User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Annotation: Impossibility of Interface

The Impossibility of Interface

Matthew Fuller

• Tech interfaces tied always to social context
• materiality and informationality are always interwoven: no 'pure' material without information; no data without supporting hardware.
• Interfaces use metaphors (Eg, the 'desktop') which become more & more inadequate to describe what a tool actually does. They persist largely due to the mass market need for familiarity to maintain or win customer loyalty.
• these metaphors are an "explanatory or structuring device".

• Three ways of understanding interfaces:

part of a broader system & indivisible from it

• Farouki's "I thought i was seeing convicts" - "crawling with interfaces". But where exactly is the interface? Points out that it could be "the shape of the camera's lense"... but equally it could be "in the minds of the prisoners... in the regulations... in the relations between prisoners" etc.

• Deleuze: shift from disciplinary society (ordering & naming etc as per Foucault) to a control society - where subjects modulate their own behaviour according to 'free will'. Farouki film shows guards switching between the two modes to maximise the level of possible brutality.

(Not convinced here... I've seen plenty of cops happy to beat ppl up with no excuse and no interface at all.)

• Interfaces are not "solely or primarily to do with representation... Interfaces code in advance how and when something occurs." "The vectors that connect one thing to another, an instruction to an object, a node to another, a layer to a filter, are always poltical at the same time as they are technical and aesthetic."

control over a number of interactive, but unalterable, elements

• Example of bread-making machines described by Richard Sennet in "The Corrosion of Character: the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism". Interface often doesn't correspond exactly to the bread being made; hence many loaves are burnt & wasted.
• Workers in this alienated condition are "performing a surface".

an "associational structure" manipulable by the user

• This kind of interface most "explicitly correspond[s] to the logical processes of a computer" and is never independent of the elements it represents. "It may... be rewritten."
• Steven Poole's book 'Trigger Happy', on games and the "kinaesthetics of information".
• The metaphors of movement and character simulation in games need not be 'realistic', but must have only a "consistent set of properties. Thus...their 'realism' is not predicated on being 'authentic' but on internal consistency."
• "the interplay of certain medial, computational, erotic, political and material arrangements are inherently part of a 'system' that is ostensibly only technical."
• MS word is like a simulation game which imitates the real, rather than like a "true videogame [which] deliberately simplifies any given situation... down to its essential, kinetic parts".

• these three kinds of interface are often found one inside another in any given example.
• Interfaces need to become 'open' to the inevitable bastardisation they will undergo at the hands of their users; not lock them tyranically into a pre-given mode of use against which users are "tested". Reference to the Open Work. "It is by what it combines with, where it goes, what it makes happen, that makes interface... so profoundly social".