Interface Critique

Die Redaktion — 2023-06-19

Front Matter

Die Redaktion — 2023-06-19

Front Mater

Die Redaktion — 2023-04-24

Inter|Face Experiments: FaceApp as Everyday AI

Sabine Wirth — 2023-04-24

“FaceApp presents itself as a second-order experimental arrange- ment in which the pleasurable practice of experimenting with one’s own appearance, so invitingly provided by the user interface, is used to further develop the underlying surveillance technology.”

Cultures of Experimentation: Testing Infrastructures in the Web and Beyond

Timo Kaerlein — 2023-04-24

“Testing – and crucially: experimentally intervening by tweaking the environmental settings – becomes a feature of everyday life when people routinely interact with ‘smart’ devices and data-intensive media technologies that capture data about their use for constant interpretation and adaptation.”

Decontextualising ‘Science Fiction Prototyping’

Christoph Ernst — 2023-04-24

“The ‘experiment’ has expanded and mutated into a global usability testing case.”

Introduction – Special Section: Interfaces as Experimental Arrangements

Christoph Ernst — 2023-04-24

Christoph Ernst, Timo Kaerlein and Sabine Wirth: Introduction – Special Section: Interfaces as Experimental Arrangements

Radio in Mind – A Conversation with Friedrich Knilli

Maria Knilli — 2023-04-24

“Inventions are repetitions. Inventions are things lying around somewhere as clutter. Whereas the existence of media is limitless. The needle that pierces, the process of a stitch, is not an invention, but a new existence.”

Sea Soma

Dora Đurkesac — 2023-04-24

“The sea is an environment to exercise the feeling of immersion and encounters. It evokes the embodied knowledge unknown to the screen surfaces.”

Pointing, Mutual Intelligibility, and the Seeing Subject in HCI

Jonathan Zong — 2023-04-24

“Users, who select data objects by looking and pointing, are simultaneously also the objects being seen, selected, and acted upon by computers.”

Through the Autism Glass. Behaviourist Interfaces and the (Inter)Action Order

Daniela Wentz — 2023-04-24

“Without the world becoming a sign, we do not possess it. And without the world becoming a sign, we cannot process it with a computer. In the sign, the world appears to us simultaneously as an object of cognition and of information processing. It is no wonder that the thought of artificial intelligence came up; the world constantly leads to signs. But we also have to attribute to the signs, the computational ones to begin with, the power to create the world from scratch.”

– Frieder Nake

Splendour in the Grass

Hana Yoo — 2023-04-24

“Cows are efficient machines for the transformation of grass into milk [...]. Man may not recognize his own project in the cow, he may forget that the cow is the result of his manipulation of reality according to his own model, and accept the cow as something that is somehow a ‘given’.”

– Vilém Flusser.”

Toward a Map of the Body

Vilém Flusser — 2023-04-24

“The body structure which this paper is going to propose is a space-time continuum and therefore not easily executable in the traditional two-dimensional map form. [...] This is how it wants to be read: as a raw sketch to be translated into more adequate means of communication.”

Duplexes

Aleksandra Domanović — 2023-04-24

The images in this section are the latest addition to Aleksandra Domanović’s exploration of the co-constitutive powers of the gaze that she has been developing for the past two years. Employing the Bezold-effect, an optical illusion that makes a color appear to change depending on its adjacent colors, the works illustrate the fraught distinction between seeing and perceiving, as well as the entangled object/observer relationship in Karen Barad’s account of the ultrasound. In their 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad analyzes the social, material and discursive changes that take place in the technological “seeing” of ultrasonography. There is no unambiguous way, they argue, to differentiate between the object and the agents of observation. Separated from both mother and fetus, the image of the ultrasound becomes the object, and we the viewers the agents of observation.

The series of images and the previous text by Nina Franz are the result of an ongoing exchange between the artist and the author.

Tactility, Sound and Diagrammatics. Ultrasound Imaging as an Interface to the Womb

Nina Franz — 2023-04-24

“Emphasizing the diagrammatic aspects of ultrasound images can help to form a more complete picture of the technological and discursive components that led to the construction of the ultrasound image.”

Post_Network

Kim Frederic Albrecht — 2023-04-24

“A community might exist as the non-networked, the gap between the lines, filled, extracted, and enhanced.”

