We examine the conditions and contingencies of apparatuses and applications and promote an understanding of the interface as a cultural and historical phenomenon.
Interface Critique is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0)
“[The book] is the interface for the exchange of authors and readers, the re-shaper of riveting oral stories into scrawled page-turners, the transformer of conversation into records and scripts.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Lindsey Drury and Nina Tolksdorf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2025 Die Redaktion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
#NOTALLDIGITALHUMANITIES: A Conversation
“If you step back to look at it, it’s basically interfaces all the way down.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Katherine Bode, Alexander Galloway https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The Half-Error of Physiognomy”, from François Dagognet, Faces, Surfaces, Interfaces (1982, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin), translated from the French by Nils F. Schott
Copyright (c) 2025 François Dagognet https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Pellicle and Portrait: A Historiography of Face, Race, and Interface in Media Theory (Thinking into the Cracks Between Lavater, Dagognet, & Galloway)
“A subterranean history tying portraiture, caricature, scientistic facial reading runs through historical theorisation of the interface.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Lindsey Drury https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Textual Criticism and Textual Transmission as History of Knowledge: Digital Annotations on De Interpretatione
“Similarly to a digital user interface, the medium of the codex allows certain interactions between the material object and the human beings who read and write it.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Michael Krewet, Philipp Hegel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Human Intuition and Computational Clustering: Tackling a Fluid Textual Tradition
“In a nutshell, such research constitutes an attempt of ‘catching a text on the move‘.“
Copyright (c) 2025 Beatrice Gruendler, Mahmoud Kozae https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Interface as a Locus of Knowledge Generation
“I see the interface as the space where people’s lived experience of the state is shaped.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Masiero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Data Practitioner as Author: Conversations with Data
“We need to consider data as a raw material for creation, in the same way we consider language as the material to create fiction, or paper and graphite as a material to create designs.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Jan-Erik Stange https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Conceptual Analogues: Coming to Terms with Data Visualisation
“Humanist data visualisation can make a profound contribution to stimulate a form of curiosity that recognizes and appreciates the entangled shimmer of the world.”
Copyright (c) 2025 Marian Dörk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
What Do We Discuss When We Discuss the Interface? A Conversation
“What does aesthetics as a kind of critical perceptual approach bring to our understanding of interface?”
Copyright (c) 2025 Johanna Drucker, Roberto Simanowski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2021 Die Redaktion https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2023 Daniel Irrgang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Inter|Face Experiments: FaceApp as Everyday AI
“FaceApp presents itself as a second-order experimental arrange- ment in which the pleasurable practice of experimenting with one’s own appearance, so invitingly provided by the user interface, is used to further develop the underlying surveillance technology.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Sabine Wirth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Cultures of Experimentation: Testing Infrastructures in the Web and Beyond
“Testing – and crucially: experimentally intervening by tweaking the environmental settings – becomes a feature of everyday life when people routinely interact with ‘smart’ devices and data-intensive media technologies that capture data about their use for constant interpretation and adaptation.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Timo Kaerlein https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Decontextualising ‘Science Fiction Prototyping’
“The ‘experiment’ has expanded and mutated into a global usability testing case.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Christoph Ernst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Introduction – Special Section: Interfaces as Experimental Arrangements
Christoph Ernst, Timo Kaerlein and Sabine Wirth: Introduction – Special Section: Interfaces as Experimental Arrangements
Copyright (c) 2023 Christoph Ernst, Timo Kaerlein, Sabine Wirth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Radio in Mind – A Conversation with Friedrich Knilli
“Inventions are repetitions. Inventions are things lying around somewhere as clutter. Whereas the existence of media is limitless. The needle that pierces, the process of a stitch, is not an invention, but a new existence.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Knilli, Lena Knilli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The sea is an environment to exercise the feeling of immersion and encounters. It evokes the embodied knowledge unknown to the screen surfaces.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Dora Đurkesac https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Pointing, Mutual Intelligibility, and the Seeing Subject in HCI
“Users, who select data objects by looking and pointing, are simultaneously also the objects being seen, selected, and acted upon by computers.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Jonathan Zang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Through the Autism Glass. Behaviourist Interfaces and the (Inter)Action Order
“Without the world becoming a sign, we do not possess it. And without the world becoming a sign, we cannot process it with a computer. In the sign, the world appears to us simultaneously as an object of cognition and of information processing. It is no wonder that the thought of artificial intelligence came up; the world constantly leads to signs. But we also have to attribute to the signs, the computational ones to begin with, the power to create the world from scratch.” – Frieder Nake
Copyright (c) 2023 Daniela Wentz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Cows are efficient machines for the transformation of grass into milk [...]. Man may not recognize his own project in the cow, he may forget that the cow is the result of his manipulation of reality according to his own model, and accept the cow as something that is somehow a ‘given’.” – Vilém Flusser.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Hana Yoo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The body structure which this paper is going to propose is a space-time continuum and therefore not easily executable in the traditional two-dimensional map form. [...] This is how it wants to be read: as a raw sketch to be translated into more adequate means of communication.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Vilém Flusser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The images in this section are the latest addition to Aleksandra Domanović’s exploration of the co-constitutive powers of the gaze that she has been developing for the past two years. Employing the Bezold-effect, an optical illusion that makes a color appear to change depending on its adjacent colors, the works illustrate the fraught distinction between seeing and perceiving, as well as the entangled object/observer relationship in Karen Barad’s account of the ultrasound. In their 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad analyzes the social, material and discursive changes that take place in the technological “seeing” of ultrasonography. There is no unambiguous way, they argue, to differentiate between the object and the agents of observation. Separated from both mother and fetus, the image of the ultrasound becomes the object, and we the viewers the agents of observation. The series of images and the previous text by Nina Franz are the result of an ongoing exchange between the artist and the author.
