For this assignment, I had a hard time trying to find something that both incorporated a compelling interface with different forms of accessibility and had a more queer focus. I found a curated art project on the Center of Art and Thought’s website called Queer Sites and Sounds. Though Drucker states that “The field of visual epistemology draws on alternative histories of images produced primarily to serve as expressions of knowledge. For the study of graphesis, attention to fine art images will be largely left aside in favor of attending to the vast array of visual work produced for the purposes of interpretation or analysis in other fields” (17). So with this, I know I’m somewhat moving away from what Drucker is attempting to look at in her work, but I was captivated by this project by how it plays with time and representation of “fine art” online in a very queer presentation.

The curated work draws from various types of media. According to the artist statement at the top of the page: “Queer Sites and Sounds will feature digital artwork, videos, audio recordings, scholarship, and writing that question the ways that we think of ‘queer’ as an embodied identity and ‘queer’ as it relates to narrative and digital forms and digital literacies.” This project is very much engaging with how the queer meets the digital. This project translates queerness from various perspectives and through different forms. Queerness is defined in the artist statement as “’queer’ is defined broadly to include non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g., LGBTQ, bakla, and tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g.,  ‘kitsch,’ ‘spectacle,’ and ‘camp’) that challenge and go beyond how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood.” This project both challenges artistic forms and presentation as well as larger socio-political representations of queer bodies.

I both like the range of different types of media as well as the way they are presented on the site “Unlike real-time, real-world exhibitions in which the works are revealed all at once and often in a singular space, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds will unfold on CA+T’s website in stages.” The Queer Sites and Sounds exhibit is very much addressing the way that “high” art is often located and revealed in a single space, but this approach makes these images differently accessible online. They are not arranged in any linear fashion, but instead fit into its own non-linear queer temporality. 

“It is impossible to express by words the glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which were softened into the beauty of this object. Nature’s ideal butterfly was here realized in all its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to disport themselves with.” -Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

I get to this line. Stomach-pit-usual, I see the word perfect when perfect and I always have words, but can never get our stories straight. For whom do you make your objects shine? What is the insight of a butterfly when there is one butterfly and we are one butterfly, skipping on screen, and all our wings are engorged and tipped and we are one stepping horde and aren’t we fucking beautiful? Are you beautiful today?

“Most computer technologists don’t like to discuss it, but the importance of beauty is a consistent (if sometimes inconspicuous) thread in the software literature. Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology. … Beauty is important in engineering terms because software is so complicated…. Beauty is our most reliable guide to achieving software’s ultimate goal: to break free of the computer, to break free conceptually…. But as we throw off the limits, what guides us? How do we know where to head? Beauty is the best guide we have.”-Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

And now I know today’s laugh, like any other chortled beast: beautybeautybeauty, shineshineshineshineshineSHINE why can’t shine, why shine always sits in your gullet, and I reach for Beauty is a Verb like a lifeboat- all enacts in water. My body is an interface. My body is broken and unable to perform to specifications. It’s user friendly qualities are affixed to other spheres, so bodies without bodies because they are butterfly choose butterfly. A tome called one so they said no. I read “An Amputee’s Guide To Sex” by Jillian Weise and I don’t have anything left of this, I don’t have anything:

“Foreplay: To create an uninhibited environment for your partner, track their hands like game pieces on a board. For leg amputees, keep arms on upper body. For arm amputees, keep arms on lower body. Engage with like limbs. Keep half limbs out of reach. Your goal is to achieve a false harmony with their body

Sex: Mobility is key. If they see the half-limb then they become inhibited, nervous. They think, ‘Will it hurt like this? Would she tell me if it did?’ Mobility shows confidence. Think for two people. Know where your limbs are at all times; know where your partner’s limbs are at all times.”

…..I am 10 and my mother buys a one handed keyboard that I throw it into the garden. My mother is always the brunt of my beauty. I am always throwing interfaces into gardens; today will this screen be enough? My body is among the grass while I’m in the kitchen, red, learning to type to proper specification. Will I shineshineshine do I need some slicked-back-oil, do I need this other body yet or can we have 5 more minutes of some useless sex? As I hitched silicone to skin, my arm is in the yard but it is not mine. But it is interface, touch when my touch is without wing, without user friendly guidelines hitched to the umbilical cord, ok, I’d really like some fucking guidelines right now, is it for me? A gift of myself. Does my screen make you slit throat- get better beauty standards to define your technological specifications.

“Did you abdicate to beauty or pain? Say pain. It is easier for me to understand.”-Jillian Weise Think for all the walls and wrench yourself to pieces. Is one missing, they’ll say. These optional readings and I am always this: a relegated object, a relegated body, I am broken and I don’t have time, don’t take up time in their butterfly-classroom, take this talking arm with you on/for every occasion: I, or am I the way my stump swings? Don’t touch a crime scene, don’t talk to strangers, when every day the stump speaks and it say something different. Unwholesome mouth. Interact with me if you choose, but if a better scale comes along, I am slit throat. Am I in the room today?

