However, even as GUIs become more normative and essential to the instrumentalization of global culture, we also see at the same time that physical objects are increasingly imbued with the interfacial intelligences of computational media (storage, calculation, and transmission). This suggests a reversal of the earlier shift from natural interfacial objects to virtual interfacial signs, and now back again to computationally intensive interfacial objects. The MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group, led by Hiroshi Ishii, works on tangible user interfaces (TUI) and a future of radical atoms based on microscopic computing machines dissolved into physical matter, while the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms led by Neil Gershenfeld develops self-assembling microrobotics and a program of “ conformal computing ” in which artificial and natural information layers might interoperate directly. Computation is cast again as a generic solvent within and between everyday things. In living rooms, Microsoft ’ s Kinect gestural-based gaming interface dispenses with touch altogether and relies instead on Users ’ natural maneuvers and proprioceptive skills to manipulate both physical things and their digi tal shadows (a general-purpose theremin). <sup>16</sup> These expansions of interfaciality through objects return it from the semiotic to the corporeal, and in doing so draw potentially even wider worlds into their computational domains than GUI can. The GUI largely reduced the hand to a fingertip, one that points and selects among a bounded set of options, and so simulated tactile craft as a sequence of discrete menu items, each executing chosen software subroutines in programmed sequences. But with gesturaltangible-haptic interfaces, we can imagine the possibility of a fully mature interface regime that dispenses almost entirely with both the alphanumeric machine of the keyboard and the semiotic machine of clickable icon. In contrast, some things might be so thoroughly imbued by that computational solvent that they will contain their own direct interfaciality with the world, not as objective metaphors but as real objects. To interact with an everyday object may involve haunted causality at a distance. To provide interfacial mediation between the mobile primates — that ’ s us — and the environmentally embedded digital information in which we are situated, such a regime would rely instead on the wisdom of spatial-object navigation accumulated over millennia: waving, poking, dancing, stacking, peeling, squishing, sorting, throwing. Any of these interactions with computational matter could link Users down the layers of The Stack and back up again.
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Interface Layer