- Thanks to Aaron Fooshee, a student in a workshop I taught at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 2013 for exploring the idea of object-to-object spam.
- See my “ Root the Earth: Peak Oil Apophenia, ” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012).
Interface Layer
- Deleuze, Gilles. “ The Brain Is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on ‘ The Time-Image ’ , ” Discourse 20, no. 3, Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in This World (October 1, 1998): 47 – 55. See also Gregory Flaxman, The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
- A widely quoted quip from McLuhan, with numerous sources in print, many quoting television appearances.
- We should be careful, as William James once said, that the word dog does not bite.
- It ’ s always possible that a technical relay between button and effect is in good working order but that the appropriate semantic association is scrambled, such as when the button that says Open in fact closes a door, or the knob for watering flowers opens the garage door instead. Jacques Tati ’ s films elevated the lampooning of these interfacial crossed wires into his own conservative lament against modernity.
- Conversely, phatic interfaces — those that interstitially interrupt attention, such as a phone ring — as well as geolocative tracking of devices revealing User trajectory, like a tagged shark, are examples of interfaces that the User accesses The Stack, but interfaces through which The Stack accesses the User.
- The etymology of interface dates the word back only to the late nineteenth century, and is now defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “ a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, and forming their common boundary. ” “ interface, n., ” OED Online, July 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/97747?rskey=BpuToj & result=1 & isAdvanced= false (accessed July 12, 2014). Only much later does it come to mean components in a machine, then specific components in a computing machine, and finally the tools used to engage with a computer. In fact, each of these connotations is still active in our use in regard to the Interface layer of The Stack. It is interesting nevertheless that it took the emergence of computation for the interfaciality of the world to warrant a separate disciplinary mode of design. Now the program of interface design is to expand (some would say inflate) its portfolio toward the diagnosis and designation and all manner of complex systems in the physical world, including common boundaries in the physical world. See my “ What Do We Mean by ‘ Program ’ ? ” Interactions: Experiences, People, Technology 15, no. 3 (2008), 20 – 26. See also http://www.bratton.info/projects/texts/ what-do-we-mean-by-program/.
- This definition is drawn from my introductory remarks at Ambient: Interface, the 54th Annual International Aspen Design Conference, which I cochaired with Christian Moeller in 2005.
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