[talks]

[08.2004]

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Ambient Interfaces

benjamin bratton

opening address IDCA 54, 2004

Interfaces

In that design is an argument, a proposition, a position, a putting something into place.

This thesis brings into focus the design complexities of connection, contact and interaction. Interfaces explores how computation changes design?s imagination of these complexities and their translation into the making of the material world. The thesis proposes an image of the world as an interface, and of all design as interface design.

Design is an expertise in points of contact, in the interfaces between people, systems and effects. In our network culture, contact is condensed into buttons and icons, menus and dashboards, and into familiar pathways and fast surfaces, diagrams and directions. Interfaces are nodes along lines of urban flow:  terminals, spectacles, ports and stations. Interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots and borders.

Such points of contact, everywhere and nowhere at once, connect each of us to the operating systems of interdependency, power, and opportunity. They are not just our interfaces to the world, but also the world's channels to us.

Not the nature of the thing, nor the free dissemination, but the points and thresholds that govern the active life of each.

Two connotations of interfaces..

Interfaces as threshold point between compext systems.

Itnerfaces as menus, condensations of language and technology?

Across the ?:? in ?ambient : interface? a two-way conversion is at work. Interfaces must be understood as always deeply contextualized by their social and physical locations: interfaces are architecture. Simultaneously, the world and how we design it must always appreciate how physical objects and systems connect cultures locally and at a distance: architecture is an interface.

In our contemporary context, theory has been transposed, compressed into design; and design has been encoded, displaced into software. This epistemic mobility is mirrored by the hypermobilities of social globalization, the permanent diasporas of itinerant labor (across all class positions) that make movement a primary state of subjectivity, and stasis the conditional exception.

The location of the interface in design is not interchangeable with the impact of computation on the tools of design the media for which we work and the fabric of the world itself, but their interrelationships is exactly what we are interested in.

The general Theory of the Interface

Interface: The place at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other. Or more technical, a boundary or point common to two or more similar or dissimilar command and control systems, sub-systems, or other entities against which or at which necessary information flow takes place.

Point of contact between two complex systems

Moment site or system

Content form, operations of each contact system of each is allowed to interpenetrate and influence the other.

Membrane

threshold point that does more than separate, it conditions the governance of exchange between both systems?

Separates cartographically, joins programmatically..

Border separates cartographically, organize determine systemtize exchanges and interplay inter penetration, not exclusion betweend the two.

Spatial system.

That is to a large extent irreducible universal for our. Generalized condtion for the production, reproduction, design and habitation of habitats.

Interfaces not just a kind of spatial moment, but as a condition of spatial moments.

Basic critical variable by which we might understand relations physical systems and socio-cultural systems.

The dashboard discourse.

Dasboard discourse

Condensations of signifiers into a little territorial array.

Conpossible table of options

Mulitple surface-network interfaces,

Local and remote connections

Could be physical markers (Mejkinaar)

Sometimes embedded, (The physical thing, microwave)

sometimes mobile; (phone)

increasingly electronic (software, dancing bits)

Language/Technology conversions.

Is a form of writing, and is also a form of technology.

language transformed into technology,

technology into language

complicates the geneologies of both.

Technologization of language.

Language becomes a technoloiigy. .can? t press words and give them social political effects. Words have these effects surely, but the pre-arrangement of options into a fixed conpossible matrix ?. (neil Stephenson, cli..) the event of the word

Linguisification of technology

A language that replaces mechanical analog machinery, reduced now to electronic pulses in very small media.)

Social Performance

Interfaces inextricably tied to the performative logics of the space.

Habit/ habitat

Computation, Subjectivity

Computation changes thought/action of design

Not only does computation change how design works, more importantly it changes how design thinks. Computation transforms one practice into another: cinema into architecture, product design into philosophy, urban planning into advertising.

Design media: interfaces between a thought and an inscription.

Computation changes raw material of design, raw location of use

and as a technology (as surely as glass and steel) out of which environments are constructed. (software lives with us, runs the register, and its accounting, gas pump, traffic lights, transmission, in my handheld telluing me I?m late, etc., from the invisible and urban, to the visible an personal)

need something good here.