“I want to be another poet. I want to be any other poet but me.”

 

Since my final project is an archive, I’ve been thinking about archive interfaces a lot lately.  We tend to think (at least I do) of this type of interface as one with relatively few “layers”, given that, operationally speaking, the function of an archive is relatively low in terms of interactivity.  With that being said, though, working on composing an archive has illustrated to me that the archive interface’s organization is almost as important as the contents it displays.  Because interface has high stakes for a project as the “bounded representational system possessed of its own ontological integrity and legitimacy” (Kirschenbaum), an archive project- as a collection of carefully chosen objects- is particularly in need of an interface suited to users’ experience of it.

So with this in mind, I chose an online archive that I use regularly, past episodes of “This American Life”: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives. When I use it, I experience equal parts admiration and frustration.  The collection, firstly, is gargantuan, including every weekly episode (both audio and transcript versions) aired since 1995.  Second, users can manipulate the organization of the archive by category (date, staff favorites, tags, locations), which enhances the interactivity of the interface to some extent.  My frustrations with the interface exist only when I access it on my phone, which issues would be mended by purchasing the app, but…. I’m not gonna do that.  My primary frustration- namely, the “back” button leads you to the program’s most recent episodes, regardless of the previously visited page- is a feature that seems (presumably) calculated by the designer to point user focus towards the show’s newer material.  I think this is interesting in light of today’s readings:  we must assume that digital interfaces like these can’t be “ontologically decoupled from whatever ‘content’ [they] happen to embody” (Kirsch.).  Such is true with the interface of an archive: user experience depends on an awareness that the construction of a digital archive (and the motivations therein) is inevitably reflected in the interface’s functionality.

This is a Bop It:

Remember Bop It?! Great game. It has a speaker and it would command you to either “bop it,” “twist it,” or “pull it.” The player’s responsibility was to bop the Bop It button, twist the twistable lever, or pull the pullable handle when commanded. Remember this.

And look! A Simon! This game was far more cerebral than Bop It. When the game started, one of the colored quadrants would light up and play a specific tone. The player would press that quadrant. Each round, an additional quadrant would light up, and the player would have to repeat the whole order to advance. A kind of memory game.

The point is: interfaces negotiate physical action. Even the supposedly abstract interfaces of computer screens require physical engagement—seeing, reading, thinking. Despite these being largely sedentary, motionless tasks, they are physical.

An interface also refers back to the physical. Digital spatial arrangements can trace their roots to linear texts (books, encoded punchcards from early computers and their roots in handwritten logic and mathematical proofs); computer GUIs are drawn from a variety of influences including the filmic, library and scientific organizational/filing systems; with enhanced screen resolutions and processing speeds we even see visual arts and ideas of “realistic” spatial relations and physics intruding—think of modern video games, or the seemingly “real” way that icons on a computer screen slow down and stop when you drag them.

I think it’s easy to lose sight that the interface is not flat, shallow, or Other than the physical. And the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more we’re learning to meld the physical into the ephemeral-seeming digital interface. The Bop It and Simon did this through the concept of a game. The virtual commands required tactile responses. They were not very sophisticated—push this button, pull this lever—but they created the sense of spontaneous play in the absence of a physical person. Our devices are becoming tactile on a far more complicated level. Take the iPhone:

 (In case you don’t know what one looks like)

A recent advent is the inclusion of fingerprint recognition on the home button. You can now unlock the phone without looking at it. This has created a new sense of a deeply, physically personal portal to our abstract world—clouds, networks, waves, signals.

I don’t have to tell you that the smartphone creates a novel physical experience. The vision of people walking around holding phones—whatever you think it says about people’s inner lives—is a new phenomenon, one derived from the appeal of the digital interface but enhanced (exacerbated?) and enabled by the way that interface melds into/corresponds with/comments on its physical interface (small, lightweight, portable, attractive, sleek, etc.).

Part of the genius of the smartphone is that, with sufficient computing power, it consolidates most of the visual/digital interfaces we’ve come up with to date (books, video games, web pages, calculators, cameras, televisions, maps, etc., etc., etc.,)—and does so in a physically convenient way. I feel I’ve rambled, but I just wanted to maybe suggest that there’s a lot more to the interface than graphic/spatial design; that interface accords in deep and powerful ways to our notions and preferences regarding the physical; that our collective imagination’s ideal for interface has always tended toward a sort of collapsing of digital and physical (The Matrix, Tron, Minority Report, The Purple Rose of Cairo); and that, in practice, the physical is invading the digital just as much as the other way around.