct from digital aesthetics, and why it is important to make that distinction.

An adverse consequence of said conflation is that concepts of digital aesthetics tend to perpetuate a cult of the new: our prevailing critical emphasis on digital materiality inhibits our ability to recognise that certain aesthetic phenomena deemed idiosyncratic to The Digital are perhaps not. Building on ongoing research on the issue in the field of electronic literature, this seminar introduces an approach to distinguishing aesthetics of The Digital from digital aesthetics by attending to how we areaffordedour impressions of either. At issue is the distinction between how and what experience in relation to digital materiality versus to digital form, where the latter may be informed by but ultimately surpasses the former.

Dylan Chng

amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:48:39 UTC

amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:51:32 UTC

amandabelton1 — 2026-07-22 21:53:27 UTC

An ontography of confused digital aesthetics

2026-07-27 01:45:48 UTC

Digital aesthetics suggests to us low poly graphics, not enough pixels, Hito Steyerl’s defense of the poor image; it is bitrot but also glitch art and pixel art; it is data visualisation and not necessarily visual data models; it is bolter and grusin’s hypermediacy; the art of Samia Halaby, bpNichol, and Mark Amerika; holograms, laser light displays, aerial drone shows, global surveillance, Russell Frank’s newslore, and Shane Denson’s discorrelated images. Visuals aside, digital aesthetics is also X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, 4chan, Meta; Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse from Snow Crash and William Gibson’s cyberspace from Neuromancer; it is the “space” of Erik Loyer’s Chroma and of videogames in general; their maps, their immersivity; and immersion of other kinds in e-sports, Minecraft, Roblox; W. J. T. Mitchell’s City of Bits; Coruscant, the worlds of Tron, Blade Runner, and Wreck-It Ralph; of Times Square, the Shibuya Crossing, the Supertree Grove. Then there are things to do with the body: static electricity, the sense of what the internet memes as “liminal space, the backrooms; the archive, the infinite library, disorientation and disembodiment; there is re-embodiment, prosthesis, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman, Steph Maj Swanson’s Loab; SCPs, Slenderman, creepypastas, and the uncanny; webinars, zoom calls, slack huddles, teams chats, teleconferencing. And on that literal note, the dialup tone, vaporwave music, and the work of Kim Cascone; Anna Munster’s deepaesthetics and machine learning; cultural analytics, distant reading, distant viewing; what Amanada Wasielewski calls computational formalism and computer vision’s pseudomorphism; not enough data and also too much data; Mark Z. Daniele’ski's House of Leaves; neuoroses, psychosis, and cyberpsychosis; Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This and Calvin Kalsulke’s Several People Are Typing; and, finally, this list.

Preliminary thoughts on taking transhistorical digital aesthetics outside western contexts

2026-07-27 02:00:37 UTC

Axonometry and infinity: The latent digitality of Chinese scroll painting?

Krikke, "Axonometry" (2000)
Hwang and Hui, "Exquisite Scrolls" (2021)
Cañizares, "Digital Suprematism" (2019)
Lynch, Composition for the Infinite Scroll #1 (2024)

2026-07-27 02:08:06 UTC

Bio

fmor4 — 2026-07-27 02:11:47 UTC

Dylan Chng is a PhD candidate in English at the Australian National University. His thesis proposes to transhistoricise critical digital literary aesthetics by deconstructing their underlying intellectual structures. His research more broadly examines the technologies of thought. Dylan holds an MPhil in Digital Humanities from the University of Cambridge and has taught DH courses at the ANU.

Is there a "mechanical" aesthetics?

2026-07-27 04:13:17 UTC

Before computing machines were "digital," they were "mechanical". (e.g. Kirchner's Musical Ark, linked.) Have you thought about "mechanical" or other competing adjectives to "digital"?

Aesthetics and continuity.

2026-07-27 04:21:01 UTC

I get the idea that aesthetic experience is naturally continuous. That's quite a familiar notion. But is it true? There are many examples of traditional art that seem fairly discrete to me, e.g. Western music in traditional notation, or bol and konnakol in Hindustanti/Carnatic classical music. Isn't there an element of "discretisation" in all aesthetic experience, as we recognise familiar elements and their composition into forms?

Cults of the new...

2026-07-27 04:33:41 UTC

Totally agree with you about the Cult of the New. College Humour have a funny sketch on that you may have seen...

4b is very evocative

2026-07-27 04:44:31 UTC

I think I get 4b, and I think you are right. I have two examples in my head of something like your 'digital aesthetics'.

One is a present a student gave me: a Stardew-Valley-style pixellated avatar made of perler beads. I love pixel art, even if it's not made of pixels!

The other is from the composer Steve Reich. He was an early experimenter with magnetic tape. One of his favourite techniques was "phasing": duplicating a recording onto a second tape, and then playing the two recordings back at two slightly different speeds. As they get more and more out of phase, strange and beautiful musical structures emerge from the interplay. After discovering this technique on tape, he then started writing music for human musicians that use phasing (e.g. Piano Phase, linked, written for two human pianists). Basically "tape aesthetics" escaped the "forensic materiality" of the tape. Do I understand your point?