Aesthetics and Affect of Hardware

“Innovation and development are impossible without access to hardware that can be produced flexibly, cheaply, and consistently.” (Nakamura 936).

Reading Nakamura, an asterisk seems necessary at the end of Apple’s motto, “Think Different”. The reading brings into focus how self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley (and really most other industries, it seems) can be while simultaneously erasing or making opaque the labor that affords “innovation and development.” I suspect that the libertarian bent of many on the bleeding edge of digital development, combined with an individualistic bootstraps ethos, plays a role in the inability to see the interconnectedness of tedious labor to the kinds of creative work so often celebrated in exclusivity.

Along with the other readings, Nakamura grapples with issues of materiality. Hardware is an essential, if dull, actor in digital or new media theory. The writers we encounter this week turn or return (cf. kittler) to hardware.

I’m drawn to the concept of the “aesthetics of lag” as described by Sterne (61), especially as he uses it to trace a connection to infrastructure. In this section, Sterne’s discussion alludes to the issues of net neutrality, which may be worth discussing more in seminar, though I’m probably more interested in dwelling on the concept of the aesthetics of lag more. I want to push that a bit and question what its precursors may have been? In other words, before the advent of new media, how was lag measured or experienced in pre-digital technologies? I’m also interested in dwelling on the implications of an aesthetics of lag. If such an aesthetic experience is immersive or all encompassing (i.e., if I’m almost always connected), how is my non-digital experience shaped? What do I have less patience for, less tolerance of? How does such an aesthetic trail or follow my experiences beyond the initial moment of lag?

Noah and Todd’s week in review cites Scott as asks how games index “real world” phenomena and (among other questions) how games provide a sort of affect management. I’m drawn to how this week’s readings extend those questions beyond the software of the game and into the hardware and the material infrastructure that makes games and other types of software possible. I might ask, similarly, how lag creates an index through which we understand other phenomena, or how lag disregulates affect management, or how it cultivates a kind of affective response that might otherwise be less apparent or accessible.