interface criticism

We are living in an interface culture: wherever we are, we find touch screens, microphones, sensors, cameras; and we are constantly reminded of interfaces through their sounds. Whether mobile, networked or embedded in architecture or artefacts, the number of interfaces constantly increases to meet the desires of technologies, users and markets.

Usually, an interface is understood as a technological artefact optimized for seamless interaction and functionality. However, the interface also draws upon cultural and artistic traditions, and plays an important role in our culture as art, entertainment, communication, work and businesses. It is a cultural form with which we understand, act, sense and create our world. In other words, it does not only mediate between man and computer, but also between culture and technological materiality (data, algorithms, and networks). With this, the mediation affects the way cultural activities are perceived and performed.

But, have we now reached the end of cultural computing? In Apple’s 1984 advertisement video for the first Macintosh computer, an interface for conformity, absorbing the worker in a totalitarian state, was replaced by an interface for individual expression and do-it-yourself culture. Three decades later, the table is turning. According to a leaked NSA presentation it is now Apple who is Big Brother, and enthusiastic iPhone customers who are the zombies living in a surveillance state (Rosenbach et al 2013). The imagined free world of cultural computing has turned into a business of “controlled consumption” (Striphas 2010; Andersen and Pold 2014). To prevent piracy, software and hardware providers such as Apple, Amazon and Google have introduced a new cultural business model that involves a licensing system for cultural software and content. In short, cultural production becomes consumption – a matter of uploading content into the cloud, and selecting pre-configured filters. Although configurations are intrinsic to an interface culture, this has been taken to another level, and has turned into a ‘war on general purpose computing,’ as described by Cory Doctorow: the locking down of software into hardware turns the computer into an IT “appliance” (2011). Simultaneously, cultural consumption becomes production of data of what is read, looked at, listened to, etc., valuable in marketing as well as national defence. In this way, interface culture has been subsumed under a strictly monopolizing business model. The computer, which was originally developed as a military technology but redefined as emancipatory and revolutionary by Apple and others, is now back again where it began: as a military intelligence technology.

The above indicates that our interface culture has become ‘post-digital’: the digital expression holds less fascination, and digital culture is no longer the domain of DIY culture per se (see e.g., Cascone 2010, Cramer 2014, Cox 2014). Following this, and building on prior work on interface criticism (e.g., Andersen & Pold 2011), we propose six characteristics of the interface that we believe are important to address to critically reflect contemporary interface culture.

(Source: Author's introduction to the article)

This talk will link a discussion of the interface to the representation of fictional entrances in narratives. In the effort to keep it within the time limit, it is build around three images of the entrance: the moment in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad when the fantastical, titular train first appears in the novel, Alexander Galloway’s treatment of our interface on the fictional world of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait, and the opening few “rooms” of the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, a classical electronic narrative that pioneered the text-based interface on the textual world that defined interactive fiction.

The goal of this talk will be to investigate the concept of the interface as a term that can travel between the design of the artifact (digital, written, or visual text) and the world represented. Galloway provides an account of the politics of the interface, and I will explore how that account explains these three very different texts.

Leaps and take-offs

The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina.From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency. It is just one small step from earth-matter to space-light – a leap or a take-off able to free us for a moment from gravity.

Paul Virilio, Open Sky

As I read Virilio’s introduction to Open Sky (1997 [1995]), I decide to open the Google Earth app on my iPad. By sliding my forefinger over its glassy surface, I notice that I am coming closer and closer to what corresponds to my current geographical position, but still, at the same time I am able to travel around the world in just a few taps and swipes on the screen. As reminiscent as it may be of David Bowie’s “Planet Earth is blue/and there’s nothing I can do”, this apparently insignificant manipulation also reminds me of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s version of “Space Oddity”, recorded inside the International Space Station and enabling more than 23 million people to witness Earth’s blueness through Hadfield’s camera lenses.

What all of these artefacts – videos, music, lyrics, quotations – have in common is the fact that they are affected by a series of interface mediations, all of which, of course, can be seen and touched through the Internet. However, one questions the real significance of this touch and why do we find the idea of holding the whole world in our hands so phenomenal. If what we need now to free us from gravity is just a leap or a take-off, which might be done by a simple touch of the hand or a snap of the fingers, what becomes of the eye?

