Interface / Branden Hookway.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hookway, Branden.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technology--Philosophy.

Technology.

Interfaces (Physical sciences).

Human-machine systems--Philosophy.

Human-machine systems.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

xi, 178 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2014]

Summary:

In this book, Branden Hookway considers the interface not as technology but as a form of relationship with technology. The interface, Hookway proposes, is at once ubiquitous and hidden from view. It is both the bottleneck through which our relationship to technology must pass and a productive encounter embedded within the use of technology. It is a site of contestation-between human 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 a theory 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 theoretical mechanism of the interface offers a powerful approach to questions of the human relationship to technology. Hookway finds the origin of the term interface in nineteenth-century fluid dynamics and traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics. He discusses issues of subject formation, agency, power, and control, within contexts that include technology, politics, and the social role of games. He considers the technological augmentation of humans and the human-machine system, discussing notions of embodied intelligence. Hookway views the figure of the subject as both receiver and active producer in processes of subjectification. The interface, he argues, stands in a relation both alien and intimate, vertiginous and orienting to those who cross its threshold. Book jacket.

Contents:

The subject of the interface

The interface as form of relation

Between faces and facing between

The interface and the surface

Toward a theory of the interface

Janus and Jupiter

Control and power

The interface and the apparatus

The interface and the game

The interface and the machine

Separation and augmentation

Mimicry in the game and the interface

The forming of the interface

The interface as that which defines the fluid

Turbulence and control

The exacting of turbulence

The demons on the threshold

Theories of the vortex

Information and entropy

Governance and reciprocity

The interface and teleology

The turbine as superimposition of fluid and machine

The vertiginous moment of interface

The augmentation of the interface

A genius of augmentation

The tacit knowing of the interface

Singularity

Symbiosis

System

Positioning.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

026252550X

9780262525503

OCLC:

855779178

Publisher Number:

99958586314