Which Operativity? On Political Aspects of Operational Images and Sounds

Jan Distelmeyer — 2023-04-24

“‘Operational’ now turns out to be characterized by mutual connections and interdependencies, which is why this politically motivated and complicating concept is so useful for opening up the diverse interface processes that are in use today on a planetary scale.”

Diagrammatic Interface

Johanna Drucker — 2023-04-24

“Try designing what can happen in an interface instead of just dividing screen real estate into compartments.”

Editorial: Diagrammatic Operations

Daniel Irrgang — 2023-04-24

“I believe I may venture to affirm that an intelligible relation, that is, a relation of thought, is created only by the act of representing it. [...] As Diagram, it excites curiosity as to the effect of a transformation of it.”

– Charles S. Peirce (1906)

Editorial: Depth of Field

Florian Hadler — 2021-09-27

Editorial

Aesthetics of High-tech Intimidation. F-35 Lightning II and a Design for Human Reception

Jan-Henrik Walter — 2021-09-27

“They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited, picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away.” – H.G. Wells, The War in The Air (1908)

Ambitopia and affective atmospheres. How world-building and cinema can help unpack ideology inside pervasive systems

Emilia Tapprest — 2021-09-27

“Who owns and controls the data infrastructure ? What is the relationship between the owners and the average participant? What are the interests that drive the use of power gained from data ownership?”

Talk with Machines, Redux

Lucy Suchman — 2021-09-27

“The designer’s project in this sense is to imbue the machine with grounds for behaving in ways that are accountably rational; that is, reasonable or intelligible to others including, in the case of interaction, ways that are responsive to the others’ actions.”

lapses in Thinking By the person i Am

Josephine Pryde — 2021-09-27

image essay

The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism

Matteo Pasquinelli — 2021-09-27

“Today, an Intelligent Machinery Question is needed to develop more collective intelligence about machine intelligence, more public education instead of ‘learning machines’ and their regime of knowledge extractivism […].”

Working for Systems that Do Not Do the Work. Joana Moll’s The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

Jussi Parikka — 2021-09-27

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” – Jeff Bezos

Girls and Their Cats: Zooms – High Resolution – Making a Difference

Elisa Linseisen — 2021-09-27

“High resolution image surfaces are overfull with data – pixels – and zooming in them is a process of inquiry that leads to meaningful and sensual exclusions, distortions or intensifications."

Wellness Capitalism and the Design of the Perfect User

Cherie Lacey — 2021-09-27

“Today, technological humanism replaces the Vitruvian Man with the Perfect User, who sits atop the hierarchy of all users. Mindful, intentional, healthy, disciplined, minimalist, designed: these features have become the ‘measure of all things’ for today’s aspirational user-subject.”

The Flusser-Hypertext: “Electronic Book Prototype 2”

Daniel Irrgang — 2021-09-27

“I am but a pre-text for this work!” – Vilém Flusser (1991)

From “Interfacing Objects” to “Interface Things”? Material-Strategic Notes on the Smart Speaker Design

Konstantin Haensch — 2021-09-27

“The slick, cold, metallic ‘outer opaque shell’ that preserved the degree of the otherness of laptops and smartphones is replaced by forms and materialities evoking a familiar closeness, inevitably conjuring uncanny interfaces.”

Plant Sonification. Its formations and media-ecological implications

Katharina Groß — 2021-09-27

The article "Plant Sonification. Its formations and media-ecological implications" by Katharina Groß was unpublished due to unmarked takeovers from the article "Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music" by Carlo Patrao.

Skin

Vilém Flusser — 2021-09-27

“Here the skin surface will be considered a plane on which I happen to the world and the world happens to me.”

Are there material metaphors? A comment on Marianne van den Boomen’s interface theory

Christoph Ernst — 2021-09-27

“The question of how practices are configured in interfaces is undoubtedly a key question in interface theory. But are we doing ourselves a favour by explaining interface arrangements or
interface processes as material metaphors? ”

Conversations on cinema and media archaeology

Thomas Elsaesser — 2021-09-27

In Memoriam Thomas Elsaesser

How a technical innovation in ancient textile industry pioneered a new way of thinking

Ulrike Beck — 2021-09-27

“As early as the 1st millennium BC, the innovative idea to cut into fabric laid the foundation for new, efficient production concepts, extensively restructured the craft and established a new distinguished discipline: the construction of patterns."

