introductory chapter - Digital Aesthetics Research Center

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stallations that represent cybernetic activities.Currently, interfaces are spreading into the urban public space as both small portabledevices and big architectural screens. In his “Monumental Attractions: An Archaeologyof Public Media Displays”, Erkki Huhtamo depicts a thought provoking and oftenforgotten prehistory of public media displays. Even in the nineteenth century signboards,billboards, various projection forms as well as an audiovisual extension of the telephonewere used for attracting people’s attention by displaying news and advertisements in thecity landscape. This prehistory not only helps us frame contemporary urban interfaces butalso challenges the visual historian Jonathan Crary’s hypothesis of modern media spectatorshipas an interiorized and privatized mode of experience. Rather than separating theviewer from the surroundings one needs to understand the experience of urban displaysas rooted in a milieu of noises, competing imagery and other distractive elements.While Erkki Huhtamo goes back to the nineteenth century’s public displays, BodilMarie Stavning Thomsen goes back to the nineteen-sixties’ video art scene in order toinvestigate changes in how we perceive and construct the imagery of interfaces. In “TheHaptic Interface – On signal transmissions and events” she explores the history behindthe outspoken use of different forms of haptic imagery in reality TV, direct news broadcasting,and documentary film formats. She argues that Nam June Paik, Les Levine andother video and performance artists experimenting with feed-back and haptic images of‘white noise’ in the 1960s, were the forerunners of a new media immediacy now associatedwith surveillance cameras, web-cams and digital video.Through: sensation and perception. The appearance and cultural diffusion of interfacesaffects the way the world is perceived and sensed. Based on human input, the computerprocesses and presents an output that often is the starting point for new human input intothe computer, and so on. As such, the human-computer interface is an input/output devicewhere humans exist in a symbiosis with the cybernetic system of the computer. In a timewhere our relationship to the world often is dependent on an interface (where the steeringof a car is run by a computer, where knowledge is accessed through a web browser,where play takes place in a computer game, etc.), our sense perception is affected by theinterface. This book will discuss this affect and how it is articulated in contemporary net4
and software art.In the development of and discourses around interfaces there has always been astrong urge to bypass representation and ‘jack’ directly in to the human brain, consciousness,perceptions and feelings. In her article ”The interface at the skin” Lone KoefoedHansen looks at how two contemporary experimental dresses made by Philips within thefield of wearable computing subscribe to the concept of ‘ideal communication’. In herarticle, she explains how this particular type of communication is linked to the paranormalphenomena of mind reading and telepathy, and argues that sensor-based wearablecomputing is the newest example of a technological development implicitly or explicitlyaiming at manifesting two utopian parameters of communication: immediacy and instantaneity.Though utopian, this manifestation has served as a way to brand Philips “as ahighly innovative and remarkable company”.Even though a direct interface to the brain does not exist, the cybernetic symbiosisof man and computer arguably affects human culture. Søren Bro Pold’s article ”InterfacePerception – The Cybernetic Mentality and Its Critics: Ubermorgen.com” presents amodel for a cultural understanding of the cybernetic feedback loop between man andcomputer. Using the example of the artist duo Ubermorgen.com (Lizvlx and HansBernhard), he furthermore discusses how cybernetic loops influence both our culture andnot least our perception and mentality. In their work Ubermorgen.com explore ways tostage a criticism of the cybernetic system, of both its function and its representation, fromwithin. Using inverted cybernetic strategies they address the cultural role of Google andthey also address how entering a cybernetic loop may be the root of new mental illnesses.Projecting Hans Bernhard as a mentally disordered victim of a human-computer relationship,their work not only stages a disease caused by media but presents a cybernetic interfacementality; complete with its illness, diagnosis, treatment and cure.Down: software and code. The human-computer interface is not just a screen throughwhich we can look into the computer; it also stands as a screen between the computer andus. As such interfaces are hiding some of the code and software processes translatingthem into soothing, well-known or ‘user-friendly’ visuals and metaphors. This commonunderstanding of the interface and its aesthetics as surface, aestheticization and con5
Page 3: others are more clearly directed to
Page 8 and 9: al software practises, ixi software
Page 10 and 11: analyses how interfaces can be used
Page 12 and 13: About the authors (in alphabetical
Page 14: Søren Pold (DK) is Associate Profe

introductory chapter - Digital Aesthetics Research Center

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