March 3, animated digital assemblage (2020)
Loading is an unfinished collection of looping GIFs, each work a meditation (and nostalgic dedication) to the affect of loading in the context of digital computing. The work is an output of a month-long collective exercise of repetitive creative practice: beginning on March 1st, 2020, I and two dozen other interdisciplinary artists committed to developing the same gesture each day for 31 days.
The day before, on February 29th, 2020, the first recorded death from COVID-19 in the United States occurred 22 miles from my home in Seattle, Washington. Soon, my project Loading and its focus on waiting for computers would find itself within a period when the practice of waiting would define each day. The act of waiting quickly became the “new normal” of pandemic living: waiting for lock down to end, waiting for the next public safety announcement, waiting for the next bit of research on COVID-19s effects, waiting to hear of the fallout from a friend’s exposure, waiting for testing availability, waiting for test results, waiting for a 10-day quarantine to end, waiting for vaccines, waiting for vaccine eligibility, waiting for the next viral mutation, waiting to see if work would be there in the morning, waiting for unemployment checks, waiting for eviction protection.
Living in this kind of lagging, perpetual potentiality could be jarring, frustrating, isolating and the source of real emotional and existential distress. For me, an asymmetrical catharsis arose: having lived the prior 20 years with chronic anxiety and depression, and seeking mental health care in the United States, waiting is the norm. Waiting for insurance approval, waiting for an available appointment, waiting in the waiting room, waiting for the prescription to be filled, waiting for the medication to take up in my bloodstream, and waiting for the side effects to subside. The space after a good day and before the inevitable return of the next bad day.
Is it still called “waiting” if we have no way of knowing what will come next? The discomfort of waiting comes when the reward for that time spent is undefined, where there is no promise of an ‘end’. Waiting was the official government policy for much of the early pandemic—a prescription that was both inadequate (and inequitable) given the scale of danger and suffering, and yet at times the only right way to move forward. Despite this complexity, and the embodied strain of waiting, the desire for it to have an end, suggested a ‘natural’ state of flow and continuity that we could return to.
For many who live in sick bodies and especially for those living with chronic ailments, perpetual waiting can come to define daily experience. In this reality, waiting must not be seen as a passive, empty, idle or without value, but a meaning-full, agential place with its own phenomenology. In this essay and accompanying works, I explore this idea through two waiting technologies: the loading screen and the medical waiting room.
March 17, animated digital illustration (2020)
Loading was an icon (literally) of early computing and the internet, but one that is quickly becoming a relic. Once an essential tool for a website or application designer to maintain the illusion of seamless flow and ‘high-speed’ web, the experience of waiting for a computer to think was now a problem to be solved not just for ‘user experience’ but a quickly developing ideology of doing business online. The online retail giant Amazon famously claimed that “every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales” (Linden). Loading time is an error, a glitch, and a risk to the bottom line.
Buffering was created to ‘solve’ this problem: digital files are preloaded and temporarily stored on a device in order to allow for uninterrupted access to networked data. This is most commonly experienced in online streaming video platforms such as YouTube or Netflix where the video files load ‘just in time’, the pixels coming together to form the image just seconds ahead of you. However, this process is not just contained to video—modern browsers and some e-commerce company websites now preload portions of pages based on which visible links it believes you are most likely to click (Chrome).
Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism outlines the potential consequences of a technology like buffering through a diagnosis of 21st century capitalist production as a destroyer of mediation, privileging immersion, flow, continuity, and presence over all else. Seeing immediacy as both a negation of medium in an affectual sense in our relationship to media and culture (“eating the real with a spoon”) as well as our temporal relations: the just-in-time urgency of globalized supply chains seeping into our every-day experience (Kornbluh 20). As Kornbluh writes, “a hurry-hurry that compresses time into a tingling present” or “presence without future” (Kornbluh 18).
The process of enacting immediacy as the ‘natural state’ of our relationships to software and the internet is in many ways the historical arc of communication and computing itself: the production of increasingly powerful microprocessors and compression protocols, expansive networked infrastructure and even more expansive adoption of mobile devices. Achieving an individual experience of information immediacy through networked digital computing ironically requires untold layers of complexity and mediation. Having the ‘world at our fingertips’ involves such distance from the bits and the hardware that contain them that the most apt metaphor for their location in popular imaginary is ‘the cloud’—a weightless, ethereal informational miasma that is both everywhere and nowhere.
Beyond ever increasing speed, maintaining the virtual’s immediacy and continuous flow requires permanent reliability. As Tung-Hui Hu writes in A Prehistory of the Cloud, modern networks are designed to ensure data “get to its destination with “five-nines ”reliability, so that if one hard drive or piece of wire fails en route, another one takes its place, 99.999 percent of the time” (Hu 1). This includes an industry standard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which prescribes that you have three copies of all of your data, “two local (on-site) but on different media (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site” (Elliot). Often this off-site is a datacenter. These spaces most familiar to me as massive, air-conditioned warehouses scattered around my current home of Phoenix, Arizona, but they are also found in former missile silos and military bases–acting as literal and ideological bunkers to keep our data ‘safe’. An interruption in the flow is intolerable. Waiting, loading, and (most terrifying) data loss become anomalies, abnormalities, something to fear. As Hu later writes, “the cloud is not just built to solve specific technological problems…but is built around the shape of our imagined vulnerabilities” (Hu 97).