The Gestalt of AI: Beyond the Holism-Atomism Divide

Hannes Bajohr — 2021-09-27

“One could therefore argue that neural networks do not only produce outputs that humans perceive as Gestalten, but that, as statistical models, they internally already operate according to a Gestalt logic.”

Editorial: Navigating the Human

Florian Hadler — 2019-10-18

“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” – Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1935.

Natural User Interfaces and the Imagination of Post-Industrial Warfare: A Brief Look at Bladerunner 2049

Christoph Ernst — 2019-10-08

Blade Runner 2049 gives us a hint how to imagine the future of warfare. According to the lm, post-industrial society will be a ‘post-human’ society.

From Artefacts to Interfaces: Gui Bonsiepe and the Redefinition of Industrial Design

Roland Meyer — 2019-10-08

Thus, not only the Opsroom, but also the dosing mechanism of a sowing machine could now be understood as an interface: it had to be readable and understandable, it had to convey a sense of the possible uses of the machine and provide access to its operative resources, and in doing so, it structured a common sphere of communication and interaction between people and their artefacts.

Taking Part. Two Steps towards Networked Computerization

Jan Distelmeyer — 2019-10-08

That is why the term interface is so fruitful today: It helps addressing a variety of efficacious operations – from the material basis of all sorts of computers and networks up to the educational and epistemological or ideological guidance by user interfaces showing and instructing me what to do.

Mobilizing Post-industrial Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction as Aesthetic Practice

Timo Kaerlein — 2019-10-08

Often against their own intentions, the pioneers of human-compu- ter interaction nd themselves at the forefront of the development of entirely new ways to control and programme the productivity of an increasingly mobile and exible workforce.

Special Section: Interface and the Post-industrial Society

Jan Distelmeyer — 2019-10-08

The following four essays are based on a workshop of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) working group on Interfaces that took place during the annual conference of the GfM at the university of Siegen in September 2018.

American Psycho. Reading an Algorithm in Reverse

Karl Wolfgang Flender — 2019-10-08

Google serves instant soup-ads while Bateman cooks a woman’s head, or suggests anti-wrinkle-products while he skins his victims.

Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature

N. Katherine Hayles — 2019-10-08

The question then is: what kinds of conceptual and artistic frameworks will help us understand the implications of our participation in the hybrid human-technical systems that have become essential to contemporary life in developed countries?

Meet the Machine: The Sideman 5000 Edition

Darsha Hewitt — 2019-10-08

Freeing the Sideman from its heavy wooden con nes is like discovering a baroque electromechanical universe.

Unintended Consequences?

Katriona Beales — 2019-10-08

Without control, unintended consequences could be far worse. [...] So you could make the argument that the fact that it’s under people’s control is a good thing. You may regret who controls it, but at least as it’s controlled by someone, there is some mechanism for change.

Still be here. The Multiplicity of Hatsune Miku

Laurel Halo — 2019-10-08

Name: Hatsune Miku Release: August 31, 2007. Age: 16 years. Height: 158cm / 5ft 2in. Weight: 42kg / 93lb. Suggested Genre: Pop, rock, dance, house, techno, crossover. Suggested Tempo Range: 70–150bpm. Suggested Vocal Range: A3–E5, B2–B3.

Lynn Hershman Leeson's Cyborg Drawings

Julia Heldt — 2019-10-08

The subject in these drawings is not identifying itself via the mirror anymore, but has become one with the mirror, the screen, the interface, resulting in exposure and self-determination at once.

Regimes on Newness: An Essay of Comparative Physiognomy

Masato Fukushima — 2019-10-08

In this observation, we may think that the art regime, in reality, exhibits an intriguing case of being a specific interface consisting of different sub-regimes that demonstrate different criteria for newness.

Starcity, MIR Simulator. And other Artistic Investigations

Armin Linke — 2019-10-08

Starcity, MIR Simulator. And other Artistic Investigations

You, the Users

Kalli Retzepi — 2019-10-08

Who controls an interface? It is certainly not the user, no matter how hard the corporate rhetoric insists on that.

