Interfaciality
The Big Idea…
The human face acts as an communicative intermediary between the body and the outside environment. In a similar way users interact with machines via a constructed interface. In Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics Anna Munster challenges traditional notions of interface in the chapter Interfaciality: From the Friendly Face of Computing to the Alien Terrain of Informatic Bodies. Munster proposes two routes by which new media technology is dealing with issues of facialization in HCI. One route is characterized by filling all interactions between body and machine the second route is characterized by the dissolve between human and computer.
Mapping…
Processing the text through a cluster mapping exercise has helped to organize main ideas, supplementary details, sources, and reflections after reading excerpts from Materializing New Media. This map will help structure my final essay which will discuss new media’s influential role in redefining HCI.
Next Steps…
Reading excerpts of referenced texts including… Brenda Laurel (The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, 1990), Donald Norman (Why Interfaces Don’t Work contained within Laurel’s book), Nicolas Negroponte (Being Digital, 1995), Felix Guattari (Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture, 1996)
Becoming familiar with the work of artists… Stelarc, Rokeby (in particular Very Nervous System, 1986), and Diane Ludin (in particular Memory Flesh, 2004)
Gaining a general understanding the work of philosophers Deleuze and Descartes and their relation to embodiment.
