Marie Wocher - Annotation: The Impossibility of Interface

Matthew Fuller examines in »The Impossibility of Interface« the relevance of interface within our society on the one hand, and the power relation, what became possible through the internet on the other hand.

Definition by Brenda: "An interface is a contact surface. It reflects the physical properties of the interactors, the functions to be performed, and the balance of power and control."

3 modes of interface:

1 Interface as distributed throughout and indivisible from the system of which it is part (Guard/ Prison)

2 Interface as monitoring and control of a reductive, indexcial map of separate elements that can be changed from state to state, but not altered (Bäcker)

3 Interface as an associational structure which allows a user to manipulate, alter, destroy, and multiply processes and objects from which it is independent (Spiele)

For each mode of interface, Fuller gives an example:

1 »I Thought I was Seeing Convicts« a documentary by Harun Farocki The idea of the film is based on a court case from the late 1990s, where prison guards were made responsible for organizing fights between different groups of prisoners. In the film of Farocki, the guards see the fights as fights between the different rational and regional gangs not as fights against authorities. The guards, sitting savely on a observation tower, watching the fights and bet on the winning groups. They also can break up the fights by shooting the prisoners. The interface between guards and prisoners in »I Thought I was Seeing Convicts«  can not be translated one to one to a computer interface, but what we can see is that also interface "operates by means of networks of mutually reinforcing patterns, ideology, structure, and technologies" (p. 7). We see how the conditions for processes change and how processes are linked to each other, how they become a principle, how they are stripped down, simplified or becoming amorphous from one medial, architectural, racial, juridical, regime to another. The condition, Farocki shows in his film, Gilles Deleuze calls: Disciplinary Society. He means that by ordaining, naming and partitioning, society turn into a society of control - in which behaviour is continually modulated.

2 To give an example for the second mode of interface, Fuller refers to Richard Sennet. Sennet describes an interface for a screen, that was designed for a bakery. This interface allows the bakers of the bakery to control the state of the baking process. For example the screen can show the colour of the bread in the oven and would display when it burns. They don't necessarily have to understand the process anymore. Like the guards in »I Thought I was Seeing Convicts«, who are checking the faces of the prisoners mechanically, the bakers judge the bread, without knowing something about the actual process of beaching a bread. By trying to simplify an interface as far as possible means that it will be incorrect sometimes and remain at a superficial level. So, on the one hand it is giving us a lot of freedom because we have the possibility to be part of a process, we do not understand, on the other hand you can't rely on the data.

3 By explaining what Fuller meant by the third mode of interface, he starts at Steven Pool's book »Trigger Happy«, that explains the dynamics of the interface. The main question Pool is asking in his book is how interaction can improve the internal data structure of a game? It has to govern how the conduct of objects and vecicles is in relation to the user input. The most important is, that the properties of the characters feels natural. But these realism doesn't have something to do with authenticity, but with consequence. Donald Norman says that in a computer game the player should interact with the task, not with the computer. The interface should bring together the medial, computational, erotic, politica land material arrangements. These are elements that only apparently are technical. Microsoft Word simulates a Typewriter. It is designed by Interface designers whose idea of writing is formed by the limits of the workspace not by writing itself.

interface suggests always a condition from which believe it has to be like this, but actually this condition is limited by technical conditions as well as social conditions and the believe that the given way how a computual interface works is the only way possible.