Session 5 – Interface : Experiment : Access

What is the interface in the age of the digital? Technology itself has long been an important locus of experimentation for media artists. Refiguring and rearticulating the technological experience is often the by-product, if not the intention, of much electronic media art. It is an approach that in its most compelling forms subtly rearticulates questions about the politics of technology away from macro-social questions of politics and policy towards consideration of the design and organization of technological artefacts themselves. Nowhere is this question more relevant then in the problem of interface design and the taken-for-granted nature of most human-machine interaction. This panel aims to explore the myriad ways electronic media artists, curators and scholars seek to question new kinds of interfaces: networked screens, architectures and urban places; human-machine interactions; new kinds of multiplicity and objects.



Abstract:

Anne Balsamo Abstract: “Public Interactives and Cultural Literacies.”

This talk will present images of the exhibits that were part of the XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading museum exhibition. I will discuss the cultural implications of these interactives in terms of the notion of literacies of the interface.

Konrad Becker Abstract: “Critical Strategies in Information Societies”

The military-industrial-media-entertainment network has been forming the realities of digital social interaction. Beyond screen design it continues to shape the future of machine interaction towards new adaptive interfaces for augmenting reality that automate decision making. While for now, the so called "Web 2.0 interfaces" enables the commodification of subjectivity, Google has become the main interface to net. In an era of robotic data spiders, global assemblages of continued linkages of databanks and sensors establish ambient intelligence in embedded societies of control. Investigating key questions of information societies since the early 1990s the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 has built multidisciplinary social interfaces for a critical cultural practice and theory. Its main projects Public Netbase (1994-2006) and World-Information.Org/ World-Information Institute created networks for cultural intelligence on deep reaching transformations in the info sphere. Beyond boutique activism and interventionist tactics what are critical strategies at the interface of technologies and the social? http://www.t0.or.at http://world-information.org/wii

Simone Jones Abstract: “Augmentation and the Interactive Interface” This paper discusses the role of authorship as it applies to site-based interactive media works. Elements of co-creation, mobility and remote access are examined in the artworks of Camille Utterback, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Julian Oliver.

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