These projects ultimately portray a bleak picture of a metainterface industrial control of literacy and of how literature, art and aesthetics is commodified and instrumentalized. However, they also point to how literature potentially becomes sites of critical reflection of the way reading-writing is encased in a big data drama. In this way, they point towards redesigning and rewriting the metainterface character.
"Grosser’s works show how Facebook’s metrification parasites on affective social dimensions, such as relations between an I and a You (You like...), emotive reactions (Go Rando) and social activity and status (Facebook Demetricator)."
Metainterface is about interface aesthetics and culture, and as an analytical strategy, it focuses on the tendency in art that reflects the contemporary interface; that is, on readings of artworks. In this sense, it presents contemporary art works, but it also reflects on the current challenges of contemporary interface culture in a situation where the computer’s interface seemingly both becomes omnipresent and invisible; where it at once is embedded in everyday objects and characterised by hidden exchanges of information between objects; or, what it conceptualizes as a metainterface. By bringing the tendency in artworks forward, the book aims to demonstrate how certain critical interfaces have an ability to reflect the deeper fissures within new technologies and the production of the work of art itself; an ability to show us an interface, after the interface has seemingly disappeared into ‘smart’ futures and new promises of anticipation, participation, and emancipation.