Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Notes to Chapter 3 219
to create their own iPod-style images. The article, titled “I See Ipod People: The
Photoshop Silhouette,” explains that “if you’re crazy about those ipod ads and want
to make one yourself, it’s actually pretty easy.” See http://www.photoshopsupport
.com/tutorials/jennifer/ipod.html.
31. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 77.
32. Springer, “Playing It Cool in the Matrix,” 91; Alexander, “Cool like Me,” 49.
33. Stross, “After 20 Years, Finally Capitalizing on Cool.” See also Liu, The Laws
of Cool, on the intimate association of “cool” with digital networked technologies:
“Cool is (and is not) an ethos, style, feeling and politics of information” (179).
34. I wish to thank the artist for permission to reprint “iPod Ghraib,” which he
has described as “Internet based.” See Trek Thunder Kelly’s Web site at http://
www.trekkelly.com/garage/ipod-ghraib/ for this and other examples of digitally created
images from his “Super-Pop” series. His “rebrands,” “crossbrands,” “real art,”
and “celebrity rebrands” superimpose corporate iconography from brands such as
Prada and Calvin Klein on photographic and painted images of Sitting Bull and
Frida Kahlo, blending the languages of modern advertising and art. The “iPod
Ghraib” images are one of a series of “rebrands” along with “Target© Iraq,” “Microsoft
Soup,” and “Xerox Windex.” The artist’s Web site explains: “Re-branding substitutes
familiar brands in an effort to expose their embedded meanings by bringing
them out of context.”
35. Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others.”
36. See Shaviro, Connected, and Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, for examples
of this type of critique.
37. Gilroy, Against Race, 23.
38. Ansen, “Murder on the Spielberg Express.”
39. Elmer, Profiling Machines, 73 (italics mine).
40. See Matrix, Cyberpop, for an incisive reading on the ways in which Gattaca
comments on racial identity in relation to biometrics, passing, and genetic engineering.
41. Mark Williams, “Closely Belated?”
42. Oliver, Witnessing, 151.
43. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 93.
44. Gilroy, Against Race, 19.
45. Scheper-Hughes, “The Global Traffic in Human Organs,” 193. Fears that
traffic in human organs will reflect geopolitical power imbalances and perpetuate
racism have been evident in literature such as the work of the Ghanaian novelist
and theorist Ama Ata Aidoo since the 1970s. In Our Sister Killjoy, Aidoo confronts
techno-utopians by writing: “Anyway, the Christian Doctor has himself said that in
his glorious country, niggerhearts are so easy to come by....Yet she had to confess
she still had not managed to come round to seeing Kunle’s point: that cleaning the
Baas’s chest of its rotten heart and plugging in a brand-new, palpitatingly warm
kaffirheart, is the surest way to usher in the Kaffirmillennium” (100–101).
46. See Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents.
47. Castells, End of Millennium, 68.
48. Ibid.
49. Wood, “The Metaphysical Fabric That Binds Us,” 11.
50. Foster, “The Transparency of the Interface,” 70.