- For a particularly beautiful example of a projective augmented reality dreamworld-interfacegeography, see Factory Fifteen, “ GOLDEN AGE — SOMEWHERE, ” http://www.factoryfifteen .com/7936/152396/home/golden-age-somewhere.
The process by which software comes to configure User cognition is familiar to anyone who has taken the time to learn a particularly difficult application, but the principle holds for everyday tools as well. An architecture student who is struggling to learn Maya will be frustrated by the disconnect between her idea and her ability to realize that idea with the application ’ s powerful but confusing GUI. Over time, however, she begins to internalize the logics of geometry, force, distortion, and iteration that underlie the software. Rotation and manipulation of virtual forms become increasingly habitual. Instead of slowly translating between idea, hand movement, and on-screen outcome, the feedback cycle becomes faster and more intuitive. She is internalizing the cognitive schema of the program, which is now not only expressing her ideas more fluidly; it has begun to inform that ideation process in the first place. As she becomes a more expert User, she will learn to “ think ” in Maya and use the application not just to output her original inspirations but as a collaborator in the design of forms that are possible only once the different abilities of her creative and interpretive intelligence and its machinic intelligence are correlated. That correlation entails a process of forgetting — of forgetting the translation, the hand movements, the arbitrary qualities of how a GUI categorizes possible combinations of gestures made and scripts executed. The software is habituated, and the acumen that allows that software to generate capital for the User is itself a function of that habituation. As those habitations become more intense and widely shared — in this case, among a community of designers — the terms, vernaculars, limits, and liabilities of a software application also inform how the User-designer comes to see what the software is meant to simulate and describe — in this case, buildings and cities. One comes to look at cities as variations on what can and can ’ t be done with the tools one has habituated for the design of cities.
This is not meant as a criticism of creative ingenuity, rather a simple observation that there is no thinking that is not also topological and, for this, also technological. Software is not unique in this or excluded from it. In relation to Heidegger ’ s notion of “ equipment, ” we also observe that we, the Users, “ unforget ” that habituation when the technology breaks. Busted hardware or glitchy software draws our attention out of focused concentration and back to the strange mechanics of the apparatus, seeing it again a bit more as we did as a beginner. For any interfacial regime, the ambient field of interfaces made available to a User is a different kind of “ distribution of the sensible, ” one in which visual and tactical interfaces, both graphical and objective, constitute a habitat of possible applications with which one makes the world in the best way available.
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