Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018
248 pp., illus. 39 b/w. Trade, $30.00
ISBN: 9780262037945.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/metainterface
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 Søren 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.
“Andersen and Pold’s The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds is a book that marks the material and cultural effects of the metainterface on our lives; it defines the metainterface relative to precursors, locates its aesthetics within net art, software art, and electronic literature, and maps the paradigm’s influence on culture, the way we see and interact with cities, and the design of interfaces.”
Alex Fleck, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics
In all this is a fascinating book, full of examples of software art, film, photography and other media arts practice, that skillfully develops a materially, socially and politically grounded critique of interface culture. 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.
Andrew Prior, Leonardo
By extending and renewing approaches to the interface, The Metainterface deftly engages with the proliferation of computational encounters from cities to apps. Andersen and Pold demonstrate how interfaces are infrastructures that constitute distinct grammars of action.
Jennifer Gabrys, Endorsement
Christian Ulrik Andersen 