interface free

Lori Emerson's Reading Writing Interfaces is a media archeology of the interface. A critique of the "invisible" interface, the "magic" of iOS that "just works," Emerson analyzes how interfaces promote or occlude human agency in computational environments. Anti-telelogical in order to interrupt the "triumphalist" narratives of progress that can characterize much writing about media, Reading Writing Interfaces stages its four chapters and postscript ("The Googlization of Literature") as "ruptures" to emphasize failure as a key element of media development.

Recent e-literature by Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson represents a broad movement in e-literature to draw attention to the move toward the so-called “interface free” – or, the interface that seeks to disappear altogether by becoming as “natural” as possible. It is against this troubling attempt to mask the workings of the interface and how it delimits creative production that Judd Morrissey creates “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text. Likewise working against the clean and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson’s hybrid poem-videogame self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written interface while deliberately undoing videogame conventions through nonsensical mechanisms that ensure players never advance past level 121/2. As such, both Morrissey and Nelson intentionally incorporate interfaces that thwart readers’ access to the text so that they are forced to see how such interfaces are not natural so much as they define what and how we read and write.

(Source: Author's abstract).

This presentation was part of a special session at the 2012 MLA organized by Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature's Past & Present. Other panelists included Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink, and Mark Sample.