After the traditional presentation of the seminar and the attendees introduction, Jorge sugested that devices should turn into interfaces: there is a need that machines could socialize with each other and people, and added that now there is an independence of the (TV) screen, because screens are everywhere.

Regarding to this, other of the participants introduced the idea of relational spaces from social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey, to highlight the space where humans and not humans relate. Following this path, seminar leader Pau Alsina added that there is a relation between the material and the symbolic, and explained that the concept of infrastructure from Bruno Latour is very useful to attend this.

In fact, as Pau clarified, one of the seminar aims is to fight the perspective of researching things (as art, etc.) regardless of their ability of agency. Thinking about interface, some authors placed the software in the center of the analysis (Manovich, i.e). In a  similar way, the essay Interface Criticism: Aesthetic Beyond Buttons, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Soren Bor Pold (as editors) attempts to enter into the interface, thinking about it not just as a mere surface in which political and social conditioning bounce, but as a society articulator.

Another participant added that there is a need of artistic practices questioning these phenomena. The devices are sociability producers, a trigger for social behaviours, and STS studies can help to understand which are the processes through which this standards crystalize. The interface should not be explained but is the explanation, which conveys.

Some authors sharing this point of view are Mathew Fuller, crossing cultural studies with software studies, or Michel Callon, an engineer and sociologist. The actor-network theory and relational materialism are useful perspectives to understand the interface as a complex phenomena, given that they understand technosciencies as a net that includes both human and non-human entities, heeding to the associations between them.

A good example of the success of certain technologies from this approach is the coding language Processing. It has become so popular and used because it has been developed for artists to artists, and has opened a new field of accessible creativity that can be translated from the art field to the industry, and where creators, technologist, coders or scientists can converge.

Building a Manifesto

One of the goals of PIPES BCN is to write an Interface Manifesto. Talking about that, Jorge Luís Marzo said that images may not represent the reality but hide it (as happens in the film The Matrix). The texts are disappearing and being replaced by icons or images full of meaning (Twitter bird, for example, or F by Facebook).

Nowadays, societies live dazzled by the new gadgets and technological services provided by the industry, there’s a technophilic layer that can bring to technical nihilism. We enjoy the latests technologies, but where is the responsability? There can be pointed just one actor?

In the case of interface, what is important is not just the object, but the function of this object in a certain context. This is the argument that defends the article An Introduction to Interface Phenomenology from Josep M. Català. Interface translates more than mediates (mediate has a friendly connotation), and it only exists when there is a need for dialogue. Interfaces are part of our lives, and despite the wide variety of devices, they tend to the homogenization and standarization. Related to technology, there has always been a search for universal languages and standards. The screws are an example, as well as internet protocols.

In technology there’s no neutrality, although there certainly is an illusion of it. It’s stories are bounded to the idea of progress, and preconceptions of human being or ideas related to power are embodied in those objects and the practices they enable. When talking about interface, it seems to be a request coming from users: give me buttons. The designers or engineers of our washing machines, radios or computers seem to say: just press the button and we do the rest. Here are clearly a number of preconceptions that shows us that the dichotomy between active subject and passive object is completely obsolete.

“The strength of new materialism is precisely this nomadic traversing of the territories of science and the humanities, performing the agential or non- innocent nature of all matterthat seems to have escaped both modernist (positivist) and postmodernist humanist epistemologies”.

The occidental thought tradition is mainly based in dualities. Many philosophers have criticized this binary logic, settled with the beginning of the modern project. However, this more systemically or net-oriented way to perceive the world has been peripheral until this last years.

Taking advantage of the convergence of interests with PIPES researchers, this Tuesday 20th of May, Hangar hosted for the first time the seminar Art Matters, lead by the philosopher Pau Alsina. The seminar has been held for two yearsand a half, and it turns arround about breaking down the barriers between learning, reflection and making: it depicts and reflects the need to create convergence zones between the own investigation and the artistic practice.

In the introduction, Alsina depicted some of the dualities that must be reviewed, like society – technology, science – humanities or culture – nature, and he contrasted them with the concept of “virtual” in Deleuze, which highlights the relation between matter and shape through the idea of morphogenesis. Other relevant authors that are usually discussed on the seminar are Foucault, Latour, Callon or Stenger, and the main concepts and approaches are actor-network theory, speculative realism or object- oriented ontology.

In this occasion, the attendees were nine people coming from art history, design, media art, politycs, SST (society, science and technology studies), or sociology, and the discussion focused on New Materialism, departing from the text “The Transversavility of New Materialism”. This chapter form a book published in Open Humanities Collection, is written from a double philosophical perspective: science and feminism.

The main idea is to put the materiality on the centre of the philosophical discussion, putting aside the idea of subject. An example:

“A piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding”. Braidotti 2000, 159

This quote shows a political position asseting that materiality neutralizes the “alterity”, setting aside the cultural factor. As the Brazilian anthropologist Oliveira de Castro affirms: “there is just one culture, but several natures”: the culture is what is different, and the nature is just the same thing. Also exchanging the roles and transversalizing the concept of gender, Donna Haraway fuses science and nature when she assets that the woman can be conceived as a cyborg, because she’s always been a machine of pleasure, or a machine of biologic and working force reproduction. In the same way, Manuel DeLanda, in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), builds a neomaterialtic history from the point of view of volcanic magma.

Although these were just some ideas about the rich discussion of the seminar, they can help us to think about how can we blur the distintions between rational or irrational, or modernity and postmodernity, to think about our complex reality from a new perspective.