While media theory and software studies have often conceptualized the interface in broadly aesthetic terms - as medium, relation or effect - less attention has been given to the methodological cultures through which interfaces are widely produced, maintained and contested. This presentation reflects on a decade of research experiments with websites, platforms and apps to outline four orientations for approaching the interface through critique: prefigurative critique (design patterns), critical diagnostics (surfacing operations), oppositional prototyping (plugins, scripts, mods) and generative critique (working with AI). Drawing on Agre’s critical technical practice and Boltanski’s modes of critique, and gesturing to links with game studies, the talk examines how interfaces become knowable and transformable through collective practices of compositional testing, foregrounding the critical potential of distributed reflexivity and anticipatory agency, as interfaces otherwise submerge users in their techno-fluid operativity.
Michael Dieter is an interdisciplinary researcher based at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick (UK) with a primary focus in digital media studies, critical theory and media philosophy. His research investigates socio-technical forms of interface critique, drawing from design methods, software studies and media art. He is also engaged in app studies, particularly in developing digital methods to critically investigate the platform economy of apps, including key issues of media concentration, datafication and governance. Finally, his work branches into tactical media, technological aesthetics and media genealogies concerned with socio-political organization, labour and infrastructural power.
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