In our everyday life we constantly have to cope more or less successfully with interfaces. We use the mobile phone, the mp3 player, and our laptop, in order to gain access to the digital part of our life. In recent years this situation has lead to the creation of new interdisciplinary subjects like Interaction Design or Physical Computing.

Currently we live between two worlds, our physical environment and the digital space. Technology and its digital space are our second nature and the interfaces are our points of access to this techno sphere.

This division will dissolve into a seamless distribution of information technology into most aspects of our life, advertised as ubiquitous computing. Immaterial information and physical objects will fuse into an Internet of Things. Our world will transform into an interface as a whole.

Since artists started working with technology they have been developing interfaces and modes of interaction. The interface itself became an artistic thematic in its technical, social and political dimensions.

INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates artistic strategies and practices which deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces.

With the rapid technological development a thoroughly critique of the interface towards society is necessary. The contribution of the artist thereby is relevant. S/he takes the freedom to deal with technologies beyond form, function and usability. The utilisation of an eclectic range of strategies and practices guaranties a diversity of results.

Spime: a map of ideas.

Lecture by Bruce Sterling Friday 10th at 10:25

During his tenure as “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design in California, Bruce Sterling published a design text called “Shaping Things.” It’s visionary and highly speculative, but basically a brief, chatty little book. Based on the ideas outlined in his book, Bruce Sterling will contemplate in his lecture new possibilities for radical changes in the relationship of people and things.

On the virtuality of public space

Lecture by Susanne Jaschko Friday 10th at 11:25

Artists working with new technologies seem to understand public space as one of their natural territories. The plethora of the prevailing communication and control media inherent in public space offer not only thematic points of action, but are suited for appropriation and intervention. Public space is political space in that existing societal and aesthetic values physically become manifest in architecture, urban planning, art and in strict laws ruling the organisation and use of this space. Which artistic strategies derive from this situation and which effect do they have on public space and its users?

Not imagined, it is real

Lecture by Laura Beloff Friday 10th 14:15

Jack Burnham wrote an essay “System Aesthetics” in 1968. In this essay he defined art of late 60’s and early 70’s to be based on systems. The art works were no longer merely independent objects, but started using the surrounding environment as a part of the work.
The recent years have seen the emergence of art forms like mobile art, wearables and locative media, which are object based but utilize immaterial networks. These works can be considered to be physical instantiations of conceptual ideas. They are systems which contain a mixture between real, virtual and imaginary and have potential to appear in the public without a support of a traditional exhibition place like museum or gallery.

Failure is success (is failure)

Lecture by Per Platou Friday 10th 15:15

Per Platou will give a brief introduction to the use of glitch aesthetics within the music and media/art world, then talk about the paradoxes that emerge when artists “fail” in their pursuit of applying new technology in their works. Why is it that engineers always try to make things work (and fail when they don’t), while artists become mythological heroes when they do the same. However there are strict rules; Always confess everything, and don’t forget that it is not possible to make a mistake deliberately. 

On Guattaris concept of the “machine” as the mental and social apparatus that directs of everyday praxis.

Lecture by Truls Lie Saturday 11th at 10:10

The French philosopher Felix Guattari, a companion to Gilles Deleuze, has developed the concept of the “machine”, as the mental and social apparatus that directs of everyday praxis: Desire machines, technological machines, capitalist machines etc. Truls Lie will explore this concept in connection to the emergence of our control society - which involves extended use of computers.

Everyware: Some thoughts on the social and ethical implications of ubiquitous computing.

Lecture by Adam Greenfield Saturday 11th at 11:10

The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?

Join “Everyware” author Adam Greenfield as he explores this new technology and its implications for society, for business, for the way we design products and services, spaces and cities - even for the way we relate to each other.

Instruction Sets

Lecture by Artificial Paradise Saturday 11th at 13:00

We enter and exit a black box (quite literally a packaged chip, live circuits hidden beneath an exterior) at points of interface, within a view of creative computing which is far removed from the desktop, that which typically is termed as interface. The interface in all senses is that which is dictated and trusted (with crash exposing the flip-side of this social agreement). Such dictation, abstraction as propaganda, is concerned with belief; the belief that a data sheet, denuded and unauthored pure description, correctly and sufficiently exposes the abstracted hardware, or belief that an API (Application Programming Interface) offers complete or even correct advice for its own operations. In very real terms there is an economic concern with that which is made public or retained as a private internal functioning; information which we (the life coder) do not NEED to know, and which could prejudice the very operation of the black box function interior, the Schwarzgerät. From the world as such an interface we can move to a crash-based revelation of a twinned CPU (central processing unit). On the one hand, there is the System or entropic operation of a necessarily cynical machine for living, standing against the specification of an artistic CPU for life coding. The data sheet will be examined as to its operational codes.

It’s all about the software, baby

Lecture by Marius Watz Saturday 11th at 14:00

Backed by Moore’s law and the ubiquity of mobile terminals, computers are constantly becoming both faster and more ever-present in our lives. With the hardware becoming cheaper and digital media having replaced their analogue predecessors, our lives are becoming all about the software. Software is the material of our information world, code is the tool that forms it. So why can’t most people program?

The Epidermis as Interface – Dynamic Textile Surfaces

Lecture by Sabine Seymour Saturday 11th at 14:50

Technology and fashion are not as distant as it might first seem. The thread-up and thread-down of the weaving process corresponds to the binary logic of 0 and 1 of a computer circuitry. Electronic textiles result from the integration of technology into a textile and thus allow the textile surface to become a dynamic – wearable – interface. A textile is seen, felt, heard, touched. The electronic qualities of the textile allow the output of data that addresses all senses.