Interface

Interface

Interface

Branden Hookway

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover art taken from From Flutter to Tumble: Inertial Drag 
and Froude Similarity in Falling Paper, by Andrew Belmonte, 
Hagai Eisenberg, and Elisha Moses, Physical Review 
Letters 81 (1998): 345–348, figure 1. Used with permission 
of Andrew Belmonte.

Hookway, Branden. Interface / Branden Hookway. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-52550-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Technology—
Philosophy. 2. Interfaces (Physical sciences). 3. Human-machine 
systems—Philosophy. I. Title. T14.H64 2014 601—dc23 2013022300

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-52550-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32263-8 (retail e-book)

2013022300

d_r1

To Maria

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1    The Subject of the Interface

2    The Forming of the Interface

3     The Augmentation of the Interface

Notes

Index

Preface

This study views what I term the interface as a relation with technology rather than as a technology in itself. In this relation the interface describes a boundary condition that is at the same time encountered and worked through toward some specific end. In a way, my experience of coming upon the interface as a subject is analogous to this process. What started out as an introduction to a dissertation on the airplane cockpit as a paradigmatic twentieth-century environment became a separate project, as I found it necessary to work through a theoretical exploration of the interface in order to address what is at stake with the cockpit. The cockpit is at once a space of inhabitation, an ergonomics of use, an assemblage of mechanical articulations directed toward control surfaces and the materiality of air flow, and a threshold between human and machine whose mediation is expressed in a trajectory of flight. It encompasses a multiplicity of derivations, testing apparatuses, and simulations. As such, the cockpit has remained an implicit challenge in the theory of the interface presented here, which needed to account for the range of its instantiations, behaviors, and transformations.

Today the interface is at once ubiquitous and hidden to view. It is both the bottleneck through which all human relations to and through technology must pass, and a productive moment of encounter embedded and obscured within the use of technology. It is a disputed zone, a site of contestation between human beings and machines as much as between the social and the material, the political and the technological. In staging and resolving this contestation, the interface both defines and elides difference; it at once separates classes and draws them together as a single augmented body. While the interface operates in space and time, and on occasion may be described as a site or an event, it also governs the production of sites and events; it describes the site or moment in which the full operation and apparatus of systems, networks, hierarchies, and material flows are distilled into concrete action.

The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the interface and to examine the implications it holds over life. Chapter 1, The Subject of the Interface, positions the interface with respect to theories of subject formation, agency, power, and control, and within contexts that include the technological, the political, and the game. The subject here is shown as poised between the simulation and the real, between autonomy and control. Chapter 2, The Forming of the Interface, finds the origin of the term interface in nineteenth-century fluid dynamics, particularly in the work of James Thomson and James Clerk Maxwell, and subsequently traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics. As the site upon which Maxwell’s demon first appears, the interface is shown to have a particular relevance to complex, dynamic systems, within which it describes the possibilities of agency and governance. Chapter 3, The Augmentation of the Interface, addresses notions of tacit or embodied intelligence as they relate to what has been called the human-machine system. Throughout, the figure of the subject is inseparably both receiver and active producer in processes of subjectification. The interface is the endgame of a technological lineage, an architecture-as-medium that stands in a relation both alien and intimate, vertiginous and orienting, to those who cross its thresholds and trace out promenades in its interior places.

Acknowledgments

Much of this book was first drafted in 2010 while I was living in Ithaca, New York. While writing on the airplane cockpit for a Ph.D. dissertation, it became clear to me that I needed to develop a theory of the interface first. I am grateful to Beatriz Colomina, my advisor, whose support and encouragement were invaluable throughout my studies and work on this project. M. Christine Boyer, my second reader, made discerning comments on the manuscript that helped refine it at various points, and I am thankful as well for her support. I am grateful to Mark Wigley and Alexander R. Galloway for their generosity and expertise as external readers. Among those who inspired me during my time at the Princeton University School of Architecture, I would particularly like to thank Hal Foster, Jonathan Crary, Spyros Papapetros, and Sarah Whiting for their timely encouragement. I am grateful to have had the chance to present and refine this work in an academic setting and would especially like to thank Mohsen Mostafavi, Kent Kleinman, Robert Somol, Ben van Berkel, Michael Bell, Lily Chi, Mark Cruvellier, Iftikhar Dadi, Sheila Danko, Stan Allen, Lars Lerup, and Bruce Mau for supporting this work. I would also like to thank the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning for research and publication support.

