The tactile and the index - From the remote control to the hand-held computer, some speculative reflections on the bodies of the will

Engell, Lorenz

doi:10.5117/necsus2013.2.enge

Cited by 2 publications

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“…As ‘the tangible sign of presence implying movement’ (McPherson, 2002: 461), the cursor references the user’s haptic responsiveness – her body, its animation and participation across a mediated space that bridges both ‘sides’ of a screened encounter with another. It is a functional agent within the interface system, to be sure, but it is also a sign that displays the user’s embodied will moving among virtual objects within the mediated realm (Engell, 2013). When those virtual objects are themselves the products of media conventionally associated with indexicality – such as photographs and films – we can postulate an ‘indexical chain’ of mediated adjacency between users and the referents of the images, where the cursor-borne traces of users’ gestures appear to make contact with the bodies of depicted others.…”

Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness: Interface aesthetics and moral response

Frosh

2016

New Media & Society

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How do the aesthetic attributes of digital interfaces affect users’ ability to respond morally to the witnessing of suffering? Focusing on mainstream Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), this article proposes a phenomenology of user experience centred on the moral obligations of attending to, engaging with and acting upon digitized Holocaust survivor testimonies. The GUI, it argues, produces a regimen of eye–hand–screen relations that oscillates between ‘operative’ and ‘hermeneutic’ modes of embodied attention, creating a default condition of bodily restlessness that threatens prolonged, empathetic encounters with depicted others. Nevertheless, interface attributes of real-time screen interaction, haptic sensuousness and user-indexicality enable moral engagement with the witness-survivor, while translating information-sharing into the moral action of co-witnessing. These attributes enable an ‘ethics of kinaesthetics’ that converts sensorimotor responsiveness into moral responsibility. Digital interfaces have established a historically novel situation, where moral response to distant suffering depends on the smallest movements of our fingers and eyes.

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Section: Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness: Interface aesthetics and moral response

Frosh

2016

New Media & Society

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“…Anticipating the clickable operational images of computer screens and the selection device of the mouse, television's images can already be qualified as switchable images, as images which enable operations of selection embedded in a supplementary device, the remote control (cf. Engell 2004Engell , 2013. In turn, TV viewers' navigational practices have also relied heavily upon (printed) lists and tables of television schedules, which are nowadays integrated into fully digital guides and menus on the TV screen itself.…”

Section: The Seriality Of Interfacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Seriality as Structure and Process

Maeder

Wentz²

2014

EJCGC

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The article analyzes and theorizes oftentimes overlooked phenomena of digital seriality in web-based media. Digital seriality can be located on two different levels: on the structural level of web interfaces, digital seriality concerns the web as a structure of interconnected websites, as well as the organizational forms through which the operational images of web interfaces establish, manage, and regulate these connections. On the processual level of viral autopoiesis, digital seriality denotes the forms through which images evolve and transform through sharing and spreading. This is for instance characteristic for memes as gesture-images in constant transformational becoming. While the article does not aim at describing the entirety of networks in terms of seriality, serial operations and procedures have to be understood as playing a distinct and significant role in the digital realm.

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The tactile and the index - From the remote control to the hand-held computer, some speculative reflections on the bodies of the will

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness: Interface aesthetics and moral response

The mouse, the screen and the Holocaust witness: Interface aesthetics and moral response

Digital Seriality as Structure and Process

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