That time I found a Backroom
When life gives you limns...
Asserting a story is true can be as self-defeating as asserting your sanity in a psychiatric institution. How often ‘This really happened to me!’ is dragged down to ‘This happened to my mate Dave’. It’s as though the opening lines of readers’ confessions to Hustler, the faux-vernacular intros to creepy pastas are our version of 19th century literature’s nudge-wink realism via redacting place and dignitary names beyond the first capital. There are no rhetorical addresses left that aren’t tired, that work. So, with throat cleared: this really happened to me, and to a couple of friends whose names and identities, sketchily enough, I can’t remember.
Nothing spooky about that, just neural wear-and-tear and the self-focus of the kids we were at that age. At our high school, morning assemblies were so heaving you got fifteen minutes before each one ended to make it to your first lesson. Since I’d have likely saved up any urge to piss for when I could take a break from lessons with the excuse, it was even more a fluke I saw merely in passing the ajar wood panel in the wall of the stairs down to the basement toilets.
C S Lewis knew what he was on to with that wardrobe. Philip Pullman after him in his Daemon Voices boiled down children’s stories to an infant’s concepts of movement in space and between objects (“This is a ‘that goes in there’ story” etc). Doors to unknown wheres, from where come inherently alien sounds, are the first surroundings for modern infants. The brown-painted panel in the green-tiled wall, loose of its padlock, to me was a door. And like a gun that has to go off by design, a door has to be entered. On tiptoes I saw through the door what looked like a wide but very low corridor disappearing into the dark.
Would I have gone in alone? Was it by chance that two other 12-year-olds I knew saw me just then, or did I search among the diminishing number of schoolmates scrambling to class for ones I knew well enough to share what I’d found, and to get them to come with me through the wall? I’d have needed a boost to get into it in any case.
Kids aren’t scared unless and until they have to be. I don’t remember having to beg or cluck my friends, don’t remember any of us balking. We were the only kids left in a usually busy corner of the school now fallen into one of its hourly silences. (On real or exaggerated toilet breaks you could steal a march on a corridor before it’d disguised itself in bustle, catch it in its natural state, quiet as the sun in triangles on the floor that stretched away from you towards that first far enticing corner.) The three of us were joined together, separated from the rest, in our secret find.
Before or afterwards we heard the rumours our school capped a bomb shelter. (In my last year or so I followed a teacher to get props for a play through a hitherto ignored door he’d unlocked, to a warren of basements that had nothing to do with changing rooms or classrooms or toilets, that had pop-string unshaded bulbs overhead and shelves of school photos, trophies and DIY costumes made by kids who were now dead.) But this ‘corridor’ was so low we had to crawl commando-style in single file. Not even a tunnel, it seemed like an airshaft. It was lit along a dusty floor by patches of gridded daylight. Each dice-six set of brick holes on our left gave peeks of the school’s main courtyard, under one short side of which we must’ve been crawling. Short still meaning a good hundred metres on elbows, belly and knees, longer when you don’t know where you’re headed, when no one else knows where you are, knows you’re missing yet.
Crawling, we didn’t talk that I remember. We didn’t need to check which way to go, so far. We didn’t know the airshaft can’t have stretched much farther than all four sides of the courtyard. It didn’t matter; we’d have gone wherever that crawlspace took us, further down, always down, always more rooms. It didn’t feel endless exactly, you can’t feel endlessness, like you can’t know whether the pit you’re falling down is bottomless. What it felt like was potential, like youth in all its mysterious options.
A year or two after, I wrote an adolescent’s story about the experience for English class (I didn’t confess the real trespass that’d inspired the story): I wrote that a monster was in there too, eating the unfortunate explorers from the back of the single-file forwards, so that the head of the file could hear what would be happening to him in two boys’ time… Strange because in there we hadn’t been scared but thrilled—the thrill of an actual discovery, of a real secret that’d let just us three in, and that might have no end.
