AcidMissile is an artwork by new media artist jimpunk. The following will explore AM's interface (the formal structure and organization of the work), the user experience it facilitates, and its ideological ramifications. The essay will culminate by discussing how AM subverts emerging politics of consumer subject formation in the realm of digital technologies by limiting interactivity.

In AM, ready-made media objects are encapsulated in web-browser windows, objects natural to the environment of the internet. Both in terms of content and interface design, then, jimpunk relies on selection and sequencing of existing objects. He reworks, recycles, and cites in a cut-and-paste logic that Fredric Jameson correlates with postmodernism on the whole. However, the windows move autonomously on the space of the screen and appear/disappear in a preordained, “unnatural” manner (that is, in no relation to the user’s volition), their orchestration resembling something a computer virus might enact.

The windows’ hectic movement erases both the usual functionality of a window (to display usable information for as long as the user desires) and of the web browser’s interface (to provide means with which to navigate the internet). There is no time to fully observe what every window contains before it vanishes, nor is there any way to actively navigate through the barrage of data that pops up onscreen. So while AM’s interface has spatialized elements, this spatialization does not subsume active navigability of a “space that responds to our desire” (McPherson 204) and because of such rapid sequencing works to emphasize time, not space, as the primary organizing element of the user’s experience. The work progresses linearly, unidirectionally, uncontrollably, and in a rigidly time-based manner, foregrounding perception of audio-visual stimuli (and not any interactive, volitional mobility to the user) (McPherson 203).

The user is therefore not able to “wed space and time” (McPherson 204) in chosen patterns. Time here works in a regulatory fashion, precluding the “experiential modalities of Web surfing” (McPherson 200) (including “‘choice,’ ‘presence,’ ‘possibility’” [McPherson 200]). Likewise, there is no freedom to choose what happens in a “connected presence in time” (McPherson 202) (back-and-forward navigation, for example), paradoxically despite there being objects like a cursor and windows that are supposed to allow for this. Both “volitional spatial and temporal mobility” (McPherson 202) are erased; as the work moves along, the user feels no sense of herself “moving, live, in command” (McPherson 203), robbed of a sense of “causality in relation to liveness” (McPherson 202). The user has only a small degree of freedom: she can either close some windows (with difficulty), thereby eliminating some elements of the interface, or she can prematurely stop the work from progressing by closing it altogether. AM blatantly stands in no continuity with the user’s regular web experiences and unabashedly mock the “freedom” and mobile subject positioning that the internet structures. AM is thus somewhat reminiscent of a television broadcast, but because it is situated in a greater web-browser environment and uses web objects, it produces a singular experience.

Limitation of interactivity is not just at stake for AM’s interface but seems to be the ideological footing of its parent site, 56kTV-bastard channel: “bastard channel is set on limiting consumption…we take the opportunity of wagging a cautionary medial forefinger at the ‘zap & surf attitude’” (http://www.56k-bastard.tv/indexf_e.html).The site imposes control not only by limiting the interactivity of its time-based internet “television programs” but by designating narrow timeframes for when these programs are accessible to users, mimicking (“bastardizing”) the program structure of a television network. This perspective is diametrically opposed to the “consumer centric point of view… intent on providing ‘more interactive, participatory entertainment’” (200) of the budding niche markets of net-casting and of website design in general. Instead, the bastard channel project, like AM, seeks to erase the temporally limitless potentialities of “pragmatic” interfaces in which it is possible to explore interactively and with spatial-temporal freedom. It is intent on launching users’ “sensible operating systems into turbulence” (http://www.56k-bastard.tv/indexf_e.html) (the term “operating systems” refers both to a user’s operational mode as well as to a computer’s normal operating functions).

AM and its participation in bastard channel serves to elicit problematics around the expectations of consumers of digital technology and the commodities of late global corporate capitalism, as well as around the construction of new modes of “spatialized and mobile subjectivity” (McPherson 204). The promise of interactivity in web interfaces “holds out the tantalizing lure of transformation, remaking information into a better reflection of the self” (McPherson 205)— however, transformation is illusory because interactivity itself is highly mediated and limited by factors outside of the user’s control. Indeed, McPherson notes that transformation may easily be welded to consumption, and that it produces combinations of existing data, not true newness or change. This logic of consumption is subversively hidden by interactivity that “promises everything and changes nothing” (McPherson 205), making the user feel like she is in control when she is actually subtly incorporated or normalized by institutionalized forces (McPherson 206); no wonder, then, that “interactivity- transformation” is appropriated as a corporate marketing strategy.

Bastard channel’s project and AM's interface design seek to make a political intervention. They make evident how the logic of interactivity in new media technologies may actually propagate corporate control of consumers, especially in the context of television on the internet (McPherson 200). By being flat-out controlling and unidirectional, AM makes the user question what and how interactivity and traditional web experience means.