Anna Lin
Lori Cole
Nothing: The Aesthetics of Absence
20th December 2023
The Graphical, the User and the Interface
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world,” science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin writes in response to a critic who asserted that Le Guin is not a “hard” science fiction writer, because of her careful “avoidance” of technology (Le Guin). On the contrary, Le Guin responds, the term technology has become overly synonymous with complex machines when technology is simply a tool, such as paper, ink, or wheels. Similarly, in a blog post by writer and artist James Bridle, Bridle makes a distinction between technology so simple it can be reduced to a toy, and more abstract, obfuscated technology. “If I can’t make that little toy version work, even in my head, I think there’s an inherent level of distrust and uncertainty there” (Bridle).
Elaborating on the feelings of distrust and uncertainty Bridle touches on, this paper will discuss the agency we have as users of graphical user interfaces (GUIs)–how modern interfaces do not currently empower us, and speculate how we can take back agency in this technological age. This alienation of us from our mental models of technology, and subsequently, our physical bodies, is what this paper will focus on–specifically, on the GUI. In the past few decades, when we escalated from using simple technology to being tech users (or, users of “hard” technology as Le Guin’s critic would call it), a virtual reality was introduced to us; the technology presented a disembodiment from our current reality. Following this, one can envision the GUI as a portal to virtuality, with the design of this portal being left entirely in the hands of the designer, who is designing for the everyday virtual commuter.
“I donʹt know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I donʹt know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. Thatʹs the neat thing about technologies. Theyʹre what we can learn to do” (Le Guin). To clarify, I don’t believe that all technology and GUIs are working against us–at the core of it, GUIs can be extremely helpful as a visual representation of feedback from the machine, and give users vital information. Rather, it is the increasingly personalized, consumer tech that has become intertwined with the quotidian routine that deserves a more critical discussion.
Here, I will present the GUI in a telescopic manner–splitting it into its three individual parts to discuss each at length: 1) the graphical, 2) the user, and 3) the interface. In more concrete terms, I will discuss the history of and the transition to the graphical user interface from the non-graphical, the user who finds herself in a state of precarity due to the interface, and the essence of an interface as well as speculation on what we are missing from the currently existing models of the interface.
	•	The Graphical
Speaking on the significance of the metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen write, “the concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details” (Lakoff and Johnsen 4). In pioneering the GUI, computer companies like Microsoft furthered this reliance on the use of metaphors to help us create mental models to better understand the functioning of the personal computer. Reflecting on the saying that good design is invisible, popularized by the designer Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things, Michael L. Black further critiques this design philosophy, referring to it as “transparent design,” in the sense that the guidance the user interface provides us as we use the machine is so seamless it feels transparent (Black 48). Gleaning from yet another popular design motto, “it’s a feature, not a bug,” there can be a lot that gets swept under the rug when it comes to designing either hardware or software with the intention of achieving an experience so subtle that the user does not even know they are being shepherded in a predetermined pattern.
Extending the critique of the design philosophy to the individual designer, Black points out, “designers are not merely building applications but also curating digital culture, ostensibly for the benefit of everyone else” (Black 50). Media scholar Quelic Berga gives a concrete example of this designed metaphor paradigm in a piece for the critical interface manifesto, “there is no real recycling bin in your PC, you do not have 530 people following you, and you didn’t save anything on any cloud. But these conventions help us to understand certain processes” (Berga).
What are the real risks behind this mental mapping and association game we play with our machines? Tim Hwang, the former director of Harvard M.I.T. Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, expands on this in an interview for the podcast the Ezra Klein Show. “Why do you even have a Like button at all? Well, one of the reasons is that it makes ‘engagement,’ quote unquote, with content a lot more measurable and, therefore, a lot better for buying and selling and serving ads. And so almost from the smallest aspect of the web to the biggest economics of the web, it’s all shaped by this core ecosystem” (Klein and Hwang). By providing us with a simple GUI interaction, websites owned by private companies are able to quantify our activities as data, building an even larger dataset in the interest of becoming better at selling us things by gauging what we are interested in or “like.”
Apart from social media websites, this is also perpetrated by sites that lead directly to buying and selling–such as Amazon. In her project investigating the hidden data tracking that happens beneath the interface while purchasing a book (namely, The Life, Lessons & Rules for Success: The Journey, The Teachable Moments & 10 Rules for Success Cultivated from the Life & Wisdom of Jeff Bezos) from Amazon, artist and researcher Joana Moll collected 8,724 pages of code “that track and personalize user behavior and experience and were involuntarily loaded by the customer” (Moll). Not only was the exploitation of the user’s data deeply embedded, and hidden beneath this “transparent” interface, Moll notes that it also consequently shifts the load of the environmental consumption onto the user without warning.
