Reading Interface

Interface, we think, is the screen, the display, the portal into the online world or computer. The GUI (Graphical User Inter-face), with its menu bars and navigational buttons, is so familiar that we tend to overlook the “gooeyness” of it—the mutable, mediating activity—and take interface for a thing, static, stable, and fixed. Or we take it as a representation of computational processes, a convenient translation of what is “really going on” inside. Neither could be further from actuality.