The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 222 页

1. Interfaces at Hand: From Object to Sign to Object

About our hands, those prehensile interfaces with which we embody cognition and manipulation, Michel Serres writes that they are never finished. Unlike animal limbs and their ecological niches, the hand is “ despecialized ” and adapted not to one specific task like the crab ’ s claw but open to the limit of the world. The world is the place where hands are usable. ⁹ Evolutionary biologists may differ, but the hands of Serres ’ s parable are, unlike, say, the fur of a cheetah, which camouflages her only in the savanna niche, adaptable to any number of unforeseen environmental and technical challenges. As adaptations, hands are general-purpose interfaces; they are machines that allow for the fabrication of all manner of subsequent machines (clothing, shelter, tools, weapons), which in turn allowed us to accelerate evolutionary advantages by transforming our environment faster that it would be possible to evolve our bodies (capturing and wearing the fur of another animal is far more expedient than waiting to grow fur after having migrated north, for example). This story of prehensile environmental embodiment, a self-animating circuit of habit and habitat, also speaks to the City ’ s ambient informational fields through which we learn to mediate spaces both near and far. Such spheres of influence need to be learned, and while it takes time to master remote controls, let alone the control of remoteness, we are fast learners. There are monkeys that, as part of a project by Michel Nicolelis, have learned to control a robotic arm and hand through interfacial electronics connected to the brain. ¹⁰ The primate ’ s dispositional impulses become informational pulses that, properly mediated, effect a remote grasping prosthesis to do its bidding. Just as we learned QWERTY in order to type by internalizing the feedback of expression and arbitrary inscription machines, we also now learn to operate the interfaciality of other habitats and ambient surfaces. As we negotiate the interfacial density of the urban fabric, our own primate bodies are infused and intersected by its rhythmic extensions, controlling its machinery at a distance and triangulated as subject- Users by that machinery in the course of our movements. Cloud infrastructures seep and rupture through the orifices of the city into the open view of people and their mobile screens, and around them we proprioceptively map our displacements in real and imagined geographies. ¹¹

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Interface Layer