March 2, animated digital assemblage (2020)
In hindsight, loading screens represent an onramp to this hypermediated immediacy. The fear that came with the growing distance from the workings of computers through the interface and the internet browser needed to be quelled—don’t worry, they said, things are happening. A reassuring voice in a moment of change and uncertainty, distracting us (at times, through deception) from our own unknowing, and the possibility of the computer’s processes being stuck in a state from which it cannot escape. Worse than stasis, a computer ‘freezing’ is the machine being caught in an infinite loop, with no other resources or logic or code to get it unstuck. The freeze compromises the sense of immediacy, agency, and control that modern computing promises (Alexander 2). So undesirable, feared, and existential, it was colloquially equated to death (Swain).
March 2, came about in exploring this tension, giving voice to the loading screen while also taking away any sense of ‘completion’ of the process. There is no edge for the progress bar to reach. And as a looping GIF—a low resolution, and nearing obsolete digital media format— the work removes the possibility and the authority of ending all together.
Outside of the screen, my own memories of loading are rich with sensuality. An embodied encounter with the labor of the computer that is in stark contrast to the smooth silence of our touch screen mobile phones and the seamless experience of the modern internet. Waiting for the computer meant hearing the harddrive clicks and whirrs, feeling its vibrations through its cold steel case, or holding a hand to the warm air emanating from the cooling fans. A loading screen is a liminal space, an in-between, that provides for what today feels like a rare kind of intimacy between user and the computer.
The culture and technological immediacy of modern computing have reduced this process, and in some cases removed it all together from our digital relations. The heat, noise, and kinetic density of computing has been exported, virtually off-shored from our homes, housed instead in data centers whose fans can be so loud as to spur municipal noise regulation if located too close to neighborhoods (Ordinance).
A primarily networked, cloud-based computer relation means that our own devices become a kind of remote interface, a purely visual portal into a digital experience that the average user knows little to nothing about the scale, function or impact of its material realities. Picking up my phone and connecting to this network is now a seamless, almost instantaneous process. Waiting has finally, seemingly, been eliminated. But in reality, the labor of waiting has just been reversed: when the network is constantly poised, computers wait for us.
Is it still waiting if they know what will come next?
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Untitled, digital image (2024)
Grocery store shelves are starting to empty out, and fill up with lines of people whose faces looked as if they were smelling something rotting but not sure where it was coming from. Some people wear masks, face shields, plastic gloves. I see an older gentleman wearing empty plastic sandwich bags on his hands.
Colloquially, “buffering” had built a powerful digital connotation in its relationship to online video streaming. Its other meaning as a kind of safe in-between, or “something that serves as a protective barrier” raced into our embodied relations in the first weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic (Buffer). What was between us, and the technologies that mediated that space, were a primary concern. Masks and 6-feet of air most commonly, but also windows, doors, and layers of plastic—between bodies, in the form of plexiglass sheets and face shields, and between objects, everything becoming potentially individually packaged—just in case.
Despite its near invisibility in common online activities, waiting also returned dramatically to the everyday digital experience. As with so much of the global economic and cultural infrastructure, home digital networks strained as the broad adoption of video calls replaced unsafe, and in many countries, unsanctioned, in-person gatherings. During the initial lockdowns, the spinning, looping, loading icon was seen often as low bandwidth and slow connections interrupted meetings, family game nights, weddings, and funerals hosted on services such as FaceTime and Zoom. A virtual buffer in need of buffering itself.
As the novelty of the new technologies wore off, and the weeks wore on, the true danger and uncertainty of the pandemic’s impact had stripped away most daily routine, including my commitment to a daily creative project on loading screens and buffering. Looking back, the staggered gestures are traces of some spike in energy, in confidence, in fear, in need for distraction. They also function as a reminder that days still held their significance, despite the fragmented temporality of my memory of those first few months. Robert Hasan, finds this fragmentation within digital temporality, calling it “connected asynchronicity”, theorized by Neta Alexander as “a tension between slowness (in the form of waiting) and excessive speed” (Alexander 12).
For me, the first month of the pandemic provided an opportunity to notice an embodiment of this kind of temporality, through Loading as well as its familiarity in my experience with depression, anxiety and their treatment. It is an understanding found within the disability studies framework of “crip time”, first articulated by Irv Zola and Carol Gill, and has become a loosely defined word to encompass the temporal experience of living with disability. Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer Crip, explores “crip time” not only as a lived experience but as a theoretical notion, and a way of engaging in concepts of non-linear time and speculative futures.
Excerpt from ‘Buffer Forever’. Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 5(1), 56–67. https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.114