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(April 11, 2003)
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In Interface Culture, Johnson maintains that "every age comes to terms with the latest technology by drawing upon imagery of older and more familiar things" (16). A typical example is Doug Engelbart's computer mouse in 1968: "I don't know why they call it a mouse," Engelbart explains. "It started that way and we never changed it" ("Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo").
But in Johnson's following book Emergence, he seems to have accomplished the opposite--he applies the techy term "user-friendly interfaces" to the imagery of "more familiar things"--in this case, "cities." He writes, "but cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone even dreamed of digital computers" (108).
This also seems to be the premise of my thesis. What's the point here of applying the term "interface" to so many aspects of everyday life?
I think it's more about a way of seeing things. For the computer/internet generation, machine interfaces may be qualified as the imagery of "more familiar things," too. So it makes sense for people to draw upon such imagery in everyday life. After all, life is much more complicated and unpredictable than computers.
2.1 Interfacing: "producing relationships"
"Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects"--this is how French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud defines art in his book Relational Aesthetics (107). I think that "producing relationships with the world," in the language of this essay, is "interfacing with the world."
In my video project Ping Pong, Ping and Pong sit facing each other in the studio. Between them, there is either the partition in the studio or the net of the table tennis table. Their relationship is visualized metaphorically through the space in the studio and a ping-pong game.
In a book project called Nostalgia Towards Electricity, I imagine how electricity travels through a wire network all over the city of New Haven. Between a man and the hidden electricity, contact is almost impossible. But when night falls, an electrified interface emerges to light up the cityscape.
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