INTRA-FACE

I am writing this piece using a custom interface which requires me to interact with my computer using six buttons made of play-dough in lieu of the touchpad and keyboard. I was prompted to explore alternative interfaces after last week’s brief discussion of my virtual world walks, where it was mentioned that the computer may serve as a bodily extension into a virtual world rather than an interface between a physical and digital body. The idea of technology as somatic extension has roots in McLuhan’s (1966) media theory, and has been deployed more recently by scholars such as Ek (2012), who described mobile devices as an “extra organ” (p. 40) allowing the body to extend its sensory place-making practices beyond the immediate physical locality.

Aubrey Anable (2018), in her chapter “Touching Games,” in Playing with Feeling: Video Games and Affect, wrote on how touchscreens, rather than being a transparent window, function as a haptic point of intimate interaction between human and digital systems that trouble facile binary discourses that designate the screen image of a digital system as just a second-order representation of “deeper and more meaningful system[s]” (p. 46) operating at the level of code. For Anable, the surface is the system-as performed (the system-as-sensible?), or, as she phrases it later in the chapter, “the interface is where it’s at” (p. 59) (this itself is a paraphrase of affect theory Sylvan Tomkins’s “the surface of the skin is where it’s at” (cited in Anable, p. 61)). The print series Touched/Screened by artist Eric Juth (2013) likewise makes sensible the “transparent” screens of mobile devices, both by literally magnifying the smudged, smeared, nicked, and thus highly visible screens, and by the history of touch documented by those smudges, smears, and nicks.

I’m also reminded of Barad’s (2003) critique of the constructivist “pronouncements proclaiming that experience or the material world is ‘mediated’ [which] have offered precious little guidance about how to proceed” (p. p. 823). Rather, Barad’s conception of materiality offers a way “to proceed” by centering the phenomenon of the intra-action(s) between the material world, the experiencing subject, and the medium of that experience as material participants within a shared system. In applying this thinking to digital interfaces, the interface of the system doesn’t recede unproblematically as a transparent medium of one’s experience of that system, but rather is a sense-able, agentic participant in that experiencing. Interfaces may even function as “apparatuses,” in Barad’s articulation of the term, “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances” (p. 816) that (co-)produce phenomena. Consequently, this exercise sought to make the interface especially salient, seam-ful, and “reflective” rather than “transparent” (Bolter & Gromala, 2006). Appropriating Barad’s language, I’ve entitled the construction an “intra-face,” acknowledging that it is not simply a medium between two coherent things (the digital and the physical), but a co-constitutive agent participating in phenomena with other agents (broadly, the computer and the human user) within a larger system in which they all act.

My brief experience writing (the introduction to) a paper with this interface surfaced several new sensory and material qualities of computing for me. Small conveniences built into Microsoft Word, such as automatically capitalizing words after periods, became much more significant and appreciated, as did the autocomplete suggestions built into the on-screen keyboard navigated by the interface. With each keypress preceded by a few moments of manipulating buttons to align an onscreen cursor, time became much more salient, and efficiency consequently became a conscious aim. I became more acutely aware of the spatial position of the different elements on the screen by the different haptics of interacting with them. In some cases, the act of moving between multiple virtual keys, using the intra-face, to activate a shortcut was less efficient than navigating to a menu, or right-clicking to bring up a context menu. One larger issue this surfaced was the degree to which such “shortcuts” would be of any use to people with bodies other than those assumed to be the norms by these systems’ designers, which points to some overlap in the artistic experimentation of alternative interfaces and the engineering experimentation in the field of accessibility technology. The fact that this seam-ful "intra-face" elicited a concern for efficiency probably speaks to my own internalized feelings around time and work, as well, feelings inculcated by a variety of social and material factors and experiences. I wonder if extended time using this interface might change my sense of time, alter my priorities, and alleviate this stress, or whether there is a more fundamental or inflexible dispositional difference at play. I'm reminded of Lynda Barry's (2010) anecdote of trying and failing to write a novel for a decade using a word processor, then completing the text in a matter of months by writing it by hand with a paintbrush. This technique was inspired in her by an experience writing a story for a five-year-old who would only give her a single word at a time. What kinds of thought and feeling are activated by being forced to slow down? What kind of (or how extended an) intervention might activate them in me?

I also became more aware of the idiosyncrasy of the layout of the (virtual) keyboard, as I had to drag the single cursor across it from button to button. A traditional physical keyboard layout is designed for a body with two hands and ten fingers to lay across it, though it does contain vestigial idiosyncrasies remaining from the material needs of typewriting and the influence of prior telegraph technology (Stamp, 2013). This design itself becomes vestigial when represented as an on-screen keyboard, manipulated using the intra-face. The arrangement of keys feels arbitrary, and the long horizontal trips from one end of the keyboard to another become very salient. Rather than it being an artifact designed for me, I found myself having to comport myself to the virtual keyboard’s shape in my use of the intra-face. Treading lightly so as not to make a facile analogy between my voluntary use of a different interface, I was reminded of the ways disability is constructed by the affordances and constraints embedded in the designed material world (Garland-Thomson, 2011), and how providing a digital version of a keyboard designed for normate bodies as an accessibility measure might actually be more of a half-measure.