At the MIT Press, I am profoundly grateful to Roger Conover for taking on this project. His guidance and vision were critical in bringing the work to its current state. I am also grateful to Thomas Frick and Matthew Abbate for their care and precision in editing, Justin Kehoe for his help throughout the process, Margarita Encomienda for the thoughtful design of the book, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their useful comments.

I am very grateful to my family for their love and support. My deepest thanks go to Maria Park, whose faith in this project and insightful reading of the work in all stages helped greatly in shaping the flow of the book. Finally, I would like to thank Lucy and Joseph, our most constant and best companions throughout this journey.

1

The Subject of the Interface

The interface as form of relation

Inasmuch as the range of human experience and performance is more and more defined and conditioned through the forces of technological development, the interface holds a familiar albeit indeterminate and even spectral presence. For while the interface might seem to be a form of technology, it is more properly a form of relating to technology, and so constitutes a relation that is already given, to be composed of the combined activities of human and machine. The interface precedes the purely technological, just as one encounters a mirror image before the mirror itself. Likewise, the interface describes the ways in which humanness is implicated in its relation with technology. For even at the moment human and machine come into contact, their encounter has already been subject to a mediation. Both the actions performed upon the interface and the agency of their performance are to a critical extent already anticipated.

Figure 1.1

The apparatus in its environment, 1918. A World War I–era laboratory for the psychological and physiological testing of pilots. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

Nonetheless, it is the interface that most actively determines the human relation to technology and delimits the boundaries that define human and machine. Increasingly the interface constitutes the gateway through which the reservoir of human agency and experience is situated with respect to all that stands outside of it, whether technological, material, social, economic, or political. It is more and more unavoidably the means of representing that which is otherwise unrepresentable, or of knowing that which is otherwise unknowable. If the interface is now ubiquitous and pervasive, it is so with respect to a proliferation of ever more complex devices and networks. If it is indeterminate and elusive, it is so in that it channels the activities under its influence toward a resolution within a common protocol, while at the same time opening up new vistas and capabilities to a now-augmented human sensorium.

The interface is defined here as a kind of theoretical construct whose essential characteristics and operations are common to each of its various realized instantiations. Specifically, the interface is treated here as a form of relation. This is to say that what is most essential to a description of the interface lies not in the qualities of an entity or in lineages of devices or technologies, but rather in the qualities of relation between entities. Such a relation possesses its own qualities and characteristics that are attendant on but otherwise independent of the entities brought into relation; the persistence of this relation in time and space is such that it may be described as possessing a kind of form. A preliminary definition of interface might then be as follows: the interface is a form of relation that obtains between two or more distinct entities, conditions, or states such that it only comes into being as these distinct entities enter into an active relation with one another; such that it actively maintains, polices, and draws on the separation that renders these entities as distinct at the same time as it selectively allows a transmission or communication of force or information from one entity to the other; and such that its overall activity brings about the production of a unified condition or system that is mutually defined through the regulated and specified interrelations of these distinct entities. Or again: the interface is that form of relation which is defined by the simultaneity and inseparability of its processes of separation and augmentation, of maintaining distinction while at the same time eliding it in the production of a mutualism that may be viewed as an entity in its own right, with its own characteristics and behaviors that cannot be reduced to those of its constituent elements.

The interface is defined in its coupling of the processes of holding apart and drawing together, of confining and opening up, of disciplining and enabling, of excluding and including. The separation maintained by the interface between distinct entities or states is also the basis of the unity it produces from those entities or states. While the constituent entities and processes of the interface may be examined individually, such analysis yields only a partial view of the interface and addresses only aspects or derivations of its full functioning. Such derivations of the interface include the surface, the test, and the simulation. The theory of the interface presented here investigates the interface both in part and in full, including the processes by which the interface comes into being, the behaviors and activities that it both draws upon and produces, and the status it ascribes to the discrete elements it brings into relation and the mutually directed entity or system that is the result of its operations. In this analysis, the interface entails implications for notions of control and intelligence as well as regarding those entities that are both its constituents and its products. These include the system and, perhaps most relevant to this study’s focus on the human relation to technology, the subject and its production through processes of subjectification. The subject of the interface finds as its counterpart the user of the interface, just as the user’s learning or mastery of the interface is at the same time a kind of subjectification. That the user of the interface is also its subject follows the notion of the interface as that which at once separates and draws together in augmentation. Likewise, agency, or the will and means to action, is a capacity at once mediated by and produced upon the interface.

