Interface

In this book, Branden Hookway considers the interface not as technology but as a formof relationship with technology. The interface, Hookway proposes, is at once ubiquitous and hiddenfrom view. It is both the bottleneck through which our relationship to technology must pass and aproductive encounter embedded within the use of technology. It is a site of contestation -- betweenhuman and machine, between the material and the social, between the political and the technological-- that both defines and elides differences. A virtuoso in multiple disciplines, Hookway offers atheory of the interface that draws on cultural theory, political theory, philosophy, art,architecture, new media, and the history of science and technology. He argues that the theoreticalmechanism of the interface offers a powerful approach to questions of the human relationship totechnology. Hookway finds the origin of the term interface in nineteenth-centuryfluid dynamics and traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics. Hediscusses issues of subject formation, agency, power, and control, within contexts that includetechnology, politics, and the social role of games. He considers the technological augmentation ofhumans and the human-machine system, discussing notions of embodied intelligence. Hookway views thefigure of the subject as both receiver and active producer in processes of subjectification. Theinterface, he argues, stands in a relation both alien and intimate, vertiginous and orienting tothose who cross its threshold.

Branden Hookway teaches in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University. He is author of Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World.