Copyright (c) 2023 Aleksandra Domanović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Tactility, Sound and Diagrammatics. Ultrasound Imaging as an Interface to the Womb
“Emphasizing the diagrammatic aspects of ultrasound images can help to form a more complete picture of the technological and discursive components that led to the construction of the ultrasound image.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Nina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“A community might exist as the non-networked, the gap between the lines, filled, extracted, and enhanced.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Kim Frederic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Which Operativity? On Political Aspects of Operational Images and Sounds
“‘Operational’ now turns out to be characterized by mutual connections and interdependencies, which is why this politically motivated and complicating concept is so useful for opening up the diverse interface processes that are in use today on a planetary scale.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Jan Distelmeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Try designing what can happen in an interface instead of just dividing screen real estate into compartments.”
Copyright (c) 2023 Johanna Drucker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“I believe I may venture to affirm that an intelligible relation, that is, a relation of thought, is created only by the act of representing it. [...] As Diagram, it excites curiosity as to the effect of a transformation of it.” – Charles S. Peirce (1906)
Copyright (c) 2023 Daniel Irrgang; Christoph Ernst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2021 Florian Hadler, Daniel Irrgang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Aesthetics of High-tech Intimidation. F-35 Lightning II and a Design for Human Reception
“They felt as secure as spectators at a bullfight; they risked their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited, picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away.” – H.G. Wells, The War in The Air (1908)
Copyright (c) 2021 Jan-Henrik Walter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Ambitopia and affective atmospheres. How world-building and cinema can help unpack ideology inside pervasive systems
“Who owns and controls the data infrastructure ? What is the relationship between the owners and the average participant? What are the interests that drive the use of power gained from data ownership?”
Copyright (c) 2021 Emilia Tapprest, Victor Evink https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The designer’s project in this sense is to imbue the machine with grounds for behaving in ways that are accountably rational; that is, reasonable or intelligible to others including, in the case of interaction, ways that are responsive to the others’ actions.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Lucy Suchman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2021 Josephine Pryde https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism
“Today, an Intelligent Machinery Question is needed to develop more collective intelligence about machine intelligence, more public education instead of ‘learning machines’ and their regime of knowledge extractivism […].”
Copyright (c) 2021 Matteo Pasquinelli, Vladan Joler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Working for Systems that Do Not Do the Work. Joana Moll’s The Hidden Life of an Amazon User
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” – Jeff Bezos
Copyright (c) 2021 Jussi Parikka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Girls and Their Cats: Zooms – High Resolution – Making a Difference
“High resolution image surfaces are overfull with data – pixels – and zooming in them is a process of inquiry that leads to meaningful and sensual exclusions, distortions or intensifications."
Copyright (c) 2021 Elisa Linseisen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Wellness Capitalism and the Design of the Perfect User
“Today, technological humanism replaces the Vitruvian Man with the Perfect User, who sits atop the hierarchy of all users. Mindful, intentional, healthy, disciplined, minimalist, designed: these features have become the ‘measure of all things’ for today’s aspirational user-subject.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Cherie Lacey, Alex Beattie, Catherine Caudwell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Flusser-Hypertext: “Electronic Book Prototype 2”
“I am but a pre-text for this work!” – Vilém Flusser (1991)
Copyright (c) 2021 Daniel Irrgang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
From “Interfacing Objects” to “Interface Things”? Material-Strategic Notes on the Smart Speaker Design
“The slick, cold, metallic ‘outer opaque shell’ that preserved the degree of the otherness of laptops and smartphones is replaced by forms and materialities evoking a familiar closeness, inevitably conjuring uncanny interfaces.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Konstantin Haensch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Plant Sonification. Its formations and media-ecological implications
The article "Plant Sonification. Its formations and media-ecological implications" by Katharina Groß was unpublished due to unmarked takeovers from the article "Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music" by Carlo Patrao.
