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FEEDBACK, AGENCY, INTERFACE, IMMERSION [The interface is] "the locus of communication between two systems, applied to either hardware or software or a combination of both. --Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993). Feedback characterizes "any art that either makes or elicits a response, whether from its own operations, its environment, the system in which it is embedded or to which it is attached, or from the user/viewer." -Charlie Gere, post to New Media Curating discussion list 9.3.04 "to the extent that meaning is always already a construct,... agency is necessary for the completion of a circuit which may or may not occur. Agency always produces circuitry. ... So it is a question of history and the history of agency. The self-negation of codework occurs within this history and this agency..."
-Alan Sondheim, essay Codework Self-Negated, 2005 "It looked as if a common pattern could be given to account for human behavior and controlled machine behavior in this case..., and that it depended on negative feedback." - Norbert Weiner, on cybernetics in essay Men, Machines, and the World About, 1954 "The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation, as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside." It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art." - Jack Burnham, essay The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems, 1970 A.R. Stone:
I think that people are beginning to realize that the definition of interface that we grew up with, like a GUI ['graphic user interface'], is way too narrow to contain what's actually going on. You can look at interface, first of all, as anything across which agency changes form, and that's a better way to look at it. Like when your self is actually pouring out through your fingers to somewhere else in the world [on-line]. And the interface is the thing that mediates between them. Questioner:
So where is the interface? In so-called cyberspace?
A.R. Stone:
"Where is the interface?" is an unanswerable question.
Questioner:
Or "What is the interface?"
A.R. Stone:
That's an unanswerable question, too. I mean, an interface is a metaphor. We used to think of it as a physical object, a keyboard...but interfaces are metaphors, and they stand in for absent structures, and the absence is the important word here, they're ABSENT structures. They're not where you could see them. It doesn't even mean that they are inside the machine, but they're in an elsewhere. And you can call that cyberspace, or you can call it symbolic exchange - there are lots of words that you can use for interfaces. But they work, anyway, they have tremendous power...
-from an interview with Allucquere Rosanne Stone,
Mondo 2000 magazine, circa 1992
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