A characteristic of artistic education is for people to tell you that you’re a genius. […] So everybody gets this idea, if you go to art school, that you’re really a genius. Sadly, it isn’t true. Genius occurs very rarely. So the real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you’re not a genius, that you’re not as good as you thought you were. […] There’s only one solution: You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure because otherwise you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you’re not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are.

It’s true that some of the visual language present in items collected on the NA Tumblr existed before. What’s really been bothering me is that I don’t think that NA is an art movement at all.

Sure, some of the things in the NA collection are undeniably works of art (like this, this or this). But what this collection says to me is this: we already live in the reality where digital and physical are beginning to blend. The visual language of the machines we built is seeping into our consciousness and affecting our aesthetic preferences. We see beauty in limitations of visual artefacts produced by our tools. We already share a world with autonomous machines, and we adapt it so they can survive alongside us. It’s a body of evidence not only that the future has arrived already, but that we are already so familiar with its visual representations that we almost don’t notice there’s anything odd with it entering the physical realm. It’s inevitable that an art movement (or maybe a number of them) can be found within the collection, but as a whole it’s bigger than this - it covers a much broader cultural area. It’s as much about art as it is about the everyday.