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\begin{document}


\title{What Is Interface Aesthetics, or What Could It Be (Not)?}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{9/5/2007}

\maketitle

What is interface aesthetics, what could it be, or perhaps: what could
it be not? There is, first of all, a colloquial common sense
understanding of the term that is best illustrated through screenshots:

\begin{itemize}

\item the aesthetics of Windows

\item versus the aesthetics of Windows Vista

\item versus the aesthetics of Mac OS X

\item versus the Macintosh from 1984

\item which borrowed from the Xerox Star

\item in contrast to the command line interface of Unix

\item and its counterpart in 1980s homecomputers such as the 
Sinclair ZX-81 and ZX Spectrum

\item whose aesthetic has been artistically resurrected in the work
``All wrongs reversed'' by jodi

\item \ldots artists who had experimented with the aesthetic of
operating system and browser user interfaces jodi earlier, for example
in their work OSS

\item as opposed to the likewise fictitious spinning, blinking and
beeping in-your-face 3D operating system user interfaces in Hollywood
movies as summed up in the Wikipedia article ``Hollywood OS''.

\end{itemize}

While these are powerful, influential and passionately discussed
examples of interface aesthetics, they merely represent a part of it
that too often gets mistaken for the whole. Interfaces are more  than
just user interfaces, and aesthetics means more than just look and feel.

\section{What is an interface?}

Literally, interface means something in between. The term
originated in chemistry where it means, according to Webster's
dictionary, ''a surface forming a common boundary of two bodies, spaces,
phases``. In computing, interfaces could be defined as anything that
acts as a common boundary or link in a cybernetic feedback loop
either between machine components or between humans and machines. Since
the machine called computer differentiates itself into hardware and
software, interfaces can thus link:

\begin{itemize}

\item hardware to hardware, such as CPU sockets, buses like PCI and USB;
\item hardware to software. A good example is the Windows key on PC
keyboards, or multimedia controller keys that no longer physically
\url{http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/5940/6964/hollywood-technology-useability-movies-wrong.phtml}
control audio hardware, but act as front-ends to software controls, CPU
instruction sets such as x86 that no longer correspond to the internal CPU design,
but act as software compatibility layer;
\item software to hardware; the classical examples are operating system
kernels and drivers;
\item software to software: plugin interfaces, file formats, protocols,
and most generally: application programming interfaces (APIs), i.e.
interfaces used between computer programs such as C standard library
API, Unix system calls or the DOM/Javascript API in Webbrowsers;
\item humans to hardware: keyboards, mice, screen and audio feedback, 
any controller and feedback device;
\item human to software: user interfaces.
\end{itemize}

Out of these six possible interfacings, media studies tend privilege if
not limit themselves to the latter. One could call this phenomenon ``the
restrained interface'', deliberately borrowing from the French literary
theoretician Gerard Genette and his notion of ``the restrained
rhetoric''. Genette observes how modern rhetoric and literary studies
from Giambattista Vico to structuralism had gradually reduced its notion
of rhetoric to merely figures of speech, and finally just to the single
figure of metaphor. The similarity to contemporary media studies is all
the more striking considering that the restraint of interface to
graphical human-to-software-user interfaces is conversely linked to a
focus on visual metaphors implemented in those interfaces.\footnote{Such
as in {laurel:interface}.} 

Another problem is that the notion of the user interface is restrained
in itself, since it is based on a politics of artificially separating
``users'' from ``developers'' based on different priviliges of access to
machines functionality granted by those interfaces. The differentiation
of user and programming interface -- in programmer lingo: UI and API --
is purely conventional, and hence arbitrary. In 8-bit BASIC computers
like the SInclair ZX Spectrum, on the Unix command line, in MIT's Lisp
machines and even in Alan Kay's initial graphical Smalltalk system, the
user interface was also a programming interface and vice versa. Live
Coding, such as in Adrian Ward's and Alex McLean's Perl-based musical
performances or in jodi's ZX Spectrum video, shows how an API can be
employed as a user interface.

