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Exerpt from: Gauthier, David. 2017. “Loading... 800% Slower.” In Executing Practices, edited by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass, and Magda Tyźlik-Carver, 115–123. DATA Browser 06. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
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Loading... 800% Slower addresses modern deceits and their latest scripts. It is concerned with the détournement of web pages’ “critical rendering paths” so that browsers can render what they really are: timely designed assaults. The project disinters contemporary third party algorithmic oddments (http://cdn.krxd.net/controltag?confid=JQqG5SW9) that lurk deep in the murkiness of your web browser’s script interpreter, and which, as non-visual techniques of entrapment, act as conduits of a new kind of imperceptible propaganda that does away with our too slow affective registers. While some may be enticed to believe that the toneless term “data” mainly denotes bytes that primarily compose images, texts, and, sometimes, sounds, it is rather predominantly in the form of machine-interpretable code that these bytes are queued and reassembled from end-to-end. Contemporary networks are not networks of perceptible images and texts but rather ones of ambulant and rampant code and scripts that do not warrant direct recourse, let alone signalling, to human sense or perception.
Loading... 800% Slower works to foreground how this non-human computational acceleration and automation work towards creating zones of felonious interactivity where the automated agency of browsers and servers directly supersedes and substitutes itself for intentional actions of their sacrosanct users. As human trans-actions are now being bolstered by machine-to-machine executions, which occur at timescales that completely bypass human consciousness, the piece amplifies this temporal asymmetry between machine deliberation time and human deliberation time.
By slowing down to an excessive degree the bitrate of an internet connection while a browser plugin renders audible the various invisible and dubious scripts and DOM elements composing a given web page, this project feeds forward the uncanny temporality of human consciousness in rendering almost still the micro temporal signals of the machine. While a given page is protractedly loading, it is prepared by Loading... 800% Slower’s plugin which injects purpose-built software oscillators into its document object model. These various oscillators are then modulated by the type, provenance, and amount of incoming bytes requested at various times during the temporal resolution/execution of the page. This parasitic rendering works towards orchestrating a noise composition that climaxes coincidently upon the transmission and execution of deceitful codes.
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Renderings: Drudge Report - The Atlantic