Sunday 3 August 2014

Interfassbender

I'll just get this out of the way: this week's readings went more or less totally over my head.

Then I found the best part of Prometheus:



Are advertisements a kind of interface? Indirect promotional "advertisements" such as this do exist in order to "provoke activities and behaviours probabilistically, rather than mechanically" (7-8). It is not a sure thing that we will go and see Prometheus after watching this clip, but I'll admit, it's fairly likely. It's a good ad/interface for Prometheus.

Except that Prometheus is not what's being advertised. Not really.

Here, Prometheus is not represented directly, only hinted at - Nusselder's talk of metaphors and digital information travels fairly well in this scenario, in that this ad can "help us to imagine and represent the information" (16) without actually showing it to us or giving us direct access to it. But why? One might assume it's a matter of technical limitations; surely if digital information could connect us to artifacts in "the real world" we'd want that. I certainly want the film being "advertised" rather than the actual film, because the actual film was an inferior carbon-copy of Alien.

But Nusselder argues that interface design is all about desire, and specifically desire for things that aren't real: "The purpose of a technological medium is hence to obfusticate itself as a medium and to claim a real presence" (28) - in other words, the metaphorical claims to be literal: The David 8 claims to be not an ad for Prometheus, but a thing in and of itself.

Or perhaps an "experience" as opposed to a "thing" (Drucker, 10). Perhaps The David 8 is less of an "interface" for Prometheus than it is an interface for itself, in which "interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing" (Galloway, 31).

Or perhaps it's just false advertising.

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