Multiple scales of the the Self operate in the image of the interface,

Scale from perception to urbanaization.

Identity: Product Design, Home, Self, Habitat

Interfaces comprise our most intimate habitats. In our homes, offices, cars, even in our bodies, pointing-and-clicking connects us with the entire world, blurring boundaries between the local and global, between self and society.

Robotics and artificial intelligence (not grand kind, the little kind) have redefined thought and action in the image of computation.

But closer to home so have consumer electronics and social software, with which memory, love, expression, investment and work are literally designed.. ?by regular people everyday. Artifacts resonate ? Energy.

software from software journal text.

Some good habitus text here.

More on subjectivity/habitat circuit

Body

Fashion image, rubber dress

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that the behavior of organisms is always a response to their species-specific environment, and that the forms that populate the world with us emerge in relationship to the evolution of our senses, and vice versa. That is, our specific embodied capacities to perceive limit and give foundation to the languages of form in which we live, and with which we design. This implies that looking and making are really not so separate after all. Looking and being looked at, wearing and being worn, is the career of the thing/self. All technologies are (at whatever scale) also technologies of looking and wearing -- which is to say of fashion. You see, ecology, the cooperation of species, is itself deep fashion. It is the stage on which biology, form, and the big/small fictions that code everyday life intermingle in the perpetual performance of perception, display, adaptation and intercourse

Organization

Plural Subject-Object

Not just of the singular social subject, but of the plural as well, the group, the organization

We posit that the interfaces all around us don?t only relay information given form elsewhere, but that they are an organizational form, a social and cultural infrastructure.

Transcoding

Translation of institutions into software?(name them)

Technologization of language. Linguisification of technology

I suppose that the massive transcoding of institutional and organizational forms into the images and bodies of software is a fundamental means and end of a ?second modernization? whereby the structures and operations of Modernity are themselves undergoing a general (though highly heterogeneous and irregular) process of re-modernization. This transcoding and translation can be seen as a means by which Zizek?s ?computerization? both disembedds and reembedds the constitutions of the Modern.

Architectural transcoding

Skyscraper, as architectural typology but also an organizational typology,,,, desk and the desktop.>> institutional isomorphism. .. not Iron Cage but Plastic/Metal/Wood Desktop

Sociological institutional isomorphism. Organizations that do different things. Take on the same characterstics. >>> mechanical and organic solidarity. Greater the division of labor the greater the I Isomorphism. ? and thus the organizational isomporphism, institutionalization takes on formal structures in architecture?

desktop, and the bodies immediate relationship to space. Phone. Desktop becomes primary interface to the cognition of labor.

the architectural convention, desk, office, organization, etc. gets reduced to a set of compossible operations?.

GUI can be understood as the moment/ site where this conversion takes place.

Interface and Mimesis

Of course then the mimesis works both ways.

Software works int eh image of the organization, then the organization comes to work in the image of the software..

City

City is interface

First function of the city is proximity, density of proximity?macines that allows for proximity to markets, cultures, trade system. Industrialization of labor produced a condition of centralization and mobilization.

Density of volumes and partitions interfaces allowing for exchange and interchange between markets of culture

Cities are themselves interfaces for the circulation of information. From bandwidth infrastructure to ubiquitous wireless connectivity, and from traffic control systems to supply chain logistics, cites are literally built out of software.

City, Medium of Mobility

The capitalization of urban space drives an acceleration of production, circulation and consumption that ultimately overwhelms traditional durable space until ?all that is solid melts into air.? Mobility names the relative movement and fixidity of persons, goods, capital, publics, and communication

We are interested precisely in the contradictions that mobility signals, in the conditions that transpose circulation into inertia, movement into mediation, and publics into cargo. Our research and design problematic is rooted in these connections and disconnections between capital flow, biographical and bodily displacement and the conception of urban technologies in their image.

