Information Architecture: Final Portfolio

STATIC: Screen Ethics

you are the audience
you are my distant audience
i address you
as i would a distant relative
as if a distant relative
seen only heard only through someone else's description.

neither you nor i
are visible to each other
i can only assume that you can hear me
i can only hope that you hear me

- Theresa Cha, “audience distance relative” in Exilee / Temps Morts: Selected Works (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 19


What is a screen, and what is an interface? How is our conception of screen and interfaces calibrated by—and in turn calibrate—our ethical relations to the world? This section brings together Alexander Galloway’s thoughts on “interface” and “software” alongside my digital argument project on televisual screens. Together, they suggest that these “windows” into an imagined or real space are not simply neutral in their ethics or ideology. Rather, their greatest trick is obfuscating their own involvement as an apparatus for how we conceptualize politics and decide to take action in the world. My digital argument connects a televisual way of seeing to our contemporary age of drone warfare. Our ability to see the “distance other” is an intensely ethical one—with life or death stakes. Screens and interfaces play an important role in mediating this ethical encounter.
 

This page has paths:

  1. INTRODUCTION Huan He

Contents of this path:

  1. See it Now
  2. Interface and Software