The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

Andersen, Christian Ulrik; Pold, Søren Bro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262037947 ISBN 13: 9780262037945

Publisher: MIT Press, 2018

Synopsis

How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Soren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms-including net art, software art, and electronic literature-seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the "semantic capitalism" of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.

About this title

Review:

a fascinating book...This is an erudite piece of scholarship that will make a lasting contribution to interface criticism, and sheds light on an increasingly central aspect of day-to-day life.

--Leonardo

About the Author:

Christian Ulrik Andersen is Associate Professor in Digital Design at Aarhus University and works with aesthetics, software, and interface criticism. Soren Bro Pold is Associate Professor in Digital Design at Aarhus University and works with interface criticism, literature, and aesthetics.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0262037947
• ISBN 13: 9780262037945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248