And of course, aesthetic notions exist just as well for
software-to-software interfaces, hardware-to-software,
software-to-hardware and hardware-to-hardware interfaces. 
The search term ``ugly API'' currently yields [\ldots] Google search
result, ``beautiful API'' [\ldots]. Similar results can be found when
researching Internet flamewars on the beauty or ugliness of other
technology, in the sense of: beauty and ugliness of the internal,
logical design. This brings us into the field of mathematical,
scientific and engineering aesthetics that has existed since Pythagoras
equated the musical octave in its beauty to the division of numbers by
two. Beauty and ugliness, as judgments of taste, however bring us into
the realm of aesthetics. [Fludd, Monochord]



\section{What is aesthetics?} 

Judgments of taste of course involve more than just beauty and ugliness
and, to come back to my initial screenshots, more than just look and
feel. Ever since the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the term
aesthetics in 1735, the concept has been philosophically understood in a
much farther reaching
anthropological sense as:

\begin{enumerate}

\item theory of perception

\item theory of judgments of taste. Classicist aesthetics focused on
beauty -- which its more sophisticated theorists from Winckelmann to
Walter Pater always understood as a
inherent tension between consonance and dissonance --, other
theories of art from Pseudo-Longinus to romanticism and postmodernism
tended to focus on such aesthetic categories of the sublime, the ugly,
the disgusting, the obscene.

\item theory of art, notably since Hegel, and thus encompassing
older-than-18th century philosophies of beauty and art, such as
Pythagorean philosophy and Neoplatonism.

\end{enumerate}

In other words, not much is gained if one broaden ones focus from the
restrained interface to a more comprehensive technical and cultural
understanding of computer interfaces if one ends up discussing what is
an ugly or a beautiful API, thus buying into the post-Pythagorean
fallacy of art as conceptual beauty of technical design. It is
just another restrained concept of interface
aesthetics because it reduces of art to beauty and of aesthetics to
theory of beauty, with the implication that beauty is good and ugliness
is bad.

Such equations are turned upside down in concepts of the ``hack'' as an
ugly, yet efficient and ingenious fix, and in art like jodi's which
honors the ugliness of software [pic]. Alexei Shulgin's projects 386 DX
and Fuck-U-Fuck Me
\url{http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/fuck-u-fuck-me}, for example,
point out and value ugliness and obscenity of hardware-to-user
interfaces, too. Edmund Burke's 18th century ``Investigation of Our
Notions of the Sublime and Beautiful'' names pleasure and pain, terror,
obscruity, suddenness among the registers of aesthetic perception, and
here they also turn into pleasure and pain of the hardware interface,
terror of the desktop, obscurity of the API, and so on. In other words,
the more sophisticated strands of digital art supplemented the
post-Pythagorean engineering aesthetic of the beautiful interface that
had likewise governed the institutional mainstream of electronic arts,
with a reflection of the computational sublime. Which of course seems to
perfectly match Jean-François Lyotard's identification of the sublime
experience to a postmodern ``incommensurability of reality'', a
condition for which he all the more accounts computational information
technology. 

A problem, however, is that the mere notion of computer interface
aesthetics contradicts textbook aesthetic theory.  It is completely
outside the conceptual framework of, for example, Kant's Critique of
Judgement and Hegel's aesthetics since it neither involves perception of
nature, nor of art, being instead about the perception and judgment of
determinist logical systems. As such, it conflates the aesthetic with
what Kant considered to be its opposite when he writes in the  Critique
of Judgement:

\begin{quote}
``That which is purely
subjective in the representation of an object, i.e., what constitutes
its reference to the subject, not to the object, is its aesthetic
quality. On the other hand, that which in such a representation serves,
or is available, for the determination of the object (for or purpose of
knowledge), is its logical validity.''
\end{quote}

Technological aesthetics, thus short-circuits, or reconciles Kant's
opposites of knowledge and judgements of taste, respectively of logic
and aesthetics. That used to be its hack and punk appeal. 

But what remains when that appeal has worn off?  Even an interface
aesthetics that reflects user interface \emph(and) API, hardware
\emph{and} software, beauty \emph{and} ugliness might be unsatisfying as
a more comprehensive theory of art. In the worst case, it boils down to
glorification of new technology as the better contemporary art, be it in
iPod lifestyle, Web 2.0 hype or media theoretical glorification of CPU
instruction sets.  None of this is provocative anymore like Marinetti's
saying that a racing car is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrake
used be, but is in mainstream accordance with the ideology of
``creative industries'' supplanting autonomous arts. 