In designing something to be “transparent,” architect writers Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley theorize that “good” design “is irreducibly associated with a certain visual smoothness. The goal of reducing functional, economic, and social friction is indistinguishable from a frictionless aesthetic that acts as a kind of self-advertisement of design” (Colomina and Wigley 90). To further expand on the keyword friction as mentioned by Colomina and Wigley, in her talk titled “Dark Patterns in Accessibility Tech,” accessibility advocate Chancey Fleet gives a good example of why it can be dehumanizing to reduce the design of a user product to encourage frictionless use over a well-functioning, robust, and most importantly, accessible design: “It's not the industry's practice to do this because extra steps create friction and the industry doesn't want to disturb your flow and your loyalty by bringing to your attention the needs of people you won't meet” (Chancey).
I believe that the origin of the GUI, and the design philosophy shared by interface designers like Don Norman were appropriate for the time when there was a need for the machines to be more understandable by the everyday user. However, as we have marched past the age of learning how to use the tech in our lives, we now have a new need for understanding how to really personalize (not in the sense that tech call “personalized” computers when they actually mean standardized for a general public) our use of tech by taking it apart, breaking it down, and keeping only the parts essential to us, that empower us to continue to being human. To quote Audre Lorde on the refusal of structures that do not serve us, “for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”
	•	The User
If the interfaces we are using continue to shepherd us as if we are one homogenous entity, then what does this entity look like? Who is the generic, everyday user that the designer dreams of when creating the interface? Quoting other sociologists and philosophers, art history scholar Anna Dezeuze writes of the precariat–how feelings of insecurity, uncertainty, and unsafety were becoming more and more prevalent in the proletariat that now finds herself in a precarious situation. Like the theory known as scarcity mindset, where one finds herself lacking in resources, to the point where it occupies her mental bandwidth and capacity to do anything else–the precariat finds herself in such situational insecurity which causes an alienation “characterised by an atrophy of both lived experience and the political will to action” (Dezeuze 22).
In designing for the user, tech designers usually have to build a “persona,” which is like a baseball card index version of one category of user they can then use to inform their design based on the preferences of this specific “persona” user. Most design teams might have a few of these personas, and when the design meets the criteria for all these personas, then the design is deemed good to go to the development stage. What is the persona that encapsulates the general User for the devices we use today? Perhaps it is someone who is able-bodied, healthy, and living in a Western society. Colomina and Wigley theorize that the well-designed domestic product became a form of “art therapy for a traumatized nation, a reassuring image of the ‘good life’ to be bought like any other product… ‘Good design’ offers ‘good life,’ a galaxy of happy, self-contained objects for people who do not feel safely contained and cannot be sure of life itself” (Colomina and Wigley 101). Perhaps the User is someone who is generally happy to consume and keep consuming, with bottomless desire, someone who keeps working in order to keep buying so that they can stay happy.
Not only does it affect the precariat’s present, it also consequently compromises the precariat’s future–as pointed out by scholar Shoshana Zuboff, "I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future” (Zuboff 25). In keeping us in this precarious state of mind, individually, we as the User become unable to reimagine a future outside of this paradigm.
	•	The Interface
Media researcher Anastasia Kubrak speculates, that the modern “worker was rebranded into a flexible entrepreneur, a freelancer responsible for its own success and measured by its ability to be productive” (Kubrak 86). Kubrak continues to imagine the precarious user: “User needs to maintain a good-looking, verifiable profile. User has to be active on the platform in order to be successful. The User that selflessly contributes to the platform is the User that benefits the most,” echoing the sentiment of Black on the “transparent” design: “our user-friendly devices continue to promise us that the more we invest of ourselves in them, the more usable and useful they will become” (Black 380).