Mobility requires infrastructure, and we are particularly interested in the circuit between the infrastructures of mobility located in the urban fabric (transportation, for example) and their relocation onto the individual (the mobile phone/computer, for example). The focus of research and the condition of design lies in the urban interface between environment and body, and the multiple potentialities for mobilization and immobilization they contain.

Soft Infrastructure

The regimes of mobility drive software to do things that were previously asked of architecture? interfaces, as much as walls, partition and ordinate, social flows.

EXPLAIN MORE. MOVE FROM PARTITION TO INTERFACE. TiE CONDITION OF MOBILITY TO INTERFACE CONDITION.

Networked circulation= interface

Infrastructure for software as much as for goods. How software reorganizes urban economies around new information infrastructures. How software lives in and makes cities go. How urban flows and modeled and planned with software. How cities are now full of interface. Cities conceived as products?.

Mobility can only be understood as part of a technologoy of immobilzation as well. Speed produces inertia. Not marinetti.

Mobility can only be understood in relation to what is has displaced, an immobility that was only ever understood as immobile once it was replaced by a mobile condition.

The terms of each ?linguistic, technological, corporeal- transpose and transcode the operations of the others. (1) Urban-architectonic space is modeled not only as infrastructure for media, or as a metaphor for mediation, but as a generative condition of both the subjective bodies that mobilize and inhabit it, and for the visible and invisible software forms that envelope them. (2) The mobile subject of urban space both models/is modeled by the transcoding of bodily habits into interfaces and by the generative grammars of databases as figurative discourses and (invisible) urban infrastructure. (3) Embedded/mobile interfaces and ambient databases both represent the social and objective forms they mediate, and in turn generate the material discursive figures of those forms. Subjectivities are modeled as databases, and inhabit urban spaces, which are generated/deployed as database operations, which are themselves based on the transcoding of subjective thought and habit.

City Types as Interface

traditional society: place, immobility, inert bodies.. city typology: (Geimeinshaft, mechanical solidarity)

industrial society: space, mobile bodies, fixed spaces.. city typology: (gessellshaft, organic solidarity)

The mobilization of the body produces a new kind of subject (Benjamin) and two new kind of natures: of production (a city filled with the products of the industrialization) and a new kind of consumption ( a consumpotin of the nature of the commodity, as a consumption of the city)

De certeau, mental city, space itself a commodity to be consumed. The city is a collaborative construction between its user and the material terrain, the collaboration is an image that is itself commodified. Zones are commodities to consume.

post-industrial society: network, inert bodies, fluid hyperspaces.. city typology: bubble.

Virilio, the network subject is immobile prone at his desk. Virtual mobility produces physical interia.

post-post-industrial society (reflexive mod) : mobile bodies + mobile city = ?

Some information design is fixed onto the structures of space, some come with us.

Cities become tangible media for the interaction between people and things, both close at hand and at great distance.

Phone/City

Phone and Industrial City

Telephone allows for another kind of proximity. (office)

In such a way that it became possible to aggregate people in offices according to a particular kind of spatial typology. :::office and office complex

Switiching systems, commmuniation network/ arch network developed in relation to each other. Stacking offies, peaper?

Mobile Phone, Mobile City

What does it mean when the city becomes condensed into something I hold in my hand.

Phone used to be attached to the building (was a generative function of a particular type of architecture) ?.

Phone no longer part of the building, now part of the body?.

No longer I walk to the interface, but it comes with me.

Urban Condenstation (Language/Technology)

Condensation of the city into the telephone (1^st architectural)

Condensation of the city into the telephonic interface now a bodily appendage. (now bodily)

Phones are being asked to do things what we used to ask buildings to do.

Gui condensed connector points into compossible linguistic array. They partition things, they connect things. (skyscraper : fixed line typology)

IPv6

Brand Matrix

Artificial Conversations

In the interface, words become tools, and the technologies that connect us to the world interact with us in a kind of conversation.

Now of course part of the profession of design is to stage those conversations as artificial or at least artifactual scenarios? we call this branding..

Brand as Interface

For our clients and for the users of our designs, ?the interface? is not just a particular concern of a particular tactical solution, a part of the problem, it is a general condition of any design success. The interface (its specificity as well as its ambience) is a first question of design.

