Interface

by Branden Hookway

Overview

A cultural theory of the interface as a relation that is both ubiquitous and elusive, drawing on disciplines from cultural theory to architecture.

In this book, Branden Hookway considers the interface not as technology but as a form of relationship with technology. The interface, Hookway proposes, is at once ubiquitous and hidden from view. It is both the bottleneck through which our relationship to technology must pass and a productive encounter embedded within the use of technology. It is a site of contestation—between human and machine, between the material and the social, between the political and the technological—that both defines and elides differences.

A virtuoso in multiple disciplines, Hookway offers a theory of the interface that draws on cultural theory, political theory, philosophy, art, architecture, new media, and the history of science and technology. He argues that the theoretical mechanism of the interface offers a powerful approach to questions of the human relationship to technology. Hookway finds the origin of the term interface in nineteenth-century fluid dynamics and traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics. He discusses issues of subject formation, agency, power, and control, within contexts that include technology, politics, and the social role of games. He considers the technological augmentation of humans and the human-machine system, discussing notions of embodied intelligence.

Hookway views the figure of the subject as both receiver and active producer in processes of subjectification. The interface, he argues, stands in a relation both alien and intimate, vertiginous and orienting to those who cross its threshold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262322638
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/04/2014
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	465,119
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Branden Hookway teaches in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University. He is author of Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgement xi

1 The Subject of the Interface

The interface as form of relation 1

Between faces and facing between 7

The interface and the surface 12

Toward a theory of the interface 15

Janus and Jupiter 19

Control and power 24

The interface and the apparatus 26

The interface and the game 32

The interface and the machine 3

Separation and augmentation 46

Mimicry in the game and the interface 53

2 The Forming of the interface 59

The interface as the which defines the fluid 59

Turbulence and control 67

The exacting of turbulence 75

The demon on the threshold 81

Theories of the vortex 89

Information and entropy 94

Governance and reciprocity 98

The interface and teleology 104

The turbine as superimposition of fluid and machine 110

The vertiginous moment of interface 114

3 The Augmentation of the Interface 121

A genius of augmentation 121

The tacit knowing of the interface 123

Singularity 129

Symbiosis 135

System 140

Positioning 148

Notes 157

Index 173

What People are Saying About This

Malcolm McCullough

'A theory of the interface is a theory of culture.' When interaction design becomes the liberal art of the age, the origins of interface become worth sounding. Deep below the surface, in a book whose very topic is surface, Branden Hookway has found something very different from the usual Silicon Valley origin myths, more ancient than Maxwell's daemon, more numinous than a luminous screen, and more ubiquitous lately than anything you might think of as technological apparatus. If, like Agamben, you seek immunity to the tech lords' sovereignty, you might try a jump into this fresh metaphysical read.

Mark Wigley

This is a uniquely subtle and compelling study of the human relation to technology. It quietly and insightfully threads itself through multiple disciplines to offer a truly transformative analysis of the ubiquitous yet elusive interface without which neither human nor technology can be thought.

Endorsement

Against its startling ubiquity in our contemporary experience of space, architecture has lacked a robust theoretical framework to engage the interface. No longer. From epistemological origins in the fluid science of the nineteenth century, through the military-industrial forges of the twentieth, to its proliferation in our own, uncertain time, Branden Hookway's bravura Interface provides an essential guide to this most ineffable of landscapes.

—Nicholas de Monchaux, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

From the Publisher

This is a uniquely subtle and compelling study of the human relation to technology. It quietly and insightfully threads itself through multiple disciplines to offer a truly transformative analysis of the ubiquitous yet elusive interface without which neither human nor technology can be thought.

—Mark Wigley, Columbia University, author of White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture

'A theory of the interface is a theory of culture.' When interaction design becomes the liberal art of the age, the origins of interface become worth sounding. Deep below the surface, in a book whose very topic is surface, Branden Hookway has found something very different from the usual Silicon Valley origin myths, more ancient than Maxwell's daemon, more numinous than a luminous screen, and more ubiquitous lately than anything you might think of as technological apparatus. If, like Agamben, you seek immunity to the tech lords' sovereignty, you might try a jump into this fresh metaphysical read.

—Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture, Taubman College, University of Michigan, and author of Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information

Against its startling ubiquity in our contemporary experience of space, architecture has lacked a robust theoretical framework to engage the interface. No longer. From epistemological origins in the fluid science of the nineteenth century, through the military-industrial forges of the twentieth, to its proliferation in our own, uncertain time, Branden Hookway's bravura Interface provides an essential guide to this most ineffable of landscapes.

—Nicholas de Monchaux, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux

Against its startling ubiquity in our contemporary experience of space, architecture has lacked a robust theoretical framework to engage the interface. No longer. From epistemological origins in the fluid science of the nineteenth century, through the military-industrial forges of the twentieth, to its proliferation in our own, uncertain time, Branden Hookway's bravura Interface provides an essential guide to this most ineffable of landscapes.