Petra Milicki - Annotation: The Impossibility of Interface

The Impossibility of Interface

In his essay The Impossibility of Interface, Mathew Fuller examines the relationship between the interface as a part of computing culture and other forms of interface that are a part of society in general. The interface is contextualised through different power relations, and is presented as an indicator of the ramification of digital media in society.

The development of graphic user interface enabled computational power to grow from relatively isolated positions to a new form of relation with the users, allowing computer them to develop a visual and spatial relations with the actions they were performing.

Fuller is examining the similarities and connections of software interfaces and different interfaces that are integrated into culture. He is using Brenda Laurel’s definition of the interface “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.” and puts it in different social contexts.

He investigates the interface and its characteristics through 3 speculative typological modes:

1. Interface as distributed throughout and indivisible from the system of which it is part.

2. Interface as monitoring and control of a reductive, indexical map of separate elements that can be changed from state to state but not altered.

3. Interface as an associational structure which allows a under to manipulate, alter, destroy and multiply processes and objects from which it is independent.

Fuller defines software as a combination of information and matter and explains it as a extension of Katherine Hayles’ definition of virtuality as a "cultural perception that material objects are interpreted by information patterns". He says that if we are to understand informational patterns as always having a materiality then the interpretation of informational patterns by other informational patterns is what is here discussed as software.

Metaphors are used to describe what functional capacity a device/software has by referencing it to properties and behaviours of a pre-existing apparatus. But as software has potentials of a greater capacity and functionality, these kind of metaphorical referential structures will be erased from the mass use of interface because those explanatory systems become nonfunctional.

Interface as distributed throughout and invisible

Fuller introduces I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, a documentary installation composed footage of the insides of a Californian Sate Prison to explain how the interface is not only the mean of representation but also as a modulator of behavior. The documentary is made of short sequences of computer interfaces cut in with images and sound from the prison, and with a prison staff training video, which show violence over the prisoners directed by the prison guards. Interfaces as seen here, code in advance how and when something occurs, but cannot necessarily determine it or its users. By giving the feedback to the same system that feeds it, it helps to build a society of control, under the pretenses of a society of discipline. The relationships between the object and the instructions are always political at the same time they are technical and aesthetical.

Interface as monitoring and control of a reductive, indexical map of separate elements

In his installation Farocki cuts in material from other kinds of control systems alongside the footage of the prison. One of them i a schematic rendering of a building’s floor plan, which allows an operator to switch lights on and off and to open and lock doors by clicking on symbols embedded in the schematic. Other footage is from a some sort of surveillance device and shows a stock recognition system which uses a camera to follow someone in a supermarket and helps to specify and record which products are the most popular.

This aspect of an interface Fuller compares with one used in a bakery in Boston. This interface allows the bakers to control bread production without the need to deal directly with the raw materials and the process of baking. The interface is very easy to use but its relation to the procedure Fuller sees as flawed, not deep nor detailed enough. Also, the ‘sociotechnical’ an economic arrangements are organised in a way that they could function without having workers with actual baking skills employed. Fuller compares this type of interface with the closing and shutting of doors and switching the lights on and off cut-in parts of the Farocki’s film where the guards have the same relationship to the processes they control. Laurel’s description of interface fits very well as a “surface that is thick, bristles with connections, blockages and channels, variable speeds, time frames and routines, manufacturing an alienated interface, double consciousness.” This is, according to Fuller, an essential capacity of life in the ‘mode of information’. It enables freedom but also paralysis, facilitation but alienation. Therefore, whenever an interface promises to make something clear or speaks of allowing something to work, we should be sceptical and critical before we declare it functional identification.

Interface as independent associational structure

Interface of this kind is never permanently ‘independent’ of those elements that it provides associational mechanism for. To make this statement more clear Fuller takes an example of video games by introducing Steven Pool’s book Trigger Happy. The dynamics of an interface is understood as a kinesthetics of information. Video games work on an always consistent set of properties and build their own realism not on being authentic but on internal consistency. The axioms can be codes instead of ‘natural laws’, whether these correspond to those in the real world or are a completely specific of computerised media.

According to Donald Norman, an interface psychologist the focus of an interface should be on ‘Interacting wit the task, not with the computer’. In a video game, the task is precisely to perform the interaction with the computer. which is a reverse definition of a good interface. Today, still plenty of video games work with the concept of task, which creates multiple virtualities.

Fuller compares a Microsoft Word program with the kind of cultures of interface that Pool writers about in Trigger Happy. Word, like the video games that work on simulations, simulates a writing machine, a perfection for a certain sort of textual production. It is the clutter of ‘realistic’ models of writing or other processes, which at the same time hide their acculturation. This makes Word and similar programs close to simulation games.

The three mentioned types of interface can operate the one inside of another at different moments. Software is designed to satisfy user’s needs and requirements, but to some extent user adopts to the software, as well. This is why the usability of a software/interface has to be repeatedly questioned and taken with openness and flexibility.