In this translation, the interface now names the software-prepared moments when an organization comes in contact with itself internally, and with its customers and clients externally. The interface is the moment when the brand becomes dialogic, becomes activated. The brand is an interface, and the interface is the brand.

In short, both culturally and mechanically, The interface is both the language and the technology through which producers and consumers connect.

the discourse of ?branding? models organizations as strategic narratives/ narrative strategies, planning points of contact and messaging as an architecture of both production and consumption. Branding far exceeds visual identity design. It constructs the very meaning of an effort or operation, the position of the organization/ product in the broader cultures of signification and adjudication. The principle of the brand as an artificial culture, moves the organization further toward the fictional and functional logics of an imagined community. In this, an organizational program exists, as brand, as a planned system of signification events extending into everyday life, through the media of artificial space-time (architecture, television, cities) Brands operate as semiotic architecture, as programmatic interfaces with capital, and as media with which complex organizations of production are experienced as lived, artifactual culture.

The aesthetics of logistics

Software, interface the generates the distribution of things in space in ways that are unseen, invisible, infrasctructural, deep scripts.

But the Big Box retail typology-of-the-Thing enrolls a different tension. There the store?s strategy of display is storage, and its strategy of storage is display. Ask the clerk at your supermarket if he has any more sardines ?in the back? and he?ll look at you like you?re nuts. Paul Virilio maps the contemporary careers of globalization and computation as parallel trajectories around a double-helixed formation, and it is not just Big Box Space that is overinfused with this aesthetics of logistics. In fact for all the architectonic forms of reflexive modernity, from airports to hotels, to automobiles, to housing to the romantic exchange of credit reports, storage is display. In all of these the fundamental communicative logic is stage-managing the lifecycle of production. This is one way that the invisible hand of culture finds to produce architecture in the image of the software through which it materializes and iterates itself.

Jobs once asked of architecture (the programmatic organization of social space, the concretization of interiority, the staging of economic exchange) is now performed by software.

One needn?t pursue the heights of avant-garde fashion to discover that the software-driven rationalized administration of space, while perhaps overwhelmed by the demands of function and utility, also produces another: the spectacle of transparent production. ?

The everyday Big Box, ironically, synthesizes a similar operation toward radically different ends. There display is boiled down to the perfunctory purpose of storage. For database-driven space and the aesthetics of logistics they inform, display is storage and storage is display. The big box commodity is dramatically underthemed, stacked vertically and horizontally, situated by the barest of theme (bedding, appliance, media, etc.), the matrix of display is more specifically deployed as a means to channel attention toward generic items that, according to the software, require higher rates of purchase. The big box commodity is signified by a tag that contains much of its differential attributes and values as cellular data within the meta-database that operates both the business and the store architecture itself. This is its interface from production to consumption. This is the thing as data.

The Spectacle of Production, the Dramaturgy of Infrastructure

Not just markets, also polis?

Polis

Including ?Architectural Social Theory? (manuscript with Roger Friendland, 1999), ?Figures of Destructuration: Terrorism, Architecture, Social Form? published 2002 in Parallax (Routledge), presented at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (May 2002), 9-11: Perplexities of Security, Watson Institute at Brown University (Sept. 11, 2003) and at Future of War, Lower Manhattan Arts Council and The New School, (April 2003).

?If there had never been a war, I would have made a very good architect.?

--Ahmed Shah Masoud, Afghan opposition leader reportedly assassinated 9.9.01 by suicide bombers who were, it is assumed, trained by Osama Bin-Laden on behalf of the Taliban, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 9.11.01.

Not just markets, also polis?

Political program (including socio-political an theo-political program) is here defined as the abstract principles of collective organization, representation and incorporation through which technologies of power specify and enforce their materializations in built space. Language affords the grammar of collective action, communication, and the condition for which architecture is employed to explore and suit its criteria of inclusion and exclusion. Architecture, in this, doesn?t as much artifacualize political program as much as it executes it. But in this turn, the residual operations of architecture as natural environment structure the figures of embodiment that live through them; habitat comes to determine habit. In this, as political program is overtaken by its own mediations, and in the contemporary context of the network society, the operations of software (linguistic, technological, discursive, urban, architectonic) employ and are employed by the machinations of socio-political demand.

