Interinterface

Interinterface (2023–)
procedural essay / web-based non-game
Ivan Netkachev & Roman Solodkov

In our digital lives, we’re surrounded by ever-too-subtle interfaces: they have grown so “intuitive” and “user-friendly” that it is often impossible to detect their presence. However, as Alexander Galloway reminds us in his “Interface effect”, any interface subsumes a trauma: interfaces are intermediaries between different states and spaces, but any such translation is imperfect and followed by loss. Furthermore, interfaces have much in common with ideology: they create the very logics behind our digital existence, and yet the users have no choice but to behave as if this machinery was a law of nature. 

Our project is an attempt to uncover the hidden machinery behind the digital interfaces; furthermore, we show that they function in a repressive mode. We focus on a very special type of interface — the ones found in dating apps. One could call them affective interfaces: not only do they structure the information flow that surrounds us and canalize our features and behaviors into normative identities, but they also constrain the affective and sexual life in digital space.  To make the criticism of affective interfaces possible, we translate them to a 3D space: in this way, we allow users to examine them from the inside and provide them with enough spatio-temporal distance to reflect on the processes which are masked by the user-friendliness and “transparency” of conventional planar interfaces.  Essentially, affective interfaces function in the logics of scopic capitalism: they normalize queerness and queer identities, transforming them to a visual commodity on the market.