Speed Racer’s Aesthetic Theory of the Digital

This article contends that Speed Racer (2008) embodies and expresses an aesthetic theory of the digital. Both formally and narratively, the film suggests aesthetics to be a privileged mode for negotiating and literally making “sense” of encounters between the human sensorium and the subperceptual digital operations that organize and sustain so much of contemporary social life. Specifically, in displaying a sensational, layered visual style that discloses the images’ basis in computer code, and in meta-textually linking this style to a narrative focus on the experience of art, the film compels us to relate to the digital aesthetically and, in the process, to more mindfully inhabit our contemporary media ecology.