Under the custody of the uncanny : a reading of the "New Aesthetic" with the contemporary frame

Abstract

My dissertation explores the influential power of visual culture in reforming how we aesthetically behave with relation to contemporary television images. This influence depends on psychological and cultural structures that are linked to the television imagery, and more precisely to visually disturbing images. The approach to this question aims at examining a new aesthetic generated by the means of its television persona. I intend to tackle this by, first, drawing on the meaning of the weird and strange imagery that underlies the new aesthetic. Second, to recognize the new aesthetic tangible status within the contemporary culture where it manifests its natural attribute; and later to outline its functional system in position to television—the outside-inside television screen—to allocate the discussion of the new aesthetic with the television culture (the spectacle). By doing so, the work tries to reason the presence of a new type of aesthetic which can be grounded at future design approaches to imagery conceptualization. Methodologically, the work presents, as a literature review, the possibility to explore the Freudian uncanny by channeling its own disturbing aesthetic nature and its correspondence to fit within the frame of the new (aesthetic), provoking unfamiliarity in visual presentation yet imposing familiarity in its cultural context. In a critical reading of the subject, and elaborating on the new aesthetic tangibility, the imagery is read in position to culture, environment and individual. I first observe the interchangeable link with its environment that can either accommodate or simply dispel its persona completely. Second, I examine the contemporary tools of reading the new aesthetic with reference to the surrounding culture to comprehend the implications of such tools on the overall experience. Finally, I discuss its tangibility through a television example to illustrate, from the perspective of the viewer, how the disturbing imagery manifests a conscious transcendence of the new aesthetic phenomenon from a direct non-realistic to a more indirect and realistic image presentation.