Manifesto for an acentric Design

Anthony Masure — 2019-10-08

Manifesto for an Acentric Design

Notes from the Labyrinth, or: The Infinite Web

Filipa Cordeiro — 2019-10-08

Surfing the web is, thus, one more possible way of existing – a recent possibility that has, to be sure, created new frameworks of meaning in light of which human beings must now interpret and shape their existences.

Oswald's Hubble

Nils Röller — 2019-10-08

It is, of course, well-known that creation and destruction are complementary processes. But there are further similarities between Wiener’s œuvre and the Hubble telescope.

Human-Machine Interface (1984)

Frieder Nake — 2019-10-08

The development of communication itself is now the development of its means; in particular, its technical means.

Navigating (through) Sound.

Christoph Borbach — 2019-10-08

Auditory Interfaces in Maritime Navigation Practice, 1900–1930

Editorial – Beyond UX

Florian Hadler — 2018-06-06

Editorial text of Interface Critique vol. 1

Letter to the editor of Leonardo

Vilém Flusser — 2018-06-06

"[…] the apparatus does what man wants it to do, and men can only want to do what the apparatus can do. In fact: apparatus and man form a single functional unit."

Art and apparatus (a Flusserian theme). Plea for the dramatisation of the interface

Siegfried Zielinski — 2018-06-06

"[…] in the age of Baroque the crystal chandeliers with their myriads of light refractions that hung from the ceilings of palaces functioned as an interface through which the cosmos became imaginable from out of the straits of the private and personal sphere."

Automobile and information: the self, the automobile and technology

Max Bense — 2018-06-06

"[…] it is almost as if a new kind of existence had occured: the consciousness-like machine, the selflike automobile, a perfect human-machine team, an existential partnership between disturbances and fears, between mechanical actions and human reactions, between signals and impulses, noises and decisions."

Applied metaphysics – objects in object-oriented ontology and object-oriented programming

Gabriel Yoran — 2018-06-06

"As computer science works on domain-specific models in order to find solutions to practical problems, employing models of the world, informatics is – like any proper science – applied metaphysics."

Interfaces of immersive media

Julie Woletz — 2018-06-06

"Instead of trying to induce immersion by presenting ever more realistic image spaces, interfaces of immersive media have to address the body by enabling kinaesthetic action."

The conceptual debts and assets of the interface

Kostek Szydlowski — 2018-06-06

"There is a growing need to rethink the notion of interface within a broader conceptual perspective, but it is important to be wary of calling for an interface philosophy based on technological enthusiasm and, more particularly, on a variety of metaphors derived from technical terms or marketing jargon—one that often tries to impose itself on discussions about technically mediated communication."

Gestalt-ideas at the interface between theory and pratice

Alan N. Shapiro — 2018-06-06

"Stories and technologies: two objects of knowledge- inquiry heretofore strictly separated from each other in our knowledge-culture, now brought together as a single object of inquiry, rethought from scratch as a paradoxical hybrid union [...]"

Commons for cartography: How social computing changes the design of interfaces

Christine Schranz — 2018-06-06

"The transformation of the map into an interface medium has not only changed the use and aesthetics of maps, but has also caused a new spatial perception."

There is no interface (without a user). A cybernetic perspective on interaction

Lasse Scherffig — 2018-06-06

"Interaction is seen as a one-way street, conveying a design model to a user, who is acting by that model either because they adapted to it, or because the model replicates their given structure. This is the cognitivist heritage of the HCI discourse responsible for the idea that interfaces can actually be designed."

Rich user experience, UX and the desktopization of war

Olia Lialina — 2018-06-06

"'Don’t call them Icons,' the team leader encouraged her, 'call them User Experience!' And his laughter sunk in with everybody else's.."

Training setting

Branden Hookway — 2018-06-06

"Just as flight instruments are means of reconciling the subjective experience of flight to a reality that might contradict it, the exhibition seeks to bring a heightened awareness of controlled environments and to mediate the tension between structured information and intuitive decisions."

MNT Reform: DIY portable computer

Lukas Hartmann — 2018-06-06

"I know that there are some who would like to better understand and take control of their device — for reasons of security, curiosity, or the desire for personal customization and hackability."

