For Bridle, that afternoon of modest creation came on the heels of nine months of pointed observation. Since that first blog post announcing his intentions, he had been gathering images, quotes, and videos that testified to what he saw as a new way of understanding the world, a “new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean,” he wrote. Its primary format soon became a Tumblr blog, and its guiding principle was that we could no longer clearly see, much less understand, the effects of the networked world we’ve built.

“We’re writing things that we can’t read,” Kevin Slavin, a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, says. “We’ve produced systems of such complexity that they’ve all been written by humans but they are totally illegible to any human on earth, and yet their effects are quite tangible.” The New Aesthetic points at those effects, with trepidation. In the process it becomes slippery and occasionally difficult to pin down, even for Bridle himself. Think of the New Aesthetic as a meme of memes: a found art movement (but, confusingly, not a movement of found art), evolving even as it is being defined.

The “aesthetic” referred to Bridle’s preoccupation with the visible artifacts of the network, the identifiable places and moments where the digital erupts into the physical. He posted dresses patterned in pixels, camouflage that evades facial recognition, and a map of the places most densely covered by Wikipedia entries. A more sinister category of phenomena soon appeared on the Tumblr: the roving stare of Google Street View cars; stock-trading algorithms that responded to market panics they themselves had created; pilots in Nevada who killed Taliban in Afghanistan. In Bridle’s mind, “the New Aesthetic” was not an art movement or an artwork but a collection of noticed things. It was no coincidence that the medium of Tumblr itself suddenly seemed very New Aesthetic: an endless scroll that others would then “reblog,” thereby reconstituting it in their own way.

The New Aesthetic had a healthy following not only within Bridle’s London tech world but also among museum curators, drone-watchers, and political journalists—from MoMA to CNN. Next week, an exhibition of Bridle’s work will open at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. “It’s really nice to see people looking for what’s next again,” cheered one early New Aesthetic fan, Warren Ellis, from his blog. “I think it really is something distinct, something you can sort of get your arms around—not just, you know, a bunch of cool-looking stuff,” wrote Robin Sloan, a self-described “media inventor” and author of the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “I find it quite beautiful because it’s a group effort to try and describe the coming together of the physical and the digital—which is the dimension where we will live the most in the future,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design and director of research and development, at the Museum of Modern Art.

By the summer of 2011, the Tumblr was attracting attention, and Bridle was ready to bring in fresh voices for the New Aesthetic and expand its audience. He was also looking for an excuse to return to South by Southwest, the key gathering for this corner of the Internet. He organized a panel discussion called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices.” It brought together Joanne McNeil, at the time an editor at Rhizome, a digital-arts organization; Ben Terrett, a preternaturally talented designer and Bridle’s former studio-mate in London; Aaron Straup Cope, a digital-mapping savant, formerly of Flickr and now at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum; and Russell Davies, a former adman and general online mischief-maker, who had helped run Wieden & Kennedy’s ad campaign for Microsoft during the agency’s late-90s heyday and been a mentor to Bridle. “We are becoming acquainted with new ways of seeing,” the description promised, “the Gods-eye view of satellites,” “the elevated car-sight of Google Street View, the facial obsessions of CCTV.” What it didn’t say was that the New Aesthetic was a movement.