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TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTIONS: The Interplay of Subjective Flaws and Virtual Space

CONCLUSION: SOFTWARE'S END

In the summer of 2019, I won the James Charlton Knox prize to conduct research abroad on how different artists interpreted virtual failure through their work. While conducting this research one night, a new friend shared with me the future of Johannesburg. We stood on a balcony as a party raged behind us, vibrating the window panes. My friend waved at the city’s blinking skyline. The cylindrical Ponte City tower glowed with grimy fluorescents, puncturing a thick overcast and turning the night red. I turned to my friend--a DJ at the party I’d met that very night--and admitted that it all looked evil. She agreed with a smile on her face.

Her goal, along with the rest of the underground artists at that party, was to preserve that “evil” in the years to come. A better term for this evil might be a streak of subversion, like what I saw in Johannesburg’s faded lights, or the bright smartphones’ bursts of flash as the blown-out speakers belted out music. These abandoned structures transform into active hubs of community for the city’s artistic subcultures, and they were top priority in my DJ friend’s vision of the future. I couldn’t be happier to hear that, as it aligned with my hopes for places like these.

The creative subcultures I encountered in Johannesburg are fueled by an undercurrent of sleek mobile technology. They form a flexible web of smartphones shooting community-made music snippets and images through the avenues of social media--the web that attracted my new friend to Joburg. I traveled to this city, along with other locations I visited in Europe and Africa, to conduct research that explores the forms in which communities abroad made technology work for them. I looked for communities that reconfigured technology not designed for them in the first place. Initially, I thought that the artists I met weren’t what I was looking for. Uploading work to Instagram or chatting on Twitter is not inherently subversive. Then I looked into where those digital interactions crossed paths with the physical spaces that the artists created.

The marginalized drew attention through digital access, and using their interactions online, they coordinated themselves enough to construct and maintain physical spaces. Once I understood how creatives used digital interaction, I noticed more spaces that were intersections of the digital and the physical. Spaces like the club I was at in Johannesburg where I met my DJ friend, the art installations overflowing from painted vans in Nairobi, or the intentional suppression of smartphone usage in Berlin’s nightclubs.

To put it simply, it came down to who was able to express themselves. Who is made to develop alternate paths through the digital era, and why? But more importantly, how do they do it?

I started working on analyzing these alternative forms of digital interaction, mainly through developing the technological disruptions framework. Due to the nature of this intersection between art, virtual spaces, and people, I do not honestly believe that any attempt to completely understand it will be possible. While writing this thesis alone, I felt the material and my viewpoints on it go through endless reinterpretations. Reading digital humanities scholarship from only a few years back seems to be on the other side of contextual gulf. I would not go so far as to say that the work had gone obsolete, but it represented more of a historical snapshot than an current reflection of the virtual landscape. The digital medium is new, and we tend to underestimate it. That is not necessarily a problem, but it is best to at least acknowledge it. I hope that this thesis, like the wonderful work of glitch artists and scholars and digital humanists in general, is a step in that direction.

As it should be clear by the end of reading this project, a significant way to capture the subjectivity of virtual space is through media. Outside of my creative fiction--which tackles the concepts from this thesis in a myriad of forms--I have tried my hand at visual art as well. The Manual is one of the mixed-media projects I developed last year. I decided to include The Manual here, at the end of this work, because I think it has more to say that is relevant to the content of this thesis. Relevant, yet adjacent. It is not necessary to go through The Manual as well, but it helps to see how technological disruptions can inform creative projects as well as academic. I would recommend reading the introduction to the project below, regardless if you go further. The link to the project is at the bottom of the page. You can scroll through images from The Manual and my explanation of how I created it to get there.

Contents of this path:

...my ideas about technological disruptions in a form that was more direct than I could have expected. For my final project in the 400-level English course Hybrid Forms taught by Prof. Shayla Lawson, I had decided to create an interactive online experience using Twine that would explore the materiality of virtual spaces. I thought that the project would result in a dynamic and overwhelming mixed-media website, but I thought that there would be an underlying cohesion to it all. On a conceptual level I knew that the internet and virtual environments are volatile, ever-changing. Even at this point I had written significantly about technological disruptions, so I was familiar with thinking about failure in these spaces. Still, this intellectual understanding of the cracks in virtual environments could not prepare me for how all of my attempts at presenting the internet fractured. If my prose became too abstract, the meaning behind my work was rendered incomprehensible to a general audience. They would not have the conceptual framework to delineate between fine details and the overarching points I was making about the texture and weight of online spaces. Yet how else can you represent such a topic? Digital worlds do not simplify themselves. All of the sleek GUIs that fill up the modern era's screens are right-clicks away from spilling hundreds of lines of code. You tweak a variable, delete an array, and you might just make it crumble. Digital media is compressed between intricate layers of instructions that all must be in constant balance, and in constant communication. It does not lend itself to the simplification I wanted. So I stopped trying to force comprehensibility.
... and breaking my site as a whole, felt more "virtual" than anything else I had tried. Of course, using virtual as this vague descriptor does not do much to define what I felt. The best way I can explain this is glitch art reveals a particular strain of decay. The flaws that appear when I corrupt the bits of a JPEG or delete frames from a video follow a logic that can only exist in the realm of binary. Collapse dictated by the right-angles of misinterpreted color channels. Visual omission through algorithms that were made blunt by shaving off strings of code. Glitches bring decay, and with decay comes ends. They are softwares' epilogues, and they are wholly unique to the medium.
...aiming it at the creative process of the project itself. It became a meta-narrative looking at what happens when you break virtual objects. It became about the act of cracking itself open. The noise and disconnect that arises from glitch art spoke much more about the textures of virtual spaces than trying to smooth it all out and aiming for consistency. If the environments I tried to represent were patchwork, then why should my work not be the same? The self-referential nature of the project also hinted at something that I also consider to be at the heart of this thesis.
...When its not a multi-layered web of bleeding colors or a series of jagged breaks, there is still that feeling of entropy--no matter how inauthentic that entropy might actually be. The immediacy of the art might be part of why it feels so taut with chaotic potential. In many other mediums, the process of creation takes time. Outside of specific experiments into autonomous creation, such as the projects of the Dadaists, Situationists, and Surrealists of the 20th century, creative work is a process. It is drawn out across stages. Preparation, execution, revision, and so on. What glitch art tends to do, like many other aspects of virtual activities, is condense stages of the creative process. Preparation is all the work of the artist. You set your software up to fail in a spectacular way and the rest is letting it all cascade into ruin. The work takes seconds to become unwhole.
...seems to be an important part of the new culture around how people operate online. Cyberpunk attempted to grapple with the repercussions of it before the internet could even flourish, and we are constantly in the middle of a techno-cultural arms race to see who will master the new forms of information transfer that have arisen over the past few decades. These new forms of interaction will only become more important over time. The previous two chapters of this thesis outlined some of the many ways in which we are already seeing the effects of technological disruptions in contemporary society. I want to understand to the best of my ability how the overloaded and broken information pathways of the post-Internet era will continue to impact our perceptions of reality. This thesis is part of that exploration, but so is The Manual. As a necessary step in the academic trajectory of this work, I want to include The Manual. It approaches the concept of virtual failure using a drastically different creative toolkit than what I used for this thesis, but this does not severe it from the conversation. If anything, the disconnect only strengthens its adjacency to my main work here. I write this in the most optimistic way possible, but virtual space would be nothing without the flaws that ground it.

This page references:

A Day in Jozi