We hit an end. A wood panel, unpainted and rough but no doubt twinned on its public-facing side with the one by which we’d entered. Through the inch that the padlocked latch allowed gleamed green tiles as in the original stairwell’s toilets. We reversed course, somehow rotating in that tiny space. By the time we made it back out we’d have all been detentionably late. But we had to go see the other side of the panel that’d stopped us.
It had a warning on it. It warned that inside was asbestos.
I didn’t know what the word meant but knew what the exclamation mark and red triangle did. I looked up ‘asbestos’, then ‘asbestos poisoning’. I thought of my lungs’ corridors, branching off mazily, in whose dark, silent, tiny dead-ends there now gathered a new dust, too late for masks: crystallising, bedding down its fine roots. The moral now seems too cute; there’s a reason a fascination for ramifying corridors flips into dread.
A24’s latest horror originated in a photo posted on a 4chan thread of unsettling imagery, which another anonymous poster captioned with a description of “the Backrooms”, a place you might slip into “if you’re not careful” where there’s “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”
This fired the imagination of many of the very online, including a young Kane Parsons. Using 3D graphics software, he created the first of many YouTube shorts of found footage purporting to explore the Backrooms, the graphics given a fuzzy, VHS wash for realism’s sake, and pretty effectively. Millions of views and seven years later the concept and series have been adopted by Parsons into the summer’s first blockbuster.
What have he and the Backrooms tapped into? Eerily empty corridors might seem a species of the Gothic1, but the Gothic was about the past’s permeability with the present. The Backrooms look modern—yet derelict: so are they an update on the Romantic love for ruins, its vulgarisation as ‘ruin porn’? Or do they come out of gonzo urban exploration: those human foxes who infiltrate power stations and underground tunnels. (The loneliness of pipes! Miles of dripping emptiness always a few feet below you.) But a true Backroom experience, like the one I started with, has to happen by accident. It’s a dark serendipity: it could happen anywhere to anybody. That’s one of the things Parsons got, at first (his YouTube series gets less creepy the more it becomes about the purposeful (and familiar) exploration of the Backrooms by shady government bodies). Exploring is not horrific, getting lost is (related: why we say the mad lost their minds). The horror of the labyrinth is that there’s always a new angle of vulnerability, and, despite all its possibilities, always some new corner for you to be backed in to. The one thing everyone finds there is their dead-end.2
Backed in by what though? What should we be afraid of: what’s in the labyrinth with us—or the labyrinth itself?
If the haunted house began as the archetypal Gothic story, a ‘past comes into the present’ story (Pullman again) it didn’t stay that way. Though Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and Robert Wise’s film adaptation The Haunting have a backstory - and what is a ghost story but a backstory? - their horror comes from the compartmentalised nature of large houses: actually so or seemingly to a real or the inner child. Every door is an unknown3, every new room a hiding place, a bolt-hole, a trap. Eleanor in the novel and film knows the only way to get through those fears is to submit to them like when as a child you’d fall to the floor being chased because the chase itself was too much. (That’s when a haunted house becomes a haunted… home?) The recent TV adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House suffered from a diminution of the house’s presence. For it’s the house that is haunting, not haunted.
Earlier in TV history aired The Black Tower by John Smith. It comes from an era of British programming when a broadcaster thought nothing of slipping a weird short film into the late night schedule, like a proto-Too Many Cooks. Told in voice-over with a series of stationary images, the film is more a sketch of proto-Weird fiction than an originally conceived and achieved idea. But going further than The Haunting iterations, it skips on ghosts; the ghost is the place, making The Black Tower a seminal case of ‘architectural horror’. (Even if the film also reminds you of that Marenghi-style line from Salem’s Lot: “Do you think a house can be intrinsically evil?”)
Going further still, the Backrooms are bigger than one Black Tower or any or all haunted houses. A closer literary precursor, then, might be Borges’ short story ‘The Immortal’4, in which a Roman soldier, lost looking for the Fountain of Youth, finds instead an ancient City:
At the end of one corridor, a not unforeseen wall blocked my path—and a distant light fell upon me… The metal treads of a stairway led up the wall. Weariness made my muscles slack, but I climbed the stairs, only pausing from time to time to sob clumsily with joy…
I emerged into a kind of small plaza—a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself.