Copyright (c) 2021 Katharina Groß https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“Here the skin surface will be considered a plane on which I happen to the world and the world happens to me.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Vilém Flusser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Are there material metaphors? A comment on Marianne van den Boomen’s interface theory
“The question of how practices are configured in interfaces is undoubtedly a key question in interface theory. But are we doing ourselves a favour by explaining interface arrangements or interface processes as material metaphors? ”
Copyright (c) 2021 Christoph Ernst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Conversations on cinema and media archaeology
Copyright (c) 2021 Thomas Elsaesser, Siegfried Zielinski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
How a technical innovation in ancient textile industry pioneered a new way of thinking
“As early as the 1st millennium BC, the innovative idea to cut into fabric laid the foundation for new, efficient production concepts, extensively restructured the craft and established a new distinguished discipline: the construction of patterns."
Copyright (c) 2021 Ulrike Beck, Martin Jess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Gestalt of AI: Beyond the Holism-Atomism Divide
“One could therefore argue that neural networks do not only produce outputs that humans perceive as Gestalten, but that, as statistical models, they internally already operate according to a Gestalt logic.”
Copyright (c) 2021 Hannes Bajohr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Regimes on Newness: An Essay of Comparative Physiognomy
In this observation, we may think that the art regime, in reality, exhibits an intriguing case of being a specific interface consisting of different sub-regimes that demonstrate different criteria for newness.
Copyright (c) 2019 Masato Fukushima https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The subject in these drawings is not identifying itself via the mirror anymore, but has become one with the mirror, the screen, the interface, resulting in exposure and self-determination at once.
Copyright (c) 2019 Julia Heldt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Without control, unintended consequences could be far worse. [...] So you could make the argument that the fact that it’s under people’s control is a good thing. You may regret who controls it, but at least as it’s controlled by someone, there is some mechanism for change.
Copyright (c) 2019 Katriona Beales, William Tunstall-Pedoe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Meet the Machine: The Sideman 5000 Edition
Freeing the Sideman from its heavy wooden con nes is like discovering a baroque electromechanical universe.
Copyright (c) 2019 Darsha Hewitt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The development of communication itself is now the development of its means; in particular, its technical means.
Copyright (c) 2019 Frieder Nake https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Still be here. The Multiplicity of Hatsune Miku
Name: Hatsune Miku Release: August 31, 2007. Age: 16 years. Height: 158cm / 5ft 2in. Weight: 42kg / 93lb. Suggested Genre: Pop, rock, dance, house, techno, crossover. Suggested Tempo Range: 70–150bpm. Suggested Vocal Range: A3–E5, B2–B3.
Copyright (c) 2019 Laurel Halo, Mari Matsutoya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Taking Part. Two Steps towards Networked Computerization
That is why the term interface is so fruitful today: It helps addressing a variety of efficacious operations – from the material basis of all sorts of computers and networks up to the educational and epistemological or ideological guidance by user interfaces showing and instructing me what to do.
Copyright (c) 2019 Jan Distelmeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
From Artefacts to Interfaces: Gui Bonsiepe and the Redefinition of Industrial Design
Thus, not only the Opsroom, but also the dosing mechanism of a sowing machine could now be understood as an interface: it had to be readable and understandable, it had to convey a sense of the possible uses of the machine and provide access to its operative resources, and in doing so, it structured a common sphere of communication and interaction between people and their artefacts.
Copyright (c) 2019 Roland Meyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Auditory Interfaces in Maritime Navigation Practice, 1900–1930
Copyright (c) 2019 Christoph Borbach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
It is, of course, well-known that creation and destruction are complementary processes. But there are further similarities between Wiener’s œuvre and the Hubble telescope.
Copyright (c) 2019 Nils Röller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Notes from the Labyrinth, or: The Infinite Web
Surfing the web is, thus, one more possible way of existing – a recent possibility that has, to be sure, created new frameworks of meaning in light of which human beings must now interpret and shape their existences.
Copyright (c) 2019 Filipa Cordeiro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2019 Anthony Masure https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Who controls an interface? It is certainly not the user, no matter how hard the corporate rhetoric insists on that.
Copyright (c) 2019 Kalli Retzepi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Starcity, MIR Simulator. And other Artistic Investigations
Copyright (c) 2019 Armin Linke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature
The question then is: what kinds of conceptual and artistic frameworks will help us understand the implications of our participation in the hybrid human-technical systems that have become essential to contemporary life in developed countries?
