by Rob Gallagher
Back in the 1850s, Seismologist Robert Mallet studied earthquakes by illuminating pools of mercury and logging the ripples’ intervals. His ‘seismoscope’ anticipated sonar and oscilloscopes and the thousand other screen-based interfaces that would be developed over the next 170-odd years, and there’s still something compelling about its conjoining of light, liquid and information – so elegant and easy and appealingly frictionless. A good interface is, of course, meant to be user friendly, to mediate complex processes in such a way as to make them easily apprehensible or controllable.
The iPhone is the latest in a string of C21st Apple gadgets that have levied mass popularity by emphasising the qualities I like about Mallet’s seismoscope – pearliness, luminescence, simplicity, organic forms. With its liquid crystal touch screen, the iPhone promises – and, up to a point, delivers – ‘transparency’ and ‘hands on’ immediacy. As with Windows (a brand name now so familiar that it’s weird to think metaphorically equating interfaces and real-world objects like ‘windows’ and ‘desk tops’ was once innovative) you’re not really looking through something into a space however; you’re looking at and onto a screen. The literal manipulability of what you see and touch and the way in which images mercurially flow and realign in response to users touching or tipping the device may be intuitive and temporally immediate but it’s also highly mediated, a complex representation. That ease of use is determined by all sorts of factors and processes you can’t see or influence.
This is by no means necessarily a bad thing, but it’s still important to acknowledge the trade-off. In terms of functionality and ease of use Myspace is leagues behind Facebook, but the ability to get (a little way) behind the interface and code aspects of the page directly enables instances of lurid, migraine-inducing maximalism that are way more interesting than the pristine sub-Mac aesthetic of Facebook (it feels sort of apt that Myspace’s afterlife has been as a place to stream otherwise unavailable music. Its kludges, glitches and clashes suit a decade that’s seen stylistically mutant scenes and genres like grime, noise, new rave and wonky proliferate).
The idea that things should and will become easier, cheaper, faster is one tech companies want to promote: a current Samsung mobile ad declares “impatience is a virtue.” This rankles with me for two kind of connected reasons. One is the way this rhetoric downplays the fact that even wireless, mobile, lightweight gadgets require very material servers and power plants and R&D labs and factories. The other is that I’m just generally suspicious of things that seem too easy. Taken too far, that sort of mindset ends in masochism and ascetism for their own sake. But there’s more virtue in the idea difficult things might be worth doing than there is in impatience, whatever Samsung say.
The prospect of instant, speed-of-thought information and gratification relies on the notion that we know what we want and what we think. Reading Artaud recently I was struck by how committed he is to undermining this idea. For him (and, admittedly, this is a guy who divided his latter years between recieving electroshock therapy and boning up on Celtic magic) it was important to acknowledge that thinking isn’t always easy or even voluntary. It’s an embodied process – sometimes agonisingly so – but it can bear fruit, making new things communicable and doable. Artaud’s texts bear traces of their own difficult gestation, glimpses under the bonnet that suggest how interfaces (including books) always screen and limit activity even as they mediate and facilitate it. They also demonstrate that difficulty and friction can prove energizing and generative. Strained pears are lovely but teething probably turned out to be worthwhile.