…Cautiously at first, with indifference as time went on, desperately toward the end, I wandered the staircases and inlaid floors of that labyrinthine palace. (I discovered afterward that the width and height of the treads on the staircases were not constant; it was this that explained the extraordinary weariness I felt.) This palace is the work of the gods, was my first thought. I explored the uninhabited spaces, and I corrected myself: The gods that built this place have died. Then I reflected upon its peculiarities, and told myself: The gods that built this place were mad. I said this, I know, in a tone of incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse—with more intellectual horror than sensory fear.
The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality… A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monk-like cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured—even in the middle of a secret desert—pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other—those might, perhaps, be approximate images.5
To my mind - to my undermind - the fright of the Backrooms comes from something more than their external architecture, its “impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality” but something internal. Whether before or after my youthful Backroom visit I’m not sure, but I dreamed of going to the basement of a mosque, like my childhood one: the place where the kid overspill usually got sent on busy days, and there finding a new door. In the UK, before they got money and prestigious, mosques often adopted old decrepit multi-floor terrace houses, gutted for maximum capacity, no portraits, pictures, or mirrors, as per image prohibition, lit with tube lights and laid in carpet, cheap but thick to bear the test of time and a million foreheads, and marker-penned in rows, usually at an irregular angle to the walls, to maintain a facing to Mecca, and so the mosques became their own Islamic liminal spaces avant la lettre. Naturally (unnaturally) the door in the dream led to another basement, empty, tube-lit, carpeted, the navy blue of the plush carpet being one of the more unpleasant details of the dream, the same colour from level to deeper level, an arched intra-room passageway here and there, and the sense of rumbling, runnable space that you get bursting into a room as a kid but something about these rooms quietening and slowing me, something non-visually misty.6
J G Ballard, our national poet of abandoned buildings and drained swimming pools, wrote his way into inner space via a vast and minatory outer. His story Home was adapted by Richard Curson Smith into another of those weird short films on British TV. In it a man withdraws from all society into his home, eventually into his attic, which expands to the infinite. In another story, Concentration City, the protagonist tries to get beyond the edge of a probably infinite urban space. While in The Terminal Beach a bereaved man escapes to a nuclear-tested atoll, on which arrays of strange blocks reincarnate his crumbling psychic architecture. Eleanor in The Haunting was not coincidentally losing her mind as she lost herself in the impossible house; the Backrooms films could’ve done worse than build from Shirley Jackson and J G Ballard. Yet it’s in the unconscious that the film founders…
By the end the film offers no definitive explanations (to the mutters and WTFs of my cinema audience). Still, roughly, the Backrooms work like one of those lethal threats in Dr. Who that are domesticated and defused for its kid audience: the monster of the week was just some technological malfunction or the unforeseen side-effect of an otherwise disinterested alien system. So buck that courage!
According to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character Clark, the Backrooms are a kind of archive of all places to ever exist, a bit-rotted copy of them and their occasional denizens. (The Zahir but without the Zahir’s paradoxical infinity in a grain of sand.) If all places, though, why all modern—where are the wattle and daub huts? And why no natural places? As for the manifestly lethal threats in the Backrooms, they’re only what you bring in there with you. Clark’s rage and cussed stasis has brought to life, in overgrown form, a pirate mascot with which he’d tried to rescue the fortunes of his flagging and divorce-scuppered business.7 (‘What if your emotional baggage became… self-aware?’)8
The Solarisk with this kind of story is that, like so many before it (Sphere, Event Horizon, The Forbidden Planet off the top of my head) the obvious blanket truth of it - that every ghost or demon ever conceived is a monster from the id9- is consolatory more than scary. As if to rein in too much consolation, the film hints at then reveals in its coda your standard ‘byzantine organisation investigating an Anomaly’—here called Async and represented by Mark Duplass’s labcoatee. But that creates another problem, a modal one.
