The mobilization of automated opinionlessness is perhaps most clearly illustrated by a subgenre of Apps that uses the device ’ s built-in camera to superimpose interfacial content on top of the ambient world as perceived by the user, such as for AR. As mentioned, the layer of interfacial icons and indexes on a given perceptual field transforms it by subtitling objects and events, offering navigational tools, overlaying GUI menus on real-world systems, cinematic insertions, and elisions, and other artificial sensations by which the ambiguities of local signification and significance are eliminated for the User. The ultimate effect of this programming may be to transform semiotic techniques into direct ideological, even theological, articulations of the world. Whereas for tangible media and conformal computing, interfaciality melts into tactile objects, for AR interfaciality melts into the perceived surfaces of objects and environments. In extending the cinematic language of new media, AR is an aggressive subtitling of the phenomenal world now rendered as interactive narrative. It does this in ways that may be highly contextual, or perhaps instead according to a strange juxtaposition of a description with what it describes, like a film subtitle with only tangential relation to the screen image and event. <sup>48</sup> For the latter, the User is thrown into confusion, forced to not only interpret the correlation between the interface and the world but perhaps to invent one on the fly, relying only on his own actual thinking. In most cases, however, semiotic correlation is easy, and it is the absence of any work of interpretation, of reading even, that would characterize a successful AR User experience. The job of the software is to explain what is seen and to automate active sorting of how it should be encountered, valued, and qualified — with reverence, indifference, or violence. As religio, or for the Schmitt App, AR draws lines and differentiates friend and foe, automating even intentional belief, subcontracting the neocortex ’ s manipulation of metaphor, offloading it to the algorithms strapped to your face.
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Interface Layer