The intensification of research around digital media devices that require tactile/haptic functions,1 such as touch and gesture, along with efforts to increase tangibility in the Human-Machine Interface (Gallace & Spence, 2014: 229), is giving way to a whole new rhetoric of bodies and surfaces (as well as interfaces). Not only touch and gesture are anything but superficial, but also these “new” processes of writing and reading tend to amplify the primacy of vision over other sensory modalities. This is a paradoxical situation that Wendy Hui Kyong Chun defines as a “compensatory gesture” by “the current prominence of transparency in product design and political and scholarly discourse”:

As our machines increasingly read and write without us, as our machines become more and more unreadable, so that seeing no longer guarantees knowing (if it ever did), we the so-called users are offered more to see, more to read. The computer – that most nonvisual and nontransparent device – has paradoxically fostered ‘visual culture’ and ‘transparency’. (2005: 2)

In addition, as ubiquitous computing turns into a naturalized process in our lives, the opacity/transparency paradox becomes even stronger, which is a natural consequence of its attachment to ubi-comp.

Extending an avant-garde countercultural tradition that started questioning visual culture as early as the beginning of the last century, there is also evidence of an increasing number of digital literary works channelling its countercultural and metamedial poetics towards the aforementioned phenomena. These “technotexts” (to borrow Katherine Hayles’ term) may or may not include multi-touch devices such as tablets and smartphones. Nevertheless, the one who do, often self-reflectively question the specificities of these digital devices and media, as well as the apparatuses enclosing them.2 I argue that such “machimanipulations”, manipulations of the device by both humans and machines, tend to defy the general assumption of surfaces as something superficial, recovering Deleuze’s idea of surfaces as double-fold and profound (1990: 4-11). If, in fact, we are now living in a “Glass Age” governed by a culture of transparency, to what extent are these “transparent” touching glass surfaces becoming an opaque looking glass?

Simultaneously with the mainstreaming of digital text in the form of e-books and the parallel normalizing of participatory hypertext in the form of social media, we see a growing interest in alternative new forms of printing and book production, including artistic explorations of the book and its cultural historical forms. As part of what has been labeled the post-digital, artists and authors explore dominant and alternative models of digitization in combination with a renewed understanding of the materiality of the book (see e.g. Ludovico 2012, Cramer 2013, Lorusso 2013-, Andersen and Pold 2014). This post-digital literary interest can be understood as an interest in how the materiality of the book is transformed and reinvigorated because of the digital revolution, but also as a critical and media archaeological reflection of the current state of the digital revolution. In this way, the post-digital explores and questions what literary media are becoming after the hype of the digital revolution has passed. In short, it resets the hype before exploring the literary media again and allows us to begin exploring the qualities of the literary across and between media.

As part of such an exploration, this paper will based on both experimental and analytical approaches explore literary platforms such as Ink After Print (Fritsch, Pold et al. 2014) and experimental writing processes such as Datafied Research/Peer-reviewed Newspaper (Jamie Allen, Christian Ulrik Andersen et al. 2014) in order to develop a theoretical concept of literary interaction as a way to describe and conceptualize reading-writing related interaction and interfaces beyond immediate functionality and usability. The concept of literary interaction will be developed from reflections on three interconnected levels:

The media: How combinations of books, screens and online media relate to a post-digital media reflexivity.
The interface: How critical and physical, affective interfaces promote a social and performative reading.
The text: How the combinatory (“uncreative”) writing and the users’ active attempts at creating a syntagmatic reading from metaphoric, metonymic and phatic sign structures result in either meaningful moments where all three levels resonate with the text, or realisations of sheer seriality and randomly generated meaningless-ness, where the output is just the system.

We will aim to relate literary experiences from electronic literature and post-digital publishing to cross-disciplinary concerns around interfaces and interaction. In this way and in relation to the discussion of the changing conditions of digital text we aim to relate to the conference's theme of the end(s) of electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)