Aesthetics is the Message

We are witnessing, in these years, a subtle but profound transformation, and we see a new era in which visual and sound aesthetics enter our lives, causing a quantum leap in human perception.

In the past, an event would occur and not be repeated. It was observed by only a few people, and from a distance. Each witness had a particular and different account. What to believe was an act of faith. Events involving rapid movements were not observable, and the human eye was never prepared for the tiniest details.

Now we can witness the player's attack in slow motion; was it a foul or not? We repeat the scene ten times until we are sure. Once again on Monday night, we see a giant foot on the screen, slowly entering the victim's legs, and the curve of the fall to the ground. We report an aesthetic that humans have never known until today: the eurhythmia of the player rolling on the grass, desperate and in pain. We watch the drama of overtime, looking at the drops of sweat and the tears of the loser, twenty times bigger than in real life. Bigger than life, in every sense. Acts of aggression are transformed into a presentation of beauty on the big screen.

We hear about entire new worlds, landscapes of the microcosm and distant planets. We study the movement of hummingbird wings in slow motion, we learn for the first time in human history how the dog, our best friend, drinks water. The complex dance of its tongue, which lasts less than half a second, has just filled a half-hour program on National Geographic, and we will see these realities, hidden until now, many more times with our children and grandchildren.

Illusion or truth? This image contains only values ​​of a mathematical truth. Not a single pixel is false or has been altered. But in nature, this manifestation is not observable; it is part of a collection of infinite possibilities of irrational numbers, called transfinite cardinal numbers. What defines the truth content in this image, besides its aesthetics, which would be its message?

Thus emerges a new perspective on our Universe, and with it, a new vision of ourselves, a vision amplified a thousand times, surpassing the limits of our perception of time and space. We miss the smell of breath, we miss feeling the pain of the wounded man, but that's alright, because the bullet passed through the head of the guy on the screen, and not yours.

All this in high definition and with vibrant colors. Again, bigger than life! We see the pimples on people's faces on the big screen, the unshaven beard, the drop of ketchup on their clothes, and the dandruff on their jacket collar. We see details that, in real life, escape us. We become Sherlock Holmes instead of Dr. Watson.

This microscopic perspective of the audience requires a new way of recording and editing the images and sounds of performances. The scene itself has gained importance almost above that of the actors, making the dialogues seem more idiotic in soap operas, in aesthetic celebrations of landscapes or indoor settings. With this, the message is no longer the semantics of the spoken words, or the dramatic and significant gestures of the protagonists, but the aesthetics of the surround sound and background. The actress's sigh is lost in the crescendo of the soundtrack, and the villain's mask in the gleam of the paint and chrome of the imported car behind him. In short, the paradigm of "The media is the message" has been extended and extrapolated to reach a new level.

Aesthetics are the message.

A large part of the semantic content in this new paradigm still follows the rules established by Adorno and so lamented by Foucault: the 'Inhalt', the intrinsic meaning of messages, is in free fall, both in quality and in humanistic level. Where is the Gehalt, the combination of content and form?

The deterioration of values ​​is reaching the point of mediocrity and criticism, with the empty vanity of a Justin Bieber and the bad taste of a Rafinha Bastos. The Bieber-Bastos complex seems to claim the icons of modern social criticism, even more so than the voyeurism and banality of Big Brother. But these extremes end up ironizing their own existences, and thus, we actually see a bifurcation into new senses of perception and transcendence of the past, through ridiculous and absurd farces.

This is how the Law is transformed.

"The quality of the content is inversely proportional to the quality of the media."

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"The novelty and uniqueness of information is proportional to the new technological means of the media."

The decline we are witnessing marks a rebirth, not the death of human culture. An instantaneous rebirth experienced simultaneously by billions of people, in cities and villages around the world. The reception of the satellite signal up in the sky is independent of the racism and elitism down on Earth.

With the structural transformation of high-tech media comes a transformation of content creators and form: the bohemian who dreams alone of achieving fame has been replaced by nerds and hackers who, for the most part, prefer to remain anonymous. The Stradivarius roadshow was seen only by a few of its time, and Mozart toured the elites of Europe, but the electronic melodies of cell phone ringtones are heard all over the world.

For the first time in human history, scientists and tech enthusiasts are uniting in a global movement to create new forms of aesthetics. We see a practical, non-elitist aesthetic that enters and pervades all aspects of human experience in our time. We watch the lives of bacteria and laugh at impossible acts in cartoons. We hardly need human actors anymore; simply choose an avatar, and then proceed with the remote control.

The artist's brush, once enchanted by the curves of the female body and the crimson of sensual lips, is now retired. In its place, we find algorithms for B-splines and gradients generated for the mathematical simulation of shadows. The colors used by the artistic genius, mixed on a palette of paints, no longer approximate the vision of the sunset. That vision now has a number like #00024700 or rgb(247,24,7) and is extracted from a virtual palette of 64 million colors. The perspective of architecture no longer depends on the artist's eye, but simply on an algebraic extension of a formula that changes 2D into 3D. The sectio aurea no longer emerges from the aesthetic mind of a talented person, but is now hard-coded. Abstract forms no longer come from the abuse of absinthe, but from a Photoshop plug-in, and even more fantastic images weren't produced in psychedelic visions, but are the result of algorithms computing irrational numbers. Forget pi and phi, now we use oz from transfinite numbers.

Finally, the animations and drawings are mixed on the computer with video recording data from real-life scenes. In this way, the illusion of an artificial reality never before seen, and which could never exist even hypothetically, has reached perfection. At the same time, the quantum leap in witnessing aesthetics in nature, and in the mental fantasies of human beings of our time, leads us to a new awareness of our humanity. Indeed, the polarity of illusion and truth, Adorno's Trug und Wahrheit, finds its transcendence. The result is aesthetics, and aesthetics becomes the message.