TIP The Interfacing Process
Interfaces are linking agents between human beings and technological data and machines. They create an interaction and “mediatise” a new redistribution of cultural cognitive perceptions. These interactions modify relationships to time and space, question classical borders, redefine and hybridise individual and collective identities, modifiy the meaning of the «subject». Interface becomes a space which rebuilds discourse, sensoriality and action.
Its involvement in technological data creates an efficient space of ”mediatisation”, communication and connection. This efficiency is used in hegemonic and vertical objectives of control and power. However, it also offers insurrectionary and emancipating possibilities by the creation of configurations of networks - fast, flexible, and
horizontal communication - which allow a questioning of these attempts of hegemony.
Thus, interface becomes a historic and political space.
We want to replay this space as a dialogue between a user and the interface, which allows him/her to create data, but which also saves this data and publishes it without his/her knowledge. The interface of «T.I.P» consists of various elements which are active links.
These links are metaphors. They introduce fragments of spaces, or fragments of territories that we called «plateaux». By activating them, the user will be placed in interaction with various elements of the world of «T.I.P» , in this particular situation of the relationship with a the media digital interface.
Throughout the whole game, the user will be guided by «Pilot» which will be its relay in connection to the interface. Pilot will be his/her main interlocutor and his/her «compagnion». It is a key element in the formatting of the user's behaviour: in order to conform to the various requests of «T.I.P». In its role as a guide in the interface, it reveals the major underlying aspects of the relationship between the interface and the user: the psychological and physical adaptability of the user to the requests of the «machine».The traumatic lessons of the American (and its coalition partners) military interventions, from Operation Desert Fox against Iraq at the end of the 1980s to the present war in Iraq – Operation Freedom or The War Against Terror –, are that they signal a new era regarding the degree of visibility, dirtiness and number of causalities of postmodern military battles in which the attacking force operates under the constraint that it can sustain no casualties and that it can sustain no images of direct destruction, blood, or dead bodies. It is almost painful how much our lives are connected with prosthetic tools, technological and digital prosthesis and immaterial simulated environments, hiding the materiality of lives and agency. Therefore the questions posed by Meate’s project on interfaces and dialogues aim to create at least the possibility to rethink consciously and responsibly the global world, and digital arts as a social process (and not simply as a selling product), which will be capable also in the form of a game to “play hard” with our already diminished senses for responsibility and critical activity in the world.
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Meate: TIP The Interfacing Process
Meate’s position within the contemporary digital, hyper informational and immaterial, aka cyber networked condition of life and work, is precise. If I quote randomly from their texts we get the following slogans, credos and discursive interfaces: “computer perceived as a medium; codes that can be traceable; minds that can be downloaded into the computer; the digital environment that is a transmitter and a place for reproduction; agents seen as characters, etc.”(Meate)
These discursive interfaces depict an action of hope and terror at the same time. They propose a clear ethical stance in order to deal with structures of power, asking from us, its users, for a rather militant response to the constant process of fragmentation and particularization of the digital world and its processed information.
One of the questions Meate poses, is how can we define the basic elements of our contemporary digital and networked condition as artists, social activists and cyborg-political entities? How is it possible today to construct a new responsible activism and actions without a superficial morality and pathos? The following questions, based on Meate’s way of understanding agents, and quoting Yvonne Volkart, can be listed: “Which spaces do they cross when they communicate? What do they call themselves? Are they subjects,
cyborgs, monsters, scums, nomads or simply hackers?” (Volkart)
For the contemporary new media condition and its digital processing of life is important to understand that our experience of place, position, activity and art is an artificially driven and constructed experience. According to Peter Weibel, when McLuhan defined media as
an extension of man, he almost called it an artificial extension. And in this artificial media space, we see that the basic concept of how to construct space and time, agents and interfaces, are examples of a non-naturality. “The media world is dominated by non-
identity, or difference. The ‘real’ is replaced by virtual reality. Necessity is replaced by possibility or contingency.” (Weibel)
Although our senses and organs are channelled and mediated by an ideology of naturality, neglecting the artificiality of the media, we can learn today that we have the possibility of an artificial interface, which consist of the media. Therefore it is not difficult to understand Meate’s demand to think about the computer not as a tool, but as an artificial and politically embedded networking medium, not at all accessible to everyone in the world.
The traumatic lessons of the American (and its coalition partners) military interventions, from Operation Desert Fox against Iraq at the end of the 1980s to the present war in Iraq –Operation Freedom or The War Against Terror –, are that they signal a new era regarding
the degree of visibility, dirtiness and number of causalities of postmodern military battles in which the attacking force operates under the constraint that it can sustain no casualties and that it can sustain no images of direct destruction, blood, or dead bodies.
It is almost painful how much our lives are connected with prosthetic tools, technological and digital prosthesis and immaterial simulated environments, hiding the materiality of lives and agency. Therefore the questions posed by Meate’s project on interfaces and dialogues
aim to create at least the possibility to consciously and responsibly reflect upon the global world and on digital arts as a social process (and not simply as a selling product), which will be capable also in the form of a game to “play hard” with our already diminished senses for responsibility and critical activity in the world.
Marina Grzinic, philosopher, artist and professor, Ljubljana/Vienna
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