Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк
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Another example: There was (and still is) a lot of commentary on The Matrix (1999), but not much of it lingers over the slightly embarrassing second and third movies in the franchise.123 They are “bad films with their hearts in the right place.”124 Like the J-Lo video, they deal among other things with what Eugene Thacker in Biomedia called immediacy, or the expectation of real-time feedback and control through an interface.125 As Nakamura drolly notes, “This is an eloquent formulation of entitlement.” Where the Matrix films get interestingly weird is in their treatment of racial difference among interface users under “information capitalism.”126
The Matrix pits Blackness as embodiment against whiteness as the digital. What goes on in the background to the main story is a species of Afrofuturism, celebrating the erotics of the Black bodies as that which is most remote from the whiteness of technics. It’s the opposite of Black Accelerationism, in which a close proximity of the Black body to the machine is in advance of whiteness and to be desired. In The Matrix version, the Black body holds back from the technical and retains attributes of soul, individuality, corporeality, and this is its value. Nakamura: “Afrofuturist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, ‘natural’ … ‘unassimilable’ and ‘authentic.’” But with the bad guy Agent Smith, “Whiteness thus spreads in a manner that exemplifies a much-favored paradigm of e-business in the nineties: viral marketing.”127 The white Agents propagate through digitally penetrating other white male bodies.
At least race appears in the films, which offer some sort of counterimaginary to cyber-utopianism. But as Coco Fusco notes, photography and cinema don’t just record race—they produce it.128 An algorithmic technics may in the main exacerbate the production of racialized difference.129 Lev Manovich notes that it’s in the interface that the photographic image is produced now, and so for Nakamura, it is the interface that bears scrutiny as the place where race is made. In The Matrix, race is made to appear for a notionally white viewer.
The presence of blackness in the visual field guards whites from the irresistible seduction of the perfectly transparent interface … Transparent interfaces are represented as intuitive, universal, pre-or postverbal, white, translucent, and neutral—part of a visual design aesthetic embodied by the Apple iPod.130
Apple’s iconic early ads for the iPod featured blacked-out silhouettes of dancing bodies, their white earbud cords flapping as they move, against bold single-color backgrounds. For Nakamura, they conjure universal consumers who can make product choices, individuated neoliberal subjects in a color-blind world. Like the “users” of J-Lo in her video, they can shuffle between places, styles, cultures, ethnicities—even if some of the bodies dancing in the ads are meant to be read as not just black-out but also Black. Blackness, at the time at least, was still the marker for the authentic in what white audiences desired from Black music. In this world, “Whiteness is replication, blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject.”131
Nakamura:
This visual culture, which contrasts black and white interface styles so strongly, insists that it is race that is real. In this way the process of new media as a cultural formation that produces race is obscured; instead race functions here as a way to visualize new media image production … In this representational economy, images of blacks serve as talismans to ward off the consuming power of the interface, whose transparent depths, like Narcissus’ pool, threaten to fatally immerse its users.132
If Blackness usually stands for authentic embodiment in this visual culture, then being Asian stands for proximity to the tech.133 The Asian shows up only marginally in The Matrix. Its star, the biracial Keanu Reeves, was like J-Lo racially malleable for audiences. In his case he could be read as white by whites and Asian by Asians if they so desired. A more ironic and telling example is the 2002 film Minority Report. Tom Cruise—was there a whiter star in his era?—has to get his eyes replaced, as retinal scanning is everywhere in this film’s paranoid future. Only the eyes he gets belonged to a Japanese person, and the Cruise character finds himself addressed as a particularly avid consumer everywhere he goes. Hiroki Azuma and Asada Akira had once advanced a kind of ironic Asian Accelerationism, which positively valued a supposed closeness of the Asian with the commodity and technology, but in Minority Report it’s an extreme for the white subject to avoid.134
Race at the interface partakes now in what Paul Gilroy notes is a crisis of raciology, brought on by the popularization of genetic testing.135 The old visual regimes of race struggle to adapt to the spreading awareness of the difference between genotype and phenotype. The film GATTACA (1997) is here a prescient one in imagining how a new kind of racism of the genotype might arise. It imagines a world rife with interfaces designed to detect the genotypical truth of appearances.
Nakamura ties these studies of the interface in cinema and television to studies of actual interfaces, particularly lowly, unglamorous, everyday ones. For instance, she looks at the avatars made for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which started in 1997 as an application running in Microsoft Windows. Of interest to her are the self-made cartoonlike avatars users chose to represent themselves to their “buddies.” “The formation of digital taste cultures that are low resolution, often full of bathroom humor, and influenced by youth-oriented and transnational visual styles like anime ought to be traced as it develops in its native mode: the internet.”136
At the time there was little research on such low forms, particularly those popular with women. Low-res forms populated with cut and paste images from the Care Bears, Disney, and Hello Kitty are not the ideal subjects of interactivity imagined in cool cyberculture theory. But there are questions here of who has access to what visual capital, of “who sells and is bought, who surfs and is surfed.”137 AIM avatars were often based on simple cut and paste graphics, but users modified the standard body images with signs that marked out their version of cultural or racial difference. This was a moment of explosion of ethnic identity content on the web—to which there was a racist backlash yet to come.138
AIM users could download avatars from websites that offered them under various categories—of which race was never one, as this is a supposedly postracial world. The avatars were little gifs, made of body parts cut from a standard template with variations of different hair, clothing, slogans, and so on. These could be assembled into mini-movies, remediating stuff from anime, comics, games; as a mix of photos and cartoons, flags, avatars.
One could read Nakamura’s interest in the visual self-presencing of women and girls as a subset of Henry Jenkins’s interest in fan-based media, but she lacks his occasionally overenthusiastic embrace of such activity as democratic and benign.139 Her subaltern taste-cultures are a little more embattled and compromised. The kind of femininity performed here —laced with cuteness—is far from resistant and sometimes not even negotiated. These versions of what Hito Steyerl would later call the poor image are hard to redeem aesthetically.140 Cultural studies had tried to ask meta-questions about what the objects of study are, but even so, we ended up with limited lists of proper new media objects, of which the AIM avatar was not one.
The same could be said of the website alllooksame.com. The site starts with a series of photographs of faces and asks the user to identify which is Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. (Like most users, I could not tell, which is the point.) The category of the Asian American is something of a post–Civil Rights construct. It promised resistance to racism in panethnic identity but paradoxically treated race as real. While alllooksame.com is an odd site, for Nakamura it does at least unite Asian viewers in questioning visual rhetoric about race.
Asian American online practice complicates the digital divide, being on both sides. The Asian American appears in popular racial consciousness as a “model minority,” supposedly uninterested in politics and eager to get ahead in information capitalism or whatever this is. Yet she or he also appears as the refugee, the undocumented, the subsistence wage service worker. For Nakamura, this means that the study