The phenomenon has been around for a long time, but James Bridle articulated the notion through a series of talks and observations.
[2] The New Aesthetic as a concept was introduced at South By South West (SXSW) on March 12, 2012, at a panel organized by James Bridle and included Aaron Cope, Ben Terrett, Joanne McNeil and Russell Davies.
[3][4][5] An article by Bruce Sterling in Wired Magazine propelled the ideas around the New Aesthetic into critical and public consciousness.
[7][8][9] The author Bruce Sterling has said of the New Aesthetic: Matthew Battles, a contributor to Metalab, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, gives a definition that makes reference to purported paradigmatic examples: One of the more substantive contributions to the notion of the New Aesthetic has been through a development of, and linking to, the way in which the digital and the everyday are increasingly interpenetrating each other.
Here, the notion of the irrepresentability of computation, as both an infrastructure and an ecology, are significant in understanding the common New Aesthetic tendency towards pixelated graphics and a retro 8-bit form.