Esther Weltevrede’s talk delves into the interface as both a subject of study and an entry point for investigating cultures of app use. It highlights that apps cater to diverse user types, such as end-users, developers, and advertisers, through distinct interfaces. By studying these interfaces, researchers gain insights into the corresponding user cultures. Researchers can script users by adopting a research persona to conduct app studies. It demonstrates how the interface can be repurposed for research using walkthrough methods, which allow for an examination of the appification of daily activities. The talk introduces four types of walkthrough methods: regular, data-centric, designerly, and multi-sided walkthroughs, and delves into the multifaceted nature of interface relations, exploring how they mediate interactions between different groups of users, such as app users and advertisers.

Esther Weltevrede is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture and coordinator of the Digital Methods Initiative and the MA New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the project ‘apps and data infrastructures.’ Her research interests include digital methods, software and platform studies, app studies, data infrastructures, and social media automation.

The concept of the “interface” was originally developed in physics in the late 19th century – to explain the conduction of energy. From the end of the 1950s, the term interface became widely used in computer technology to describe the regulated relationship between people and computers. To this day, the term “interface” is often used to describe human-computer relationships that we encounter every day, for example in the form of graphical user interfaces. However, the term interface encompasses much more. Interfaces do not only mediate between computers and humans: Rather, interfaces establish connections on all present and hidden levels in, between and to computers, which are necessary today for the functioning of digital technology in its diverse forms, embeddings and networking. Interfaces perform mediations for and as computer work: from hardware-hardware interfaces for the cables of the Internet to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to sensors of self-driving cars or “smart” cities and all those software/hardware constellations for humans to provide input. The term interface addresses these diverse forms of correlations—and helps to question the complexity of the digital present precisely because these forms and process of interfaces are increasingly intertwined. They belong and work together, are interdependent and thus form an interface complex.

Current research on interfaces has increased in the international field of media studies, particularly in the last ten years, and is correspondingly many-faceted. With the lecture series “The Interface Complex”, researchers have been invited to the ZeM to provide insights into this complex and put it up for discussion. Scheduled are:

14.05.2024 Dr. Esther Weltevrede (University of Amsterdam): App Studies and Interfaces

21.05.2024 Dr. Michael Dieter (University of Warwick): Interface critique at large

28.05.2024 Joana Moll (Academy of Media Arts Cologne): The Interface Deconstructed & Revisited

04.06.2024 Prof. Dr. Kim Albrecht (Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF): APIs als Medium

18.06.2024 Dr. Timo Kaerlein (Ruhr University Bochum): Handhelds und Landhelds – Smartphones im Interfacekomplex

02.07.2024 Dr. Theresa Züger (Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft [HIIG]): Interfaces of AI in the public interest

Organisation: Prof. Dr. Jan Distelmeyer (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam/Universy of Potsdam)

The lecture series “The Interface Complex” is directly linked to the ZeM’s annual focus “Control of Loss”: Because the presence of digital technology, which promises and enables control for us as users, is at the same time linked to the loss (or increasing difficulty) of insight and overview. On the one hand, digital technology is permanently close and familiar to me, such as my smartphone as an everyday companion and organizer of many areas of my life; on the other hand, its functionality, its own activity beyond my direct use and the ongoing exchange of data are alien to me. In view of the (promised) omnipresence and permanent availability of internet and cloud-based services, the infrastructures that (are supposed to) guarantee this, such as sealed-off server parks, camouflaged transmission masts and undersea internet cables, are comparatively invisible. The net is both present and hidden. My trust in the algorithmic processes of various services and apps, which I demonstrate through my use, is opposed to my limited knowledge of these processes. While it is clear to me what I get from digital services, it is unclear to me what these services get from me. The further development of “artificial intelligence” and the targeted productivity of a so-called “black box” make this special control-loss relationship clear: the more powerful digital methods and services that we actively have at our disposal become, the more explicit the loss of insight seems to become, which, according to a significant part of the discourse, must be accepted. “Interface” can be a helpful concept for analytically confronting this (dialectical) complexity—the simultaneity of presence and concealment, of knowing and not-knowing, of control and loss of control.

An event as part of the ZeM’s annual focus “Control of Loss”.