RND/ To imagine a ‘condensed Ballardian visual retro computing novel’, as assembled for internal subject lab testing use via The Parallax Corporation.
Potential candidates viewing these images at high speeds through their attached headsets are instructed to ask themselves the following questions.
- What is my current ongoing relationship with technology?
- What are the (/historical) links between industry-wide misogyny and technological mass acceptance?
- How does Baudrillard’s ‘charm of the real’ overlap with the retro computing aesthetic?
- What is it about infinitely boring white male nerds and the technological impulse / will-to-tech?
- To what extent is the accidental humor contained within some of these images the result of modern, up-to-date socially progressive (enabled) skepticism?
- Precisely how and to what extent do such images portray a technologically utopian future? Or are they simply hopelessly naive?
- Science lurks in the background of these images; what do you consider the (then) current model of social scientific understanding which ideologically underpins them?
- What is my general, mostly unconscious psycho-aesthetic response to this test?
- To what extent do I feel physically unsafe and-or unwell while viewing such images?
- The straps on this chair are a bit tight. Can someone please loosen them?
- How might technology seem a virtual simulation of (/Capitalist) reality?
Images courtesy of Byte Magazine – 1620 x 2160
