Aesthetisphere

The Aesthetisphere

The Aesthetics of a World Culture Fusion

By Dani E. Day – 2004

 

(Aesthetisphere is the term I use to describe the following)

 

The world is at our fingertips. We enter a keyword in the search engine of choice and an abundance of images and texts floods our screens. The impact this has on our minds and our sense of aesthetics is phenomenal. The twentieth century impact of media, movies and international news has changed and evolved the way people view themselves, their culture, communities and art. This evolution has reached epidemic proportions in the twenty-first century with the increased contact and availability of information and ideas presented via the Internet. This accessible atmosphere of world-cultural influences has created a fusion of ideas and cultures, thoughts and techniques and has opened a gaping hole for the world to vividly witness the global effects on the aesthetisphere.

The cultural context of any given image is merely a click away from the image itself if not embedded in the image or vise verse. The information attached via “link” at the bottom, side or top of a computer screen can connect the viewer from New England to Brazil and back via Australia’s Outback! The only limitation is that of the viewer. If there is no question asked, the information is not given. If the question is posed, the information is available. The obligation to use the information in a logical sense is left to the imagination of the viewer. Is creation then a new implication for re-assimilation of information?

Can an artist go beyond the confines of time and space via cyberspace? Is the element of global culture at the inlet of oceanic abundance? The answer to these questions can be found with a simple search. An Internet search of global art can give the answers the seeker wants to find. Pick any link and the viewer is transported to anywhere they want to explore. If the viewer is extremely cunning or at very least multi-lingual, the expansion of possibilities opens even further. The unrelenting availability, deemed effective as long as the server of choice continues to function, is the paradox that instigates this phenomenon and perpetuates the effect. Would this aesthetisphere exist if the power grid of information were switched off?

The books, magazines and movies that have been in existence for a century and more would still be available to the viewer, but the instant gratification of Internet access would be denied and so would the fulfillment of cross-cultural, multi-cultural fusion through instant responses and non-linear connection to multiplicity at the speed of light. The process of fusion would then be frozen to the currently existing idea of global reality and the infrastructure of movement would be halted or at very least slowed to a pace reminiscent of past experience of limitation to artistic license reserved for scholarly access and denied to the public and hoarded by the educated elite. How then, can the global aesthetic be reached without jeopardizing the traditional aesthetics of any given culture?

In teaching from a global perspective, one must consider moving from a mono-national/cultural context to a multi-national/cultural context. This cultural consideration for community context can be seen as a method to incorporate cultural difference without assimilation, but it does not eliminate the possibility of cross-contamination through exposure to outside catalysts. The priority of movement via Internet access has sped up the process by means of incorporation not necessarily assimilation. It is more an adaptation of information than it is conformity of idealization. Contrary to Barbara Boyer’s ideas of cultural literacy and the need to eliminate cultural assumptions, the Internet experience of cultural examination in art is a visceral occurrence rather than an intellectual understanding.

The constant integration of foreign iconography with familiarity of any given culture is the intrinsic lure into the aesthetisphere. New and exciting images can sometimes be overlooked or abandoned because they are not familiar. Styles reminiscent of something in ones own history can prove to be compelling in the fact that they are comfortable and reassuring for both the viewer and the creating artist. The fact that many images can be viewed from different cultures and individuals in a relatively short period of time, eliminates the unfamiliar factor due simply to the reality that even though the image may be overlooked initially, it is somehow stored in the subconscious mind of the viewer and when revisited in another context seems recognizable if not familiar. How many times has an artist created an image that they felt was truly unique and originally their own thought, only to find out later that they had seen or heard something similar a few years before and “forgot” they were exposed to it? This phenomenon is a major contributor to the aesthetisphere’s effect on the art spawned by the current access to images and information from around the world passing through the Web.

The reality of the situation is only limited to the extent at which an artist chooses to inhibit production of creation based on the possibility that the creation or fraction of it may already exist. The abundance of architects showing their designs via personal websites, compounded by the plethora of fine-art, graphic-art and pseudo-art exhibits accessible either via web design or display leaves very little left to the imagination. Or, does it open a door to a new imagination, free of cultural identity in the sense that we know it today. Does it in some way free us as creators to explore visual aesthetics in a less than identifying manner? Can a Buddhist symbol for Utopia become a visual representation of zilch? Can a crucifix become non-identified as Christian and suddenly be accepted as an intersection of spirits or a pacifistic identity with modernity? Can a star in the night become a mid-summer daydream?

The affect of mass, instantaneous information on the human psyche is as much a part of the equation as is quantum metaphysics and the psychology of adjustment. To explore the mind’s ability to devote itself to one culture and one thought is to find an expansive history of adaptation and evolution based on intervening entities and cross-cultural contamination throughout the known past of humankind. Biological adaptation has provided a primary means to survival for organisms of many kinds, but humans have taken adjustment to a higher level by incorporating cultural adaptations.

“All living creatures face a fundamental problem in common – that of survival. Simply put, unless they adapt themselves to some available environment, they cannot survive. Adaptation requires the development of behaviors that will help an organism use the environment to its advantage…early hominids began to rely more on what their minds could invent, rather than on what their bodies were capable of… The consequences of this are profound. As evolving hominids unconsciously came to rely more on cultural as opposed to biological solutions to their problems, their chances of survival improved…Moreover, the tools and techniques that made this new way of life possible made our ancient ancestors less vulnerable to predators than they had been before…Because culture is learned and not inherited biologically, its transmission from one person to another, and from one generation to the next, depends on an effective system of communication.” (Haviland)

The system of communication for the twenty-first century is the Internet. It enables the world to access the necessary tools to create art beyond the scope of ones own back yard and embraces the multitude of imagery and ideas and brings them together in a twelve to twenty-seven inch frame for the perusal of many and the contemplation of a few. The transactional communication is an ongoing process unfolding with each attempt to expand beyond the scope of cultural perception into the multidimensional atmosphere of visual and verbal expression. The answers to an aesthetic culture are to be distilled from the primordial ooze of binary information swimming in the cosmic juice of cyberspace. The phenomenon of how that communication affects art and culture on a global scale is the Aesthetispheric Response and the environment it creates when explored by the inquisitive artist is the Aesthetisphere. ###

Bibliography

Lee Anderson, Schooling and Citizenship in a Global Age: an Exploration of the Meaning and Significance of Global Education (Bloomington, Indiana: Social Studies Development Center, Indiana University, 1979)

Barbara Boyer, Cultural Literacy in Art: Developing Conscious Aesthetic Choices in Art Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987)

William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology: Seventh Edition (University of Vermont: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993), 86