Graphical User Interference

In the summer of 2020, Aarhus University hosted Critical Interfaces Analysis, a three-day summit intended to “critically analyze potential disjunctions between the desires of users and the maximization of profit that goes hand in hand with a cultural interface industry.”¹ Four years prior, the first Interface Politics Conference was held in Barcelona in the fall of 2016. As a precursor to the conference, Hangar hosted Poetic Deconstruction of the Interface, a series of workshops led by artist Joana Moll that sought to “stimulate and re-appropriate subjectivity, an essential process in the generation of critical thought about the true nature of technology.”² The workshops were organized into three sections: revealing the physical layer of the interface, deconstructing it, and re-articulating the interface’s ideology. These examples point to sustained academic interest in the cultural criticism of interfaces, but also an interest in their artistic subversion. What would it mean to...