The human-machine interface is neither the first interface nor the only type of interface that may be defined as a form of relation. The concept of the interface was developed for use in the field of fluid dynamics. Fluidity provides a powerful metaphor for the operation of the interface, as well as for associated processes of mediation and control. To engage an interface is also to become a constituent element within a kind of fluidity. Likewise, subjectification may be described as a process of becoming fluid.

The interface is a liminal or threshold condition that both delimits the space for a kind of inhabitation and opens up otherwise unavailable phenomena, conditions, situations, and territories for exploration, use, participation, and exploitation. Often the territories it opens up constitute in themselves further threshold conditions. This reflects what may be taken as axiomatic: that the interface is at every stage of its operation concerned with the liminal. Not only does the interface constitute in itself a threshold condition, but it also operates through the seeking out, identification, and development of thresholds of various kinds. These thresholds are guarded, regulated, and maintained in place by the interface both in its internal organization and in the relation or effect it produces with respect to the externality with which it interfaces. The relation of an interface to its external condition, a relation that is the primary product of its operation, may be described as control. Insofar as the interface serves as a locus and condition of control, control could also be said to pertain to the liminal, in that it describes a way of operating upon and through threshold conditions; this is to say that, at least in relation to the interface, control proceeds a limine, or out of a threshold. It is axiomatic of control as well, then, that it both occurs upon a threshold and proceeds from a threshold; control may even be said to define the threshold to the extent that it seeks out those moments, or tipping points, at the onset of a transition from which a difference may be most easily effected. To the extent that the identification of difference is essential to the operation of the interface, the interface is aligned with the test; and to the extent that the interface occupies the threshold that governs the change from one state to another, the interface may be said to possess a tendency to come into being, operate within, and express its character with reference to the transformative or transitional.

This is borne out in the history of the human-machine interface from the early twentieth century to now. During this period the interface has become a prevalent means of testing and simulation, has served as a testing ground for transformations in self-identity, and has been the site from which complex technological processes are governed, from the control of machinery to the design of environments to the modeling of complex physical processes. In each of these settings, and whether as a general theoretical construct or within a specific instantiation, the interface carries with it a third major tendency, along with the identification of differences and the facilitation of transformations; this is a tendency toward a seeming transparency and disappearance, even as it is undoubtedly a condition that demands to be worked through. While promising an illusory effortlessness and seamlessness in its provision of an augmentation, the interface nonetheless requires an extraction of work and for this work a cost must be paid. This cost is extracted both in terms of energy and in the confinement and channeling of these energies into a form compatible with the interface, even as the cost of working through the interface is hidden from the perspective of its having been worked through. In its occupation of the threshold, the interface is both the conduit through the threshold and the judge sitting upon the threshold to determine what may pass through and the manner of its passing. Both of these aspects of the interface constitute a kind of friction upon the threshold that requires work or the exertion of energy to overcome. What occurs within the interface, the kind of relating across a threshold that is often described as interaction or interactivity, may also be described as a transaction, in the sense of a cost being extracted and compensation being given in exchange. This transaction also reflects the reconciliation of the interface as a space that is both inhabited and worked through; here the transaction is a confinement endured for the granting of an enhancement.

Between faces and facing between

The etymology of interface, a word first used in the description of fluid behavior, suggests how the interface may be opened up to theoretical description even as it resists such description. The prefix inter- connotes relations that take place within an already bounded field, whether spatial or temporal. It pertains to an inward orientation, an interiority. As an interiority of relations, inter- encompasses relations that may occur between, among, or amid elements insofar as they are given as bounded within the space of their relating, or of events insofar as they are bounded in time. Inter- holds its bounded condition as already given, as a priori to the relations it describes. It does not exclude that which is exterior to it, since it has already been separated out as an interior. This reading of inter- would suggest an interface that does not define its bounding entities but is rather defined by them. The interface thus would be an interior condition, whose activity and influence is constrained within the boundaries given by its defining entities. If used as a form of communication between these entities, the role of the interface would be limited to the translation or transmission of that which its bounding entities project into it. While the specific means of this communication belong to the interface, the interface would otherwise always refer back to its bounding entities. Its influence would not extend into the bounding entities that confine it, but would rather be constrained to the relations that occur between them. The interface would be defined according to its betweenness, its amongness, its duration-within.

Against this reading of the interface as an interior condition, the etymology of face points toward an outward orientation and an exteriority. Face is derived from the Latin facies, meaning like the English face a visage or countenance, as well as an appearance, character, form, or figure; facies in turn is derived from the verb facere, meaning to act, make, form, do, cause or bring about. A face, then, is the aspect of a thing by which it presents itself. From facere, this is an