If experimental digital art is seen as its mere antithesis, and playful
subversion of interfaces, one runs danger of reducing it to the role of
the court jester of those industries.

Yet interface aesthetics might have its place as a critical perspective on
both media theories and computer science right because of its insistence on the
``aisthesis'', perceivability of the linking agent in cybernetic
feedback. If an API can be as ugly as a GUI, it means that it is also a
user interface. Unlike a conventional engineering angle, an aesthetics
perspective thus can shed light on the arbitrary political nature of
interface conventions. The restraint of the notion of the interface just
corresponds to the technical restraints in the interface proper.  This
stil means that ``interface aesthetics'' remains a limited subset of
aesthetics which will never be sufficient for a critical perspective on
electronic arts, but a seductive trap for critiques to get caught in.
Perception and subjective judgments of taste as a whole cannot be
reduced to cybernetic feedback unless one buys into behaviorism and
naive ideologies of artificial intelligence and artificial life. 

In short, the issue seems to be that, for someone whose primary interest
is aesthetics and the arts, not computing, the study of the beauty, the
ugly and the absurd of computers has some hack appeal, but gets dull
sooner or later because it's about deterministic systems whose states
are finite.  This why researching interface aesthetics is not something
I would like to do for the rest of my life. 

Aside from that, an even more serious issue lurks behind such an
approach. Ever since the late Heidegger applied existential philosophy
to technology, to the effect that technology became an a priori of the
human condition rather than a human product, there is a technological
sublime that many media theories have subscribed to. As second nature,
technology aesthetically takes the place both of Kant's natural
beautiful and his mathematical and dynamic sublime.  We are, in other
words, no longer overwhelmed by mountain ranges or thunderstorms, but
for example by the pervasiveness of computing. If, with Lyotard, the
sublime experience of computing thus becomes postmodern experience of
incommensurability of reality, it obscures the fact that this particular
reality (i.e. the reality of computing) is based on constructed policies
and can be hacked. 

There are ways out of those dilemmas. One would be a simple shift from
``interface aesthetics'' to an ``aesthetics of interfacing'', in other
words, towards a  
perception anthropology of \emph{practices} instead of systems.
The 386DX software and hardware interface for example might be dull by
itself, 
its musical output, too, but Alexei Shulgin's rock star
performance which interfaces with it isn't. 

But this should not mean to subscribe to
an aesthetics of social practices either. Theodor Adorno's aesthetic
theory remains, in my opinion, an outstanding critical achievement in
its refusal to bless either practices or objects -- respectively
the autonomy or sociality of art --, putting them instead into an
aporia of a negative dialectics that produces no synthesis and trying to
``break the coercive character of logic with its own
means''.\footnote{Minima moralia, p. 199}
For Adorno, 

\begin{quote}
``The dual nature of artworks as autonomous structures and
social phenomena results in oscillating criteria: Autonomous works
provoke the verdict of social indifference and ultimately of being
criminally reactionary; conversely, works that make socially univocal
discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves'' 
\end{quote}

Just as this dialectic  implies a critique Kant's and Hegel's concepts
of natural beauty, it means that technology --
including GUIs, APIs, protocols, instruction sets etc. --
by itself isn't very exciting from the point of view of a critical
aesthetics. Its objecthood, without any artistic intervention, is
``creative industries'' territory,\footnote{The meme of the creative
industries should however not be mixed up with Adorno's and Horkheimer's
notion of the cultural industries -- since it's not about the
entertainment industrialization of art, but the idea that industrial
product design aesthetically supplants and obsoletes autonomous art.}
lacking the negative dialectical pole of critical autonomy and
asociality.  In this context discussed here, this critical quality is
only achied through the aesthetic interfacing by artists like jodi and
Shulgin; a quality which resists recuperation into what an alliance of
techno-existentialist media studies and the so-called creative
industries might have in mind with``interface aesthetics'' or the
``aesthetic interface''.



\end{document}
