The migration of the new: from the avant-garde to the algorithm

The future used to arrive as an image. Now it arrives as a system. Maria Rivans for Wellcome Collection. Robert Hughes called his great series on modern art The Shock of the New . It was a title about modernism, but it captured something broader about the twentieth century. For much of the last century, the future arrived through culture. It had a look, a sound, a uniform, a haircut. The new was…