Generalizing from its impact on me, I would say that Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace owes its efficacy to its success at confronting the viewer—black and white alike—with images that simply cannot be completed through action, at least not within the constraints the work imposes on our consumption. In this sense, the work functions in a manner akin to the cinema of the affection-image, following Deleuze's typology: like the affection-image, this mechanized interface with the image of the black body creates a crisis of the sensorimotor logic of the (movement-) image. If the affection-image ensues when the completion of the sensorimotor circuit is interrupted and received movement (sensation) and executed movement (action) are rendered incommensurable,xxxiii something like an affective-overflow occurs in our bodies when we are unable to correlate the sensations generated by the video game with some appropriate action on our parts.
Yet, in contrast to Deleuze's typology, affection here is not a modality of the cinematic image, but rather a “faculty" of our embodied singularity, and the source of our affective crisis is not an opening of the cinematic image to the force of time, but the concrete excess of our singular bodies.xxiv Piper's Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace extends the logic of affectivity beyond the image and it does so by deploying a postcinematic interface in which the power of time has been subordinated to constraints of the body's agency within a game-space. The work compels its viewer to live through the exclusion of certain bodies from cyberspace via the frantic temporal mode of a survival exercise, thereby mobilizing the disappointment of viewer expectations concerning the payoff of video game-playing (where some kind of clear victory is an always achievable goal) in order to deliver a message about racial inequality.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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