Vortrag am 12. Dezember – „Screens Shot: Mediating the Interactive Interface“

This talk will examine the history of the digital screenshot from its origins in computer graphics labs in the 1960s to contemporary methods for digital archiving and preservation, asking what this history tells us about the materiality of the digital and the ways in which visual artifacts efface the complexity of digital systems.

Vortrag am 16. Januar 2024 – „Interface Critique at Large“

This talk will discuss how to understand the role of critique in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life from apps to sensors. While theorizations of interface critique can be readily be found in HCI proposals such as reflexive design or humanistic HCI, or broadly within the interdisciplinary field of media art, these cases are not always considered within broader ecologies of practice or ‚critical technical cultures‘ from industry practitioners to vernacular subcultures that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interaction design.

Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a techno-fluid milieu, I offer a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue that these orientations provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Workshop am 17. Januar 2024 – „From Apps to AI: Mapping Ecologies of Interface Proliferation“

This workshop invites participants to consider how this conceptual matrix, along with related work in the interdisciplinary field of interface critique, can be extended and refined through exploration of other forms of interface relation, including, for example, idioms of voice interfaces, capture of gestures, conversational design of chatbots, immersion of virtual and augmented reality consumer devices, and onto-epistemologies of environmental sensors, among others. What are the changing stakes for testing user-experience design as it proliferates into settings of urban design, healthcare, automobiles, money or the cognitive assemblages of machine-learning systems? How have forms of criticism and critique been elaborated in such contexts? What (extra)disciplinary forms of expertise are mobilized, and what kinds of collective critical knowledge, concepts and methods might be established in support of new common literacies, technologies and infrastructures?