Some horror stories never aspired to be read more than literally, though inevitably they always express some psycho-socio-political symptom (George Romero zombie films, the antisemitic omens of Nosferatu). Some horrors get in there first, are more self-conscious: they palm the prefix of subtext (The Babadook for instance and other the-trauma-is-the-horror films). And some horrors aspire to be read figuratively: Men or Beau is Afraid (which film will form the centrepiece of our conclusion to the realism series).
Where does Backrooms fall on the spectrum? And doesn’t it dither about for a place? The scene in it that takes dictation from dreams best is when Clark struggles to escape looming footsteps by climbing a trapezoid carpeted slope to a freakishly small door. The Backrooms are best when they have a dream’s hodgepodge building plans and mindless juxtapositions: when you can hear noises, but you’re not really hearing anything. But by wanting to be at once a horror metaffur and a science fiction what-if?, Backrooms calls to mind that John Barth line I can never pinpoint which nonetheless I use as a mantra: “It’s easy throwing chestnuts into the fire. The trick is knowing how to get them out.”10
Here it’s fair to mention Kane Parsons is only 20 years old. His initial teenage Youtube shorts are formally smarter and more technically accomplished than the home movies I was making at 16, may they never be found. The Backrooms film had a big budget, a cast of big movie stars, and a seasoned screenwriter, so the film’s fair game for the critical hunt. And by 20 you ought to want the respect of honesty more than to be patronised. So while I won’t go as far as others in calling it Wackrooms, there is a way in which the film suffers from the age of its director. Nothing to do with his greenness at that age but that age’s media nostalgia.
In an essay for A*DESK, Rosa A. Cruz searches for where the allure and dread of the Backrooms comes from, where they come from. There’s the modular, scale-uppable architecture of corporate spaces which might adequately shelter but remain comfortless, a failed ergonomics. (Cruz marks such spaces as late or post capitalist but they could as easily be the maddened rationalism of communist architecture and design). Then there is in the Backrooms’ pointless extrapolation an echo of the internet’s own constantly expanding ‘space’. In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the salient contrast is that place is “enclosed, humanised, defined, meaningful”: the opposite of any Backroom. As the author Christine Rosen points out, we talk (or used to) about cyberspace but not cyberplace (you have ‘a place of work’, but you go to a ‘workspace’), and not only because cyberplace sounds like a last gen wanker’s name for their start-up.11 The internet is all windows and doors and space-like voids made of nothing but numbers and light… A particular accent on the internet that Backrooms might be placing is AI. The close-but-no-cigar forms of the Backrooms are like LLMs’ so-called hallucinations (errors)—what if ChatGPT did offices? The clearest evidence is in the humanoids the Backrooms approximate: a few too many fingers, eyes the wrong shape. More than AI, though, the Backrooms aesthetic, their affect, come from another side to the computer age.
Parsons has described himself as less a film buff than a buff of another kind, particularly a fan of Portal and 2004’s Yume Nikki. The 3D graphics engine he used to make his first shorts is what you can use to make a dungeon-crawler or first-person-shooter. The phrase ‘noclip’ in the original 4chan post means when you glithcily pass through a wall the graphic designer didn’t mean you to. Hence portals being how you get into the Backrooms, their basic polygon walls and dividers, the way in which their furniture is often merged jauntily with the floor. These are the hallmarks of computer games, of a certain age, descendants of what was once called The New Aesthetic.
Coined by author and artist James Bridle and popularised by the cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, The New Aesthetic is about being entranced - entangled in its words - by digital traces left in the physical world. Examples: the kaleidoscope of square pixels that’d swirl on-screen while an older digital video got fast-forwarded. Or the brief leprosy that afflicts everyone on a video that a computer is struggling to render, shapes blockily delineated and colours garished till the lag catches up.
