CHAPTER 2.0: A RESILIENT RETROFUTURE
Technological disruptions have existed ever since people interpreted the same piece of tech for different usages. On the other hand, acknowledging technological disruptions for what they are and using them to explore how marginalized people use tech has only seen rising visibility in the past few decades. New media artists and scholars have been reinterpreting these technological disruptions through creative and academic projects for a significant amount of time, like James Bridle’s The New Aesthetic project and the hundreds of essays on technology that have been published through CTHEORY. The previous chapter helped to frame the technological disruption through events with direct, real world impact—this chapter aims to add a layer of interpretation. New media art has grappled with technological disruptions more directly than almost any other creative or academic avenue. Instead of looking directly at the paradoxes that populate our virtual realities, this chapter will explore how technological disruptions are reinterpreted by artists and society at large. Like any product of the internet, technological disruptions are deconstructed, rethought, and recontextualized over time. To fully understand them, an investigation into the products of these disruptions has to be conducted.
The first place to look for reinterpretations of technological disruptions, of virtual failure, would be projects where the visual language and sensibilities of that failure are being used intentionally. Most of these reinterpretations are categorized under the glitch art umbrella, yet as Carolyn Kane has mentioned before, it is difficult to know when an intentional use of failure loses the inherent critical aspect of displaying broken things to an audience that expects functionality. When mainstream media continually implements the aesthetics of digital failure in advertisements and products, when dead pixels and compression artifacts are a feature and not a bug, then do glitches retain their brokenness? Are they yet another facet of corporate branding?
Despite years of discourse around them, those questions remain unanswered. What applying the technological disruption framework will allow is to situate subjective interpretation of virtual failure front and center. To understand where and why the paradoxes in the aesthetics of virtual failure exist is to understand how significant users of these aesthetics see their relation to virtual space. Video games provide one of the most direct ways to explore this. By definition they must involve a crafted virtual space, an environment that has been directly formed by its creators. As seen in the previous chapter with the struggle between gold farmers and MMORPGs, video games are embedded with the ideologies and sensibilities of their developers. Like the gold farmers changing the flow of play in World of Warcraft, these ideologies are challenged by the players and how they interact with the game world. But for the case study in this chapter, the conflict between player ideology and creator ideology is not an issue. The science-fiction Role-Playing Game (RPG) Cyberpunk 2077 has not been released yet, so there are no players to directly contradict the game world and the creators' intentions for said world. This allows for an exploration of the game world’s aesthetics while centering the creators' perspective, similar to how the analysis was conducted on AT&T's "You Will" commercial series from the introduction.
What an analysis of Cyberpunk 2077 will allow is not only the freedom to explore a game world before it has been changed by its user-base, but its claim to a specific sci-fi subgenre can also be contextualized in the larger history of cyberpunk. There are not many other subgenres that deal with the themes of technological disruptions as cyberpunk does, and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most mainstream examples of media from that subgenre in the late 2010's/early 2020's. By examining this game specifically, we can see a clear example of technological disruptions in media (in other words, the passive technological disruptions as described in the introduction).