Review
His self-published guide to re-programming our brains with the power of the microchip is facinating stuff. It reminded me a bit of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach in its remorseless tumble of ideas and gags (and you can't give better praise than that). Words and phrases in the age of the colour monitor can become vivid icons (viewcabularies to use an Eiffe coinage) (7.06) that take advantage of aspects of our visual scanning system that trad print media ignore.
The book is fun, though perhaps so embedded in its own discourse -- what Eiffe dubs hyper-analysis (8.09) -- that it sometimes loses touch with any likely market outside the 'graffix' labs of Silicon Valley and their local equivalents. I would hope that future editions can include some sample programs, meantime, every computing class needs a stack of copies... --Damien Broderick in the Weekend Australian 26/3/94
''Write down every word you know! Add a definition and give examples of its usage. Print it all up in a book and then wonder why no-one is buying it. Unfortunately, you are 300 years late and you are not Dr. Johnson.''
The ultimate interface is between mind and reality, an interface presided over by natural language. As the machine becomes an ever-greater part of our reality, our dialogue with it will increasingly resemble natural language. This is the starting point for a unique book from a truly original mind that may one day take its place up there with Ted Nelson's Hypertext in the pantheon of obscure-but-influential computer books.
While Artificial Intelligence has sought to make machines emulate the human mind, Interface Art seeks to advance the mind by enlisting the aid of information technology. If Eiffe rejects the technocratic path of thought-extension, neither is he retrogressive in his approach.
The computer screen is not a book and deserves its own solutions, points out Eiffe: new icons, new keyboards and new concepts are needed to cope with the coming info-blitz as computers do for information what they have already done for words and numbers. With its mix of exercises, mind games, obscure factoids from the history of language, Interface Art constitutes a course of intellectual callisthenics to tone up the imagination of anyone dissatisfied with the state of the interface art.
Although designed for student and professional programmers, there is not a line of code in the book. Instead, Eiffe uses simple, accessible language, organised in (humourously-provocative) bite-sized chunks of text interspersed with flippant and decorative clip art.
Mediamatic has no information on the author or his background, but Interface Art speaks for itself. Grab a paper plate and load up on this conceptual smorgasbord as soon as you can find it. --Jules Marshall in Mediamatic vol. 7#3/4
From the Publisher
On one level this book purports to be a set of potential programming exercises for school students. During the early days of personal computing, circa 1980, typing in programs was the main activity. I myself bought an Apple II in early 1979, carried a small U.S. television home from San Francisco, and, using a step-down transformer, was likely the first Apple Computer customer in my home state of South Australia.
By 1990, programming was definitely on the wane, but there was still a case for students to be taught some skills.
The title of Interface Art was deliberately ambiguous, my ultimate interest being in the interface between the human mind and reality as mediated by language.
An early working title was Mindshift, because the thesis here is that a radical upgrade to language can produce a radical improvement in the interface of mind to reality. That is, people would automatically behave in a more intelligent fashion (surely a worthy aim). This hyper-Whorfian viewpoint is at odds with the prevailing academic view that all human languages deliver similar levels of competency, and any future changes to language are going to be about convenience rather than core function.
When looking at a mirror your focus is not the performance of the mirror but your image in reflection. Language is similarly difficult to study and understand. Upon learning our first language, we also come alive as sentient beings. But years later, you may have been asked, as I was, to learn a second language. It struck me forcibly that French aller was less versatile than English go. This and other discrepancies seemed a chink in the immaculate perfection of the language process.
Then came Roget's compaction of English vocabulary into several hundred numbered groupings.
Add the explicit terseness of chemical formulae and equations, the infinitesimal calculus and the notable fact that Newton's notation was outdone by that of Leibniz:
dy/dx beat f'(x).
So, in early 1968 as the summer of love gave way to the spring of street fighting man, flower-powered psychedelia mixed with preposterously naive ambition. For many, anything seemed possible. For me, I hoped that a handful of colourful visual symbols could be confected into a capable symbol-wielding monologue offering both elemental power and subtlety. Here was another cool form of mini-malism, but it would have to take place on a big movie screen, and its production would require resources such as an Oxberry Optical Printer that were comfortably out of my reach. Yet the dream persisted, and I began to investigate a formal basis for my intuitions.
Years and decades of impassioned letter-writing, research, manuscript production and forays into movie production followed. A year hunched over a Bolex H16 cine camera would give way to several with an IBM Selectric typewriter. An era of book production such as the one above would give way to a tussle with Delphi or Actionscript programming languages.
The dream is now dented, its tiring defender increasingly philosophical, but both refuse to lie down and die completely. Forty-two years on from that initial impulse, the rise of smart phones may allow a final flowering of the idea. The campaign continues elsewhere on the internet, but meanwhile I recommend Interface Art to you as the manifestation of an unfinished aspiration.