A crucial aspect is that these aesthetic effects are a consequence of human-made digital technology and processes but are in themselves autonomous and unintentional, and in which we find ourselves entangled without influence or agency.12 Another aspect is that the New Aesthetic has already been happening, which means one such site of it might be old computer games.
Their available quality of graphics, the computer processor speed at the time meant that the backgrounds in these games would be stark by necessity. Buildings got simpler the further you went back, till they were just polygons with bitmap images pasted onto them. Their limited sandbox environments would fill in as and when required by your advance, but they could never provide that much detail nor populate the landscape with too many characters. Natural landscapes usually had to look spare since dense or complex vegetation couldn’t yet be animated. Then the final layer: a wraparound image to represent the sky/horizon.
In the 90s computer game Jedi Knight, there was a cheat code that could make you fly: one jump and shove of the mouse and you’d rise up, and keep rising till you moved the mouse again in a different direction. Once, I got so high that when I scrolled the mouse to look but not turn back down, I could see the world entire, flat and dwarfed in its surrounding space-scape. The soundtrack of the game was a medley of Star Wars music, which swelled in a sequence then faded abruptly out, the tech not yet at the level where soundtrack intensity could be timed with the action. Which left most of the gameplay filled with quiet and emptiness. (Hence the shock at a laser blast on your turned-up loud speakers—shock then your skin prickling all over like killed-TV static.) Dunno about you, but I’ve never associated the Star Wars universe with the eeriness and solitude of vast, mostly quiet, depopulated places. In another game from that time, Carmageddon you could see available areas on the map that you couldn’t seem to access. They weren’t meant to be accessible, they were architectural dead-spaces. But with a fluke or effortful jump from another rooftop your car could land on this now revealed-as-pointless level: no items, no opponents, and no way off.
Many game designers from that time exploited these constraints to evoke feelings of the uncanny, the haunting, the eerie on purpose, like the science fiction platformer Another World, which leaned into the basic shapes of its graphics to make its black worm and black boar-like opponents all the more abstract and unnatural. The mysteriousness of puzzle game Myst arose from its combination of pretty images and relative gameplay stateliness. But for most games the atmosphere wasn’t premeditated, was a surplus, as in the fantasy point-and-click game The Legend of Zog, which featured a chess-like game-within-the-game, with an opponent whose turn by turn sluggishness and repeat canned jeers had all the pleasantness of a haunted fairground.
Looped noises, mindless enemy spawning points, uncanny polygonal spaces were in older games a New Aesthetic tangle of user experience and machine process, in which we were arrested by residues that came from initial human design but hadn’t been meant by humans. Whereas the Backrooms aren’t The New Aesthetic itself, since their filmmakers have consciously meant their affect. But they are an allusion to or a parasitising of it. The Romantics of the past were stirred by the sublime in nature and put it into their art, sublime here meaning the terrifying suprahuman experienced from a safe enough vantage that its allure supersedes its terror. The Screenrapt of the present are haunted by computer games, which had only ever meant to let them play-act in space operas or drive in gory car races. They hadn’t meant to plague our troubled dreams.
Here’s what’s weirdest of all about the Backrooms’ aesthetic. The way older computer games’ basic, iterative spaces felt eerie wasn’t just down to the level of technology at the time, but the age at which they were experienced. An adult now playing Carmageddon or Jedi Knight for the first time, even getting lost in them, won’t feel the same eeriness as a kid did in the 90s. Their simple graphics meant that the kids’ imaginations had to fill in the rest. But try YouTubing a clip of any game you played as a kid, known at the time for its groundbreaking graphics, and be shocked by how clunky it looks. More so than you remember. The question is, will such a disenchantment cycle occur to every generation? Will kids playing Elden Ring look back at it when older with the same haunted feeling for its spaces?
