Critical Interfaces Main Menu Introduction Critical Making Origins of Vectors Digital and social engagement Case Studies: Stolen Time Archive and Totality for Kids Scalar Critical Commons Critical Commons + Scalar Conclusion Works cited

Vectors as interface

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The journal's first Creative Director, Erik Loyer, was a veteran of experimental interface design in both arts and humanities contexts. Loyer designed the online companion (“WebTake”) to Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines for the MIT Press MediaWorks series in 2002, and his experimental sci-fi narrative Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998) was among the first web-based artworks to be added to the permanent collection of a major art museum. In addition to designing numerous Vectors projects, Loyer produced an interactive index that allowed users to "paint" with the contents of a project in order to find resonances or create dialogues among multiple projects. From the beginning, then, user interface was conceived as a space for creating intellectual linkages and encouraging a form of discovery that eroded the boundaries between individual projects and even the concept of an "issue" of the journal.

To further enhance the interconnection among projects and authors, each Vectors project was initially conceptualized through a summer planning workshop that included the entire Vectors design and editorial team as well as scholars selected to contribute to the two themed issues being produced in a given year. In addition to individual design meetings and project demos, contributors were encouraged to participate in a physical “making” session during the residency. A typical example of this was a workshop titled “Soldering Synthesis” led by Mark Allen, founder of the Los Angeles artist collective Machine Project, in which each participant soldered together the pieces necessary to make a basic audio synthesizer. At the conclusion of the workshop, Allen and his team would lead participants in a collective "jam session." The purpose of this experience may not have been entirely obvious to the humanities scholars who took part in the workshop, many of whom had not previously used a soldering iron or participated in any kind of physical making. For Vectors contributors, the benefit of this exercise lay not in the acquisition of specific “maker” skills but in the conceptual allegory of dismantling and reconstituting their basic practices of research and writing.

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