On Interfaces: Cultural Logics and Digital Boundaries
Emerging towards the end of the nineteenth century, cinema — what Lev Manovich describes as the first new media — dramatically re-contextualized ontological notions of time and self, optics and haptics, in the wake of a bustling modernity. This emergent mode — not dissimilar from earlier, experiential modes of seeing — would continue to diffuse throughout high and low cultures alike in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Yet, early new media and the technologies of their production, by and large, remained inextricably linked to the screen. Despite the prolific mass production of new media technologies, ranging from Super 8 to Polaroid film cameras, the logic of the interface continued to be bound by the rectilinear limits of the still, the slide, the shot — in a word, the screen.
With the rise of digitization and information technologies (i.e. the Internet and social media) in the post-war era, the bounds of the screen have become invariably vague. The screen, in its myriad manifestations across time and place, can no longer be seen as having (or as ever having had) a unidirectional relationship with its viewer. Rather, as media theorist Alexander Galloway writes in his seminal work, The Interface Effect, the interface is not simply an object or boundary point, but instead, represents a complex, autonomous zone of activity (vii). Interfaces and digital technologies more broadly, must be approached as socially symbolic meanings, as active sites of sociohistorical processes that shape and are shaped by human behavior. What Galloway defines as the interface effect lies here, at the threshold between self and world (viii).
Galloway’s understanding of the interface — not as surface, but as a gateway into some place beyond — becomes a useful theoretical framework for understanding non-digital, works of new media art as being informed by the logic information technologies and processes of digitization. In The Language of New Media, Manovich describes several qualities that are unique to — but not universal signifiers of — new media, which include: numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. These qualities describe the aesthetic properties of data and the logics by which they are made intelligible. To better understand these characteristics and how they are made manifest in new media art, I would like to draw specific attention to the work of Martha Rosler (whose retrospective, Irrespective is currently on view at the Jewish Museum) and James Bridle, who defined the term “new aesthetic” to describe the interplay between digital and physical realities in the wake of the twenty-first century. Moving away from a fetishization of screen-based media, Rosler and Bridle’s corpus of work foregrounds the distinctive logic of the interface through various media and environments.
On view at the Jewish Museum, Martha Rosler’s Irrespective showcases over five decades of work that, to varying degrees, speak the aesthetic language of new media. For example, her decades-long series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home takes as its formal logic the Dadaist proclivity towards collage and filters it through through a digitally-mediated environment, Photoshop. The final product of Rosler’s transmediation of images are not-screen bound, but speak volumes of the screen — of its haptics, aesthetics, and logics.
For example, we can see glimpses of new media aesthetics in Rosler’s 2004 work, Photo-Op (2004), which uses photomontage as a means of chipping away at the monolithic narrative surrounding the Iraq War. The work features several, distinct images of narcissism and violence which, divorced from their original meanings and milieus, are carefully reassembled within the domestic space. Speaking to what Manovich describes as new media’s “logic of selection,” Rosler dis- and reassembles bodies and meanings within the syntagmatic space of the canvas (120). Rosler’s work, much like the media from which its images are sourced, forgoes temporal montage for that of spatial, inviting the viewer’s eye to navigate from image to image; even the doubling of the woman’s body in the foreground mirrors the windowing aesthetic of the Internet. Rosler’s use of the Internet as database for the construction of Photo-Op, in turn, radically challenges the ideology of American sociopolitical structures. From signifiers of gendered norms that govern the domestic space to those of the military-industrial complex writ large, Rosler’s Photo-Op speaks the aesthetic language of a cacophonous, hyperconnected mass media and of the Internet more broadly.
Similar to Rosler, Bridle’s body of work utilizes the logics and aesthetics of interfaces, screens, and new media to augment the physical. In a 2017 work entitled Autonomous Trap 001, Brindle uses a series of demarcations on the pavement to immobilize an autonomous vehicle, speaking to what he describes as the new aesthetic. Brindle uses this theoretic concept to refer to the increasing appearance of the visual language of digital technology in the physical world, as well as their coalescence.
Autonomous Trap 001 then, refers directly to this this amorphous fusion of the aesthetics of digital and physical reality insofar as the markings Bridle inscribes on the ground signify two entirely different things. For the human viewer, they refer to road markings which, once stripped from of their linearity, are rendered meaningless. But for the digital actor — in this case, the autonomies vehicle — they trigger a route set of commands and executions that render it immobile. Beyond mere aesthetics, the place-boundness of Bridle’s work represents a unique condition for the art historian, as most of his works cannot be viewed in-person. Rather, their gallery is the Internet and their myriad dispersion across micro-blogging platforms and Google Image results. Bridle’s work, in sum, is one that challenges a reading of the interface as static, as his work exercises profound autonomy over digital and physical media alike.
We must view the interface, then, not as being confined to the screen, but as that and more. Interfaces, as these two brief examples have demonstrated, have profound effects on the products of both digital and physical social realities. Their capacity to shape, augment, and alter human perception extends to their manifestations both on screens and off.