Empire, Agamben, Schmidit, Ontology

Primary medium of democracy is the ballot (interface design) Florida, system called into being through pointing and clicking

Interface at the Political Scale

On a continental scale interfaces are nodes along lines of flow, terminals, ports and stations. On a global scale, interfaces link and partition society itself, as belief systems, ballots and borders: the interface is elemental, material, imminent.

Border between two countries. Border acts as privelaged if abstracted governed. Coconstitution is managed and designed.. point of governance?

.

Cartographic Border now overtaken by Network of Interfaces

Reflexive modernization, disjunction of geography, nation, state and market?. Borders operate as a general?

Interiorizing the enemy no more

Activating the interfaces of the global network?

Terrorist Space (interface)

Terrorist networks are themselves work like the distributed rhizome network. Clich? of our times?. Cell phone, transcontinental identity smuggling. Zarqawi and McKinnsey? Deloitte

As the most advanced reflection of the networked condition of the network condition it is attacking. Now a function of globablization, not its exceptions.

How terrorist space sees things?..terriorist space sees the territory. A building , a server, a port, a terminal, a shipping port, a station becomes for the terrorist the symbolic interface to an entire global society: politics becomes the politics of the network which becomes the defense of interfaces.

State as Software, Software as State

Functions of the state and religion have been translated into software and the micrologial acts of government (database generated notices to interface driven commands at a border crossing) . Accordingly, they are redefined in the operation software, they become software, materially figuratively. Along the lines of Empire?s juridical ubiquity. Software, the anatomy of the Network, is as protocol, linguistic convention, invisible logistics, discursive statement system, both an infrastructure of this reach and the language of its production.

Programs

Picture a computer on a desk, its glowing monitor staring at you.

Some designers are excellent at designing what happens inside the glowing glass rectangle; we call them software and interaction designers. Other designers are excellent at designing what happens outside the glowing glass rectangle; we call them architects and environmental designers. But social space, market space, indeed political space, depends upon the integration of this inside and this outside into a seamless program.

Accordingly, across the ":" in "Ambient : Interface," a two-way conversion is at work. Interfaces don't just perform on screens, they also contextualize their lived, physical locations: interfaces are a kind of architecture. Simultaneously, design must begin from an appreciation of how people connect locally and at a distance through surfaces, objects and systems: the material cultures in front of us are themselves interfaces.

They propose substantive theories of technology in the sense that they attribute a more than instrumental, a substantive, content to technical mediation. According to these theories, technology is not neutral. The tools we use shape our way of life in modern societies where technique has become all pervasive. In this situation, means and ends cannot be separated. How we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human.

We are looking at the interface not as what is bounded in a display screen but as always already culturally, socially and spatially contextualized system of interaction at a distance. It is not bounded in a frame, they are the fabric of everyday life. Interfaces are architecture, and are a property of architecture.

We are looking at architecture as interface; not as an arrangement of partitions and volumes, nor just as a setting for the installations of screens, but as physical media for the organization and circulation of people, intentions, things and purposes.

This thesis maps multiple connotations and constructions of ?program? as a latent and manifest operation of (1) architecture, (2) software and (3) socio-political form and conflict, and argues that each functions as both an underlying condition and extant expression of the other. In this, ?design? must be understood as general grammar of everyday life, as a medium through which social form is variously reproduced and resisted. Architectural program is the organizational logic of structural production, the operant logic of location based on institutionalized principles of individual and collective habitation. Software programs are the visible and invisible networked mediations of information, materialized through surface and screen, as human and machinic communication and, perhaps most importantly, as embedded infrastructure. Social/ political program is the implicit or explicit logic of cultural organization in whose name and image the ?employments of the plural? (language, law, city, government, sacrality, etc.) are mobilized. As a condition of material culture, each figure of program operates as a reflexive condition of the others

Tags: branding

Published: 08.07.2010

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