Copyright (c) 2019 N. Katherine Hayles https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
American Psycho. Reading an Algorithm in Reverse
Google serves instant soup-ads while Bateman cooks a woman’s head, or suggests anti-wrinkle-products while he skins his victims.
Copyright (c) 2019 Karl Wolfgang Flender https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Special Section: Interface and the Post-industrial Society
The following four essays are based on a workshop of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) working group on Interfaces that took place during the annual conference of the GfM at the university of Siegen in September 2018.
Copyright (c) 2019 Jan Distelmeyer, Timo Kaerlein, Christoph Ernst, Roland Meyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Mobilizing Post-industrial Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction as Aesthetic Practice
Often against their own intentions, the pioneers of human-compu- ter interaction nd themselves at the forefront of the development of entirely new ways to control and programme the productivity of an increasingly mobile and exible workforce.
Copyright (c) 2019 Timo Kaerlein https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Natural User Interfaces and the Imagination of Post-Industrial Warfare: A Brief Look at Bladerunner 2049
Blade Runner 2049 gives us a hint how to imagine the future of warfare. According to the lm, post-industrial society will be a ‘post-human’ society.
Copyright (c) 2019 Christoph Ernst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” – Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1935.
Copyright (c) 2019 Florian Hadler, Daniel Irrgang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Drawing connections – how interfaces matter
“[...] interfaces carry – in every sense of the word – the global computerization of living conditions.”
Copyright (c) 2018 Interface critique https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transgressions at the post office counter
"The counter, thus, was not a space where a simple difference – between clerks and customers, internal and external, operational and public – was established but where a complex and seemingly ambivalent system of mutually dependent acts of openings and closings were enforced to keep business up and running safe."
Interface Mythologies – Xanadu unraveled
"We are seduced by the interface into neglecting the work behind it, and the operationalization and instrumentalization of dreams that takes place. The interface appears mythical, absolute and frozen."
"I know that there are some who would like to better understand and take control of their device — for reasons of security, curiosity, or the desire for personal customization and hackability."
"Just as flight instruments are means of reconciling the subjective experience of flight to a reality that might contradict it, the exhibition seeks to bring a heightened awareness of controlled environments and to mediate the tension between structured information and intuitive decisions."
Rich user experience, UX and the desktopization of war
"'Don’t call them Icons,' the team leader encouraged her, 'call them User Experience!' And his laughter sunk in with everybody else's.."
There is no interface (without a user). A cybernetic perspective on interaction
"Interaction is seen as a one-way street, conveying a design model to a user, who is acting by that model either because they adapted to it, or because the model replicates their given structure. This is the cognitivist heritage of the HCI discourse responsible for the idea that interfaces can actually be designed."
Commons for cartography: How social computing changes the design of interfaces
"The transformation of the map into an interface medium has not only changed the use and aesthetics of maps, but has also caused a new spatial perception."
Gestalt-ideas at the interface between theory and pratice
"Stories and technologies: two objects of knowledge- inquiry heretofore strictly separated from each other in our knowledge-culture, now brought together as a single object of inquiry, rethought from scratch as a paradoxical hybrid union [...]"
The conceptual debts and assets of the interface
"There is a growing need to rethink the notion of interface within a broader conceptual perspective, but it is important to be wary of calling for an interface philosophy based on technological enthusiasm and, more particularly, on a variety of metaphors derived from technical terms or marketing jargon—one that often tries to impose itself on discussions about technically mediated communication."
"Instead of trying to induce immersion by presenting ever more realistic image spaces, interfaces of immersive media have to address the body by enabling kinaesthetic action."
Applied metaphysics – objects in object-oriented ontology and object-oriented programming
"As computer science works on domain-specific models in order to find solutions to practical problems, employing models of the world, informatics is – like any proper science – applied metaphysics."
Automobile and information: the self, the automobile and technology
"[…] it is almost as if a new kind of existence had occured: the consciousness-like machine, the selflike automobile, a perfect human-machine team, an existential partnership between disturbances and fears, between mechanical actions and human reactions, between signals and impulses, noises and decisions."
Art and apparatus (a Flusserian theme). Plea for the dramatisation of the interface
"[…] in the age of Baroque the crystal chandeliers with their myriads of light refractions that hung from the ceilings of palaces functioned as an interface through which the cosmos became imaginable from out of the straits of the private and personal sphere."
"[…] the apparatus does what man wants it to do, and men can only want to do what the apparatus can do. In fact: apparatus and man form a single functional unit."
Editorial text of Interface Critique vol. 1