Interface Mythologies – Xanadu unraveled

Christian Ulrik Andersen — 2018-06-06

"We are seduced by the interface into neglecting the work behind it, and the operationalization and instrumentalization of dreams that takes place. The interface appears mythical, absolute and frozen."

Drawing connections – how interfaces matter

Jan Distelmeyer — 2018-06-06

“[...] interfaces carry – in every sense of the word – the global computerization of living conditions.”

Transgressions at the post office counter

Susanne Jany — 2018-06-06

"The counter, thus, was not a space where a simple difference – between clerks and customers, internal and external, operational and public – was established but where a complex and seemingly ambivalent system of mutually dependent acts of openings and closings were enforced to keep business up and running safe."

Interface Critique

Contents

Front Matter

Front Mater

Contents

Inter|Face Experiments: FaceApp as Everyday AI

Cultures of Experimentation: Testing Infrastructures in the Web and Beyond

Decontextualising ‘Science Fiction Prototyping’

Introduction – Special Section: Interfaces as Experimental Arrangements

Radio in Mind – A Conversation with Friedrich Knilli

Sea Soma

Pointing, Mutual Intelligibility, and the Seeing Subject in HCI

Through the Autism Glass. Behaviourist Interfaces and the (Inter)Action Order

Splendour in the Grass

Toward a Map of the Body

Duplexes

Tactility, Sound and Diagrammatics. Ultrasound Imaging as an Interface to the Womb

Post_Network

Which Operativity? On Political Aspects of Operational Images and Sounds

Diagrammatic Interface

Editorial: Diagrammatic Operations

Editorial: Depth of Field

Aesthetics of High-tech Intimidation. F-35 Lightning II and a Design for Human Reception

Ambitopia and affective atmospheres. How world-building and cinema can help unpack ideology inside pervasive systems

Talk with Machines, Redux

lapses in Thinking By the person i Am

The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism

Working for Systems that Do Not Do the Work. Joana Moll’s The Hidden Life of an Amazon User

Girls and Their Cats: Zooms – High Resolution – Making a Difference

Wellness Capitalism and the Design of the Perfect User

The Flusser-Hypertext: “Electronic Book Prototype 2”

From “Interfacing Objects” to “Interface Things”? Material-Strategic Notes on the Smart Speaker Design

Plant Sonification. Its formations and media-ecological implications

Skin

Are there material metaphors? A comment on Marianne van den Boomen’s interface theory

Conversations on cinema and media archaeology

How a technical innovation in ancient textile industry pioneered a new way of thinking

The Gestalt of AI: Beyond the Holism-Atomism Divide

Editorial: Navigating the Human

Natural User Interfaces and the Imagination of Post-Industrial Warfare: A Brief Look at Bladerunner 2049

From Artefacts to Interfaces: Gui Bonsiepe and the Redefinition of Industrial Design

Taking Part. Two Steps towards Networked Computerization

Mobilizing Post-industrial Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction as Aesthetic Practice

Special Section: Interface and the Post-industrial Society

American Psycho. Reading an Algorithm in Reverse

Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature

Meet the Machine: The Sideman 5000 Edition

Unintended Consequences?

Still be here. The Multiplicity of Hatsune Miku

Lynn Hershman Leeson's Cyborg Drawings

Regimes on Newness: An Essay of Comparative Physiognomy

Starcity, MIR Simulator. And other Artistic Investigations

You, the Users

Manifesto for an acentric Design

Notes from the Labyrinth, or: The Infinite Web

Oswald's Hubble

Human-Machine Interface (1984)

Navigating (through) Sound.

Editorial – Beyond UX

Letter to the editor of Leonardo

Art and apparatus (a Flusserian theme). Plea for the dramatisation of the interface

Automobile and information: the self, the automobile and technology

Applied metaphysics – objects in object-oriented ontology and object-oriented programming

Interfaces of immersive media

The conceptual debts and assets of the interface

Gestalt-ideas at the interface between theory and pratice

Commons for cartography: How social computing changes the design of interfaces

There is no interface (without a user). A cybernetic perspective on interaction

Rich user experience, UX and the desktopization of war

Training setting

MNT Reform: DIY portable computer

Interface Mythologies – Xanadu unraveled

Drawing connections – how interfaces matter

Transgressions at the post office counter