Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection.
If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness.
While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.
Herzogenrath, Bernd: - Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American BodyPolitic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010) and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012) and DeleuzeGuattari & Ecology (2009). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Kemper, Jakko: - Jakko Kemper is Assistant Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platforms Vernaculars at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on critical theory, media aesthetics, and the environmental implications of digital technology. He previously published the edited volume, Imperfections: Studies in Mistakes, Flaws, and Failures (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Pisters, Patricia: - Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, program director of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures, and co-director of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003); Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (with Rosi Braidotti; 2012) and The Neuro-Image (2012). See for articles, her blog, and other information at www.patriciapisters.com.
