Studying Archives - CARI
Interesting to discover the existence of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute via a duet livestream of two teenagers arguing about gorpcore. The Institute picks up from the late midcentury where aesthetics stopped being formally categorised, understandably, a slow decline of the importance of visual identity that begun with the Broadside chapbooks - art historians would like you to think it ended with Warhol’s cans but I think some blame can be traced back to the Académie Française.
The cyclical relationship between a culture’s collective attitudes and the visual qualities of the artifacts it generates is crucial to observe and consider both when attempting to create timely, meaningful artwork and when analyzing the social and economic events of the last half century.
FAQ, cari.institute
The institute is a collection of researchers and designers and denizens of the internet / participatory curators who submit aesthetics for approval. I am quite taken by any concrete organisations carrying out work to solidify hypermodern low-cultural movements into academic parlance. CARI also satisfies the desire to put a name to a familiar face.
Utopian Scholastic 
I find this quite vital in how clearly important it is for born-online internet users to classify all visual content they experience within these boundaries of labels, often with intent to collect images under this label to call their own, identify with that label, brand themselves as members of the associated Utopian Scholastic community, and cast that net as an inherent part of their online persona. A personal archive - assertion of ownership through knowledge of a microculture, perhaps.
The Institute is clearly one of those silicone valley starbucks startups I heard Jo Chenye talking about in a podcast recently. But, he indicated these groups of materially wealthy intellectuals forming micro-companies that answer to no transparent societal need as a health indicators of the New Tech world - so long as they are there, new ideas, new growth, etc. As an archivist I like CARI’s user-interface bridging the gap between carefully designed corporate memphis and accessibility to standard internet users - it is easily browsable. As I set out to do with my essay on Star Wars fan clubs on Reddit, though, I would like to see more space in the archive for organic context of each aesthetic - the gallery is a little detached.