Alexander R. Galloway - The Interface Effect

• Pad notes about interface (not from me but from XPUB 3)
• Bootleg Library link

Description (from bootleg)

Description :

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable.

Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer.

Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface.

Intro

"The goal of the book is two fold, to define the interface , but also to interpret it. Inter faces are not simply objects or boundary points . They are autonomous zones of activity. I n terface s are not things, but rather processes that e ffect a result of whatever kind. For this reason I will be speaking not so much about particular inter face obj ects (screens, keyboards) , but interface effects. And in speaking about them I will not be satisfied just to say an inter face is de fined in such and such a way, but to show how it exists that way for specific social and historical reasons. I nter faces themselves are effects, in that they bring about transfor mations in material state s . But at the same time interfaces are themselves the e ffects of other things, and thus tell the story of the larger forces that engender them."

Notes

Introduction: The Computer as a Mode of Mediation

Talking about Lev Manovitch "The Language of New Media"

"The five principles - numeric representation , modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding - are not to be understood as universal laws of new media. Rather, they describe some of the aesthetic p roperties of data, and the basic ways in which information is created, stored, and rende red intelligible ." p.3

About other definitions of new media than Manovith's one

[...] "we should remember that more than one response exists to such a questio n. • It is clear where M anovich puts his favor: new media are essentially software applications. But othe rs have answered the same question in very different ways. The re are those who say that hardware is as important if not more so than software ( Friedrich Kittler or Wendy H ui Kyong Chun) , or those who focus on the new forms of social interaction that media do or do not facilitate (Geert Lovink or Yochai Be nkler) , or even tho se who focus on networks of information rather than sim ply personal com puters (Tiziana Terranova or Eugene Thacker)." p.3.-4

The true first new media

"As the o pening page s divulge, the dirty little secret of The Language of New Media, and the detail that reveals Manovich's first passion, is this : cinema was the first new media. New media did not begin in the 19 8 os in S ilico n Valley; it began a hundred years p rior at Etienne-Jules M arey' s S tation Physiolo gique in the outskirts of Paris. The reason fo r this is that cinema is the first m edium to bring together techniques like compositing, recombination, digital sampling (the discrete capture of photographic im ages at a fixed rate through time) , and machine automation , techniques that, o f course , are present in other media, but never as effectively as the singular synthesis offered by the cinema." p.4

The interface paradox

The less they do, the more they achieve and the more they become invisible & unconsidered

"Frames, windows , doors, and other thresholds are those transp arent devices that achieve more the less they do : for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible , one notch more inoperable." p.25

"As technology, the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing re presented beyond) , the more it succeeds in its functional mandate ; yet this very achievement undercuts the ultimate goal : the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. To succeed, then, is at best selfdeception and at wo rst self-annihilation .p.25

=== " Systems work because they don't wo rk. Nonfunctionality re mains essential for functionality." - Michel Serres ===

" Systems work because they don't wo rk. Nonfunctionality re mains essential for functionality. This can be formalized : pretend there are two stations exchanging messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds - if it is perfect, optimal, immediate - then the relation erases itself. But if the relation remains there , if it exists, it' s because the exchange has failed. It is nothing but mediatio n . The relation is a non-relatio n . " ' p.26

Definitions of the Interface

The interface as a "significant surface"

"New media foreground the interface like never before . S creens of all shapes and sizes tend to come to mind: compute r screens, ATM kio sks, phone keypads , and so o n . This is what Vilem Flusser called sim ply a "significant surface, " meaning a twodimensional plane with meaning em bedded in it or delivered through it. There is even a particular vernacular adopted to describe or evaluate such significant surface s . We say " they are user-friendly," or "they are not user-friendly." "They are intuitive " or "they are not intuitive . " p.43

The interface as a gateway

"Still, it is also quite common t o understand interfaces less as a surface but as a doorway or window. This is the language of thre sholds and transitions already evoked at the start of the chapter. Following this position , an interface is not something that appears before you but rather is a gateway that opens up and allows passage to some place beyond." p.43

The interface as "the place where information moves from one entity to another"

"The notion of the interface becomes very important fo r example in the science of cybernetic s, for it is the place where flesh meets metal o r, in the case of systems theory, the inte rface is the place where information moves fro m one e ntity to another, from o ne node to another within the system ." p.44

