New Aesthetic in the Perspective of Social Photography

Abstract

Let me begin my analysis with a pioneer of so-called net photography, Marco Cadioli, whose work is appropriate to introduce the New Aesthetic discourse. In particular, I want to focus on the abstract journeys ¹ which this Milan-based artist began in 2011. Armed with a prodigious technological magnifying glass (Google Earth), he embarked on a journey around the earth with the specific aim of finding, among the forms that human beings give to the earth’s surface with their incessant activity, pictorial motifs related to European abstract painting.² Here, he is dwelling on landscapes that seem to come from a Bauhaus graphic workshop, only to pass — after a few clicks -to compositions of natural and artificial elements that bring to mind the Utopian models of El Lissitzky.³ What we perceive in the abstract journeys are shapes and colours, but, beyond this surface, an invisible web of numerical sequences represents the real architecture of the artworks. In Cadioli’s work, it is not possible to draw a sharp line between the media objects that arise in numerical form and those that are reconverted from analogical media. In the creative process that gives rise to the abstract journeys, we can witness a dizzying jump from one medium to another. Let us try to reconstruct these steps. Some humans, through their activities (mostly agricultural activities on an industrial scale), alter the natural landscape, giving it shapes that, viewed from above, bring to mind pictorial motifs characteristic of 20th-century European abstract art.