In removing the friction from the usage of these interfaces, and creating a generally more sanitized, smoother experience, what did we lose? To capture this evolution of design philosophy, Colomina and Wigley combine the terms “anesthetic aesthetics,” drawing a parallel between the smooth, addictive quality of modern design to the usage of cocaine as one of the first substances used for anesthesia during surgery (Colomina and Wigley 95). They pose the question, “What is the human that needs this smoothness so badly? Or is made to feel needy, inadequate, wounded, or incomplete in the face of good design and offered the chance to rebuild itself by simply choosing the right product?” (Colomina and Wigley 94). In an interview with Kubrak, media artist and writer Silvio Lorusso postulates:
Apparently, when he [Peter Thiel] invested in social media, much of his belief was in the idea of mimetic desire. It is a theory that poses the idea that desire is not a relationship between subject and an object, but it’s always triangular: object, subject and another subject. As soon as you desire this, I would imitate you and also desire that object. Desire is shaped by what other people do. Places like Facebook materialize this really well, and you can shape these signals of desires, manipulate what people want. (Kubrak 92)
Following this theory that these interfaces are designed to captivate, and capitalize on our feelings of lack, and consequently, feelings of desire, I return to the definition of surveillance capitalism as illustrated by Zuboff:
“Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior… With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” (Zuboff 8)
While this may seem bleak, I would caution that this is only one side of the coin. While we may continue living with these paradigms in our everyday lives, we have agency over our personal narrative in our relationship to technology. As Black points out, “rejecting the rhetoric of personalness can thus help us to expose and confront the biases that are necessarily embedded in all products of human creativity but that are sublimated by user-friendliness” (Black 381). Relating the concept of precarity to the banal, nothingness, refusal art of the 20th century, Dezeuze writes of playwright Samuel Beckett’s development of “a humorous ‘syntax of weakness’, a kind of ‘language endlessly undoing and undermining itself’. Beckett’s ‘making a meaning out of the refusal of meaning’ is a means to resist the temptation to ‘stuff the world full of meaning and sign up to one or more salvic narratives of redemption’” (Dezeuze 246).
	•	Conclusion
“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” – Donna J. Haraway
In this last section, we will reimagine the interface as something that works with what we have, rather than against us, by nudging us to endlessly chase towards things we don’t have. Specifically, I will discuss a refusal of built-in paradigms by examining the work of assemblage artists. As pointed out by Dezeuze, assemblage or junk art participates in the “wider agenda” of “the disappearance of art-making as a specialised and professionalised category of everyday experience,” in contradiction to the “kind of goal-oriented order of efficiency singled out by Jullien in Western thought – which coincided precisely with the model of profit-driven capitalism and an increasingly organised society“ (Dezeuze 293-4). It is a refusal to speed up with the ever-productive, ever-quickening capitalist, consumerist society. Rather, assemblage art invites us to pay attention–as writer and artist Jenny Odell observes, “one thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious…I’ve also learned that patterns of attention–what we choose to notice and what we do not–are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time”. Emphasizing the importance of choosing with care where our attention is focused, Odell goes on to conclude, “we might just find that everything we wanted is already here” (How to xxiii).
This act of staying in the present, and paying attention to what’s already here is also a refusal to the consumerist ideal of always creating new, because with everything new that is created, it requires someone to keep maintaining it. Dezeuze writes of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in her performance cleaning the Wadsworth Museum, “she also exposed the fact that poor, often non-white men and women would normally be performing such labour – in the same way as the Athenian polis, in Arendt’s account, was dependent on the invisible labour of slaves and women” (Dezeuze 312).
Similarly, the expository, and narrative re-telling aspect of assemblage art is not lost on junk artist Noah Purifoy. Initially working heavily within the realm of art advocacy and social work, Purifoy eventually moved to the Joshua Tree desert to create his own art, from junk that people threw out. This embrace of what is already working, to maintain and transform it into something not traditionally shown in institutions, and museums, is an exemplary radical reimagination of staying with the trouble, as Haraway envisioned.
Another aspect of refusal of the virtuality of interfaces, and staying with the present, is a rejection of its disembodying qualities. In her research practice of the computer mouse, scholar Emma Rae Bruml Norton examines the mouse as the singular device that we have been using and continue to use to interface with the computer for decades as it is one of the rare devices to be shaped according to our physical body. As if in acknowledgement of us as the users using this interface, the mouse and Norton’s research on it invites us to look more critically, as well as creatively as existing paradigms we are using as interfaces–is it possible to regain more agency as human beings using machines rather than simply, users who are tolerate the machines?
Quoting Arendt, Dezeuze emphasizes the importance of storytelling, and fictional artwork. Nevertheless, I would argue that their precarious works are involved in ‘fictionalising the real’, as Rancière called it, via the stories they insert into the concrete field of everyday experience. ‘Art and politics,’ explained Rancière, ‘construct “fictions”, i.e. material re-arrangements of signs and images, relations between what we see and what we say, between what we do and what we can do.’188 This is why fictions can participate in a redistribution of the sensible and open up new ‘breathing’ spaces. Furthermore, since storytelling, as Arendt explained, is ‘a way of understanding the sense of our actions in a web of human references’, it can also serve to produce the kind of ‘public’ space of appearance delineated by both Arendt and Rancière” Dezeuze (271-2).


Works Cited
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