I particularly liked this week’s readings that confronted us with questions of the relationship between software and ideology. Software is an ultimate fetish, imbued with the appearance of power that is actually located elsewhere. Software perhaps extends televisions ideology of liveness to new heights, foregrounding, according to Tara, volition and mobility.
Software and source code supposedly enable a true understanding of the inner workings of the machine, but as Wendy Chun argues, this too is an illusion sustained by particular ideological commitments. Source code must be legible by people and is thus subject to interpretation by both humans and machines.
Interfaces then are a metonym for the computer as whole, collapsing the underlying stack to an immediate sense of movement, choice, and execution. It is a mask for deeper computational processes which happen simultaneously and without user input.
I’m interested in how the interactivity of digital media can come to stand in for all types of action and participation. I think the conceptual collapsing of event and command that software enacts is useful for understanding politics and social relations in the present. This logic animates the rhetoric of social media as empowering and offering real time connection (for example, the twitter update where likes and retweets numbers are reflected through live updates).
A question I’ve been thinking about is the relationship between computers as systems of control, software’s collapsing of event and command, and fascism’s cult of action, a quality described by Umberto Eco that emphasizes action for its beauty and deemphasizes reflection. Is the desire for beautiful, clearly streamlined and ordered source code a contemporary manifestation of a fascist aesthetic? Is the collapse of command and event what makes first person shooter video games seamless and orienting, in comparison to first person film which is disorienting and challenging to identify with? I also think of the phenomenon of speed running in these terms: a style of play based on completing a game as fast as possible by pushing up against the boundaries of the code to the point of possible implosion (exploiting glitches). What processes, computational and human, are disguised in the emphasis on action, interactivity, participation.
In contrast, Kara Keeling’s Queer OS provides a challenge as she asks us to consider how queer theory and critical race theory can open up new theories of computation that nevertheless must come out of existing systems. Can we design an OS that reveals the process of compiling and execution described by Chun that is also usable and not relegated to minor cultural spheres? A software that is not vaporwave but still recognizes the importance of vapor and ephemerality to the digital?
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ReplyDeleteI also thought about speed running throughout the readings this week, especially when speed runners "accidentally" found glitches, or "skips" that improved not only their personal times, but also enabled different routes and patterns of play for those games' communities to take "action" thereafter.
ReplyDeleteI loved your comparison between first person shooter video games and first person films and how you described the video games as "orienting", in which the "command" or executable lends itself to shifting "orientations" from the player's actions. It just came to mind, but I wonder about how your question might also apply to genre of games, such as the Telltale, in which there's a "collapse" between not only forms of media, but also industrially (I think that Telltale has LucasArts people). Another game genre that comes to mind are Japanese visual novel games, especially the ones adapted from anime series prior. I'll have to revisit this week's reading to better think of how these media map onto this week's themes.