The interface as the media itself

"Often interfaces are assumed t o be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that " interface " and "media" are two names for the same thing ? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other p ieces of m edia . This is a claim most clearly elabo rated on the opening pages of Marshall Mc Luhan's Understanding Media. Mc Luhan liked to articulate this claim in term s of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format." p.44

The interface as "agitation or generative friction between different formats"

"This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system . The interface is an "agitation " or generative friction between different form ats . I n computer science , this happens very literally; an "interface" is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. S ince any given format finds its ide ntity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collap se into one and the same thing." p.44

The interface as "an area" that "separates and mixes the two worlds that meet together there"

"The French author François Dagognet describes it thus : "The interface . . . consists essentially of an area of choice. It both separates and mixes the two worlds that meet together there , that run into it. It becomes a fe rtile nexus ."7 Dagognet presents the expected themes of thresholds, doorways, and windows. But he complicates the story a little bit in admitting that there are com lex things that take place inside that threshold; the interface is not simple and transparent but a " fertile nexus." p.45

"The interface is this state o f "being on the boundary. " It is that moment where one significant material is understood as distinct from another significant material. In other words, an interface is not a thing, an interface is always an effect. It is always a process or a translation." p.46

Norman Rockwell, "Triple Self-Portrait" vs Richard A . Williams , " Untitled (Alfred E . Neuman SelfPortrait)"

IMG vs IMG

Figure 1.1. Norman Rockwell, «Triple Self-Portrait,» The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1 9 6 0 . © 1 9 6 0 The Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

About Norman Rockwell, "Triple Self-Portrait"

"Unusual side effects emerge from such a co mplicated circulation of images and meta-images. F irst, the artist paints in front of an off-white sweep wall, not unlike the antiseptic, white nowhere land that would later become a staple of science fiction films like THX 1138 or The Matrix. Inside this off-white nowhere land, there appears to be no visible outside - no landscape at all - to locate or orient the artist' s coherent circulation of image p roduction . But seco nd, and more important, is the dramatic difference in re presentational and indeed moral and spiritual vitality between the im age in the mirror and the picture on the canvas. The image in the mirror is p resented as a technical or machinic im age , while the p icture on the canvas is a subjective, expressive image . In the mirror, the artist is bedraggled, dazzled behind two opaque eyeglass lenses, performing the rote tasks of his vocation (and evidently not entirely thrilled about it) ."

"The fact that this is a self-conscious self-po rtrait also assists in making that fourth level invisible because all the viewer's energies that might have been reserved for tackling those difficult "meta" questions about reflections and layers and reflexive circulation of meaning are exercised to exhaustion before they have the opportunity to interrogate the frame of the illustration itself."

"self-conscious self-portrait also assists in making that fourth level invisible because all the viewer's energies that might have been reserved for tackling those difficult "meta" questions about reflections and layers and reflexive circulation of meaning are exercised to exhaustion before they have the opportunity to interrogate the frame of the illustration itself."

About Richard A . Williams, " Untitled (Alfred E . Neuman SelfPortrait)

"Being an artist of such great talent, he not only paints a portrait of him self but does so from the viewer's sub jective vantage point. In this sense, the interface is a kind of semiotic short circuit."

"Considering them side by side, Rockwell and Mad p resent two ways of thinking about the same problem . In the first is an interface that addresses itself to the theme of the interface ; Rockwell ' s is an image that addresse s image-making i n general . But it answers the problem of the interface through the neurosis of repression. In o rienting itself toward interfaces, it suggests simultaneously that interfaces don't exist."

"On the other hand, the second image solves the proble m of the interface through the psycho sis of schizo phrenia. I t returns forever to the original trauma of the interface itself. Reveling in the disorientation o f shattered coherence, the second image makes no attempt to hide the interface ."

"On the one hand Rockwell 's image is inte rnally consistent. It is an interface that works. The interface has a logic that may be known and articulated by the interface itself. It works; it works well. Mad's image, on the other hand, is an image that doesn't wo rk. It is an interface that is unstable . It is, as M aurice Blanchet or Jean-Luc Nancy might say, desoeuvre - nonworking, unproductive , inoperative , unworkable ."