Wiki – Laboratoire Ex situ / René Audet

Référence : GALLOWAY, Alexander R., The Interface Effect, Polity, 2012, 200 p.

Synthèse : Focalisé sur la question de l’interface (à relier peut-être avec le travail de Samuel Archibald) mais pas précisément porté sur la question du livre, cet ouvrage saura intéresser pour sa dimension d’expérientialité. Son apport est entre autre adoubé par Katherine Hayles, qui le qualifie d’essentiel (voir 2e compte rendu).

Mots-clés : Expérientialité, Interface, Aesthetic, Video Games, Software, Television, Painting, Media Studies

Langue : Anglais

Format : Papier

Description existante : « Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer. Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface. », trouvé sur http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745662528.html, consulté le 20 juin 2017.

Compte rendu existant : JAGODA, Patrick, « As its title suggests, Galloway’s newest book concerns media interfaces. To its credit, it provides neither a formal definition nor an exhaustive taxonomy of this concept. An interface, Galloway argues, is not a stable object; it is a multiplicity of processes. In other words, an interface is not merely a laptop LCD or a television screen. It is not the Windows 8 operating system or Mac OS X. It is not a hypermediated heads-up display of the contemporary videogame with its myriad forms of information (health levels, map position, speed, time, messaging options, and so on). Galloway mentions many such objects in The Interface Effect, but does not dwell on them. In the first place, he observes, media studies scholars have too often privileged screens and displays. This disproportionate focus on visual interfaces ignores other critical objects, such as “nonoptical interfaces (keyboard, mouse, controller, sensor); data in memory and data on disk; executable algorithms; networking technologies and protocols; and the list continues.” But it’s not merely that media studies has been focusing on the wrong objects; it goes wrong, Galloway claims, by sticking to the matter and form of objects at all. An interface, for Galloway, is “not a thing”; it is “always an effect” — a technique of mediation or interaction. The conceptual move here departs from the object-centered approach taken by critics such as McLuhan, for whom media objects are technological extensions of the human body; and his position differs, too, from Kittler’s contention that media objects carry their own technical logics that only intersect obliquely and occasionally with human perceptions. Galloway draws from a different philosophical tradition, including thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, which “views techne as technique, art, habitus, ethos, or lived practice.” In this view, media are not “objects or substrates” but rather “practices of mediation.” While his approach risks casting too wide a net (what, we might ask, is not mediation?), it also promotes a form of thought that is open to ongoing interactions that unfold in complex systems. Thus, Galloway’s method shifts attention from stable interface objects to dynamic interface processes. A computer, from this perspective, is no longer a media machine that standardizes and absorbs all other media, including print texts, audio recordings, films, and games; it is a process of translation among different states. », trouvé sur https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-next-level-alexander-r-galloways-the-interface-effect/, le 20 juin 2017. HAYLES, Katherine, « Employing a sustained, powerful methodology, The Interface Effect sparkles with original insights. Galloway is interested not only in the effects that interfaces have, but also in them as themselves the results of cultural, technological, economic, and political forces. This double movement provides a way to connect the historical with the political, and the technological with both. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in new media studies, contemporary theory, and digital technologies. », trouvé sur http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745662528.html, le 20 juin 2017.