Böcker av Jakko Kemper

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.

This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies.In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertise 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature. While these and other experts applaud imperfection, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, and the frail.The editors unite the different strands in imperfection thinking across various disciplines tools. In fourteen chapters by experts from different world localities, they offer scholars and students more historically grounded and more critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect.The book editions of this books are available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.