- For a much detailed elaboration of these different performative typologies of interfaces, see my “ All Design Is Interface Design ” (presented at SoftWhere, University of California, San Diego, June, 25, 2008). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSoGFzLlLYQ.
- “ Nicolelis Lab, ” http://www.nicolelislab.net/.
- In this conjunction of a generalized interfaciality with the technogenesis of the human form, the reference is, in very different ways, related to the work Gilbert Simonden and Bernard Stiegler, but recall also Maurice Merleau-Ponty ’ s discussion of the cane becoming part of the body of the person who uses it to sense the world.
- Peter Galison, “ The Lives of Images: Peter Galison in Conversation with Trevor Paglen, ” Aperture 21 (Summer 2013).
- Like most visual economies of love or war, this depends on the identification of “ objects of interest. ” See “ Cyborg Astrobiologist Put Through Its Paces in West Virginian Coalfields, ” MIT Technology Review, September 24, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519576/ cyborg-astrobiologist-put-through-its-paces-in-west-virginian-coalfields/.
- John Underkoffler ’ s work on large-scale gestural interface systems has helped define this avenue of design research.
- What groups these together is the use of the motor body itself as a signifying machine, not a source from which a signifying trace remediates between body and machine. The model is kind of an inversion of modern dance notation systems, which code the slightest gesture with incredible nuance and flexibility.
- I should explain this folding/unfolding allegory in more detail. The “ Thing ” is, at least in the German, a “ gathering. ” Invoking this etymology, Bruno Latour extends Heidegger ’ s four-foldedness of the thing into new domains. We could say, however, that the interfaciality of a thing inverts the gathering and its network of relations. According to the Latour-Heidegger story, drawn from Heidegger ’ s 1950 essay, “ Das Ding, ” and Latour ’ s recent essays on the “ parliament of things, ” a thing is an assemblage or index of those actors and forces that gave rise to it, which are combined and folded within one another in marvelous ways to result in a given thing. The “ thing, ” however stable or temporary, gathers its particular forms and forces of earthly production into itself and presents them (each one of these — sun, water, metal, work — is still present in the thing) toward a new use or encounter. Conversely, the interfaciality of a thing inverts the direction of that gathering. In connecting one thing to another by remote control, by action at a distance, the interfacial thing unfolds out toward the world of other things in looping cybernetic circuits of relay and interruption. It doesn ’ t fold in; it explodes out. The unfolding, degathering interfaciality of the thing is equal and opposite to its infolding gathering as assemblage. See Martin Heidegger, “ The Thing, ” in William Lovitt, trans. and ed., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
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