Not least when any atmosphere nowadays will have been planned for and beta-tested and technically and financially accounted for. As for the retro-basicness of Minecraft and Roblox, they can’t evoke the same feeling when the broader audiovisual gaming experience for kids is so busy and rich and ‘realistic’. What if, then, there was a trivial moment in history when the stark audiovisuals available to games at the time intersected with the youthful sensitivity of their most prominent users, resulting, à la The New Aesthetic, in an unprepared-for, unique unsettlingness?
Earlier I acknowledged Kane Parsons is 20. He was born in 2005. Not the era of Myst and Doom; not the era of Final Fantasy VII or Sims either. His is the era of the maximalist game, of lush Last of Uses and Red Deads, of games like shaken soda cans going off eternally, Super Smash Brothers, Apex Legends. (A horror tapping into them might be something truly frightening.) The Backrooms’ horror is nostalgic—the film is set in the 90s (“Torture me in the old ways” complained one Guantanamo prisoner). They’re like a computer game designed by the gods of Borges’s eternal City. But as well as mad those gods were ancient. All hail the new aesthetic, same as the old aesthetic.13
Or hauntology, if you wanna be all Goldsmiths grad about it.
“In one of Chesterton’s stories—‘The Head of Caesar,’ I think,” wrote Borges of another wunderkind film, Citizen Kane, “the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth without a center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.”
“There are doors,” a scientist character says in Backrooms, perhaps referencing the Gene Wolfe novel by that title, a novel that doesn’t quite live up to the title’s technically obvious, almost pompous yet simple, evocative, fucking cool valency. There are doors.
I’ve still not read Piranesi or House of Leaves—I know, I know, I’m gonna.
Twice the Backrooms in the film are likened to a drawing of a dog approximated by someone who’s told what a dog is but who’s never seen one.
A furniture store. The real photo that kicked off the Backrooms was simply a photo of a furniture store mid-renovation.
Critics have fallen slightly too fast for scoffing at Backrooms as more trauma-themed ‘elevated horror’. Renate Reinsve’s therapist character did have a traumatic childhood with a shut-in mad mum. But Clark isn’t traumatised, he’s embittered. Their final scene together is a send-up of therapy: Reinsve, albeit under duress, confesses the truth, that Clark can’t and shouldn’t change. (Though the scene also has the bad aftertaste of a screenwriter smug at the anticipated posts re: ‘men would rather get lost in liminal space than go to therapy’.)
At one sermon at a mosque the imam derided any talk of mental health outside of the frame of religion with a wry “Ah! Ps’chalagy!” So when the climax of Backrooms took the turn it did, I couldn’t help thinking: “Ah! Ps’chalagy!”
Another overcooked creepy pasta / wiki fiction is the SCP Foundation, which spawned (an apt cliché) the novel There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division by QNTM (British author Simon Hughes). It’s a novel that has an actually effective blurb: An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it. Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams... But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day. And it has one of the best first chapter dramatisations of a brilliant concept; on its basis alone I was ready to recommend the book to everyone. The second chapter just about keeps up the quality, if a little more rote in its horror trappings. Then, horror aside, it devolves into some of the most rote characterisation outside of a subreddit. (“We had music in common at first, Bach and Mendelssohn. We had tobacco in common and a mutual hatred of The X-Files. Then it was coffee and wine… We watch Law & Order and Jeopardy! and we read stacks and stacks of books.”) While its climax goes for a Calvin and Hobbes ‘This is so cool / This is so stupid’-style conceptual pile-on, with kaiju and pointlessly demonic cosmic hell-tortures and the power of love. I kept my counsel on recommendations.
In TV show Nathan Barley the pretentious corporate cultural hub is called Place.
From ‘The Manifesto for the New Aesthetic’ by theory-artist Curt Cloninger:
The NA image is the incidental visual residue of the performance or enactment of a process. The process never intentionally alters itself in order to achieve the ‘goal’ of the NA image. The NA image is a trace, a remnant, a remainder, a residue, a (potential) clue. The ‘subject’ of the NA image (when sussed aright) is the process itself.
The New Aesthetic debuted on Tumblr, of course. That’s how old it is.