Staging the Techno-logical Sublime: A Computational Aesthetics of the Roller Coaster

Beyond simple gravity-driven machines, contemporary roller coasters are better understood as precisely choreographed computational systems. This is exemplified in Universal Islands of Adventure’s Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure (HMA), one of the most complex and expensive roller coasters ever built. Through a technical analysis of the computational systems used in HMA’s operation, I demonstrate how the aesthetic experience of the ride is inseparable from the logico-quantitative operations of computation. As a form of mechanically-augmented computation, the roller coaster transduces between the discrete, symbolic realm of the digital and continuous, nonsymbolic realm of the analog, thus allowing computational operations to be felt as embodied intensities. These intensities produce an aesthetic experience of disorientation. Throughout the essay, I demonstrate that this sense of disorientation is only made possible through technical operations of orientation. Furthermore, I claim that the experience of disorientation ultimately serves to reorient riders within their contemporary technological milieu, by converting the alienating effects of technological acceleration into an embodied sensation of acceleration as (fearful) pleasure. This contradictory emotional and affective register bears resemblance to 18th century romantic conceptions of the sublime. In this paper, I revisit and critique Immanuel Kant’s notions of the dynamical and mathematical sublime in light of the computational roller coaster. Departing the moralistic anthropocentrism of the Kantian sublime, I propose a post-human conception of the techno-logical sublime suggestive of a more synergistic future human-machine relation.