Re: <nettime> full of having to think about usability

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 6:19 PM -0400 2/5/02, nettime's_digestive_system wrote:
>You are raising an important question here Kristoffer Gansing, especially
>if we consider interactive design as an expansion of the utopian idea of
>hypertext as an liberating or perhaps empowering concept. Such a line of
>thought has to be rejected, since it does not question the performative
>status of the action of the user, if we as Judith Butler seams to do, think
>of performativity as an materialising process. And therefore I definitely
>think your demand for a rethinking of the ’Äúuser subject’Äù within the
>discourse of so called interactive design is needed.  To do so, I think we
>also have to consider who the desire to create a ’Äúfree user
>subject’Äù within  techno-media discourse is constituted, preferably
>without slipping into Deleuzeian nor Lacanian clichˆ©s (logocentric or
>not)?

i'd suggest one of my own essays as a point of connection here. 
available in one iteration as
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/essays/cinema_paradigms/cinematic_paradigms.txt

in hypertext (and cinema in regards to edits) i'd argue links are 
performative in austin's sense with perlocutionary and elocutionary 
force. also means that usability is not about 'true or false' but 
about felicity, which as austin (and derrida in signature event 
context) has shown is only ever about context....

i also think it's possible to slip into deleuze without the cliche's 
:-) particularly around the rhizomatic rule of n-1 which is certainly 
how i think about my own hypertextual (text and video) practice.

what gets interesting is the role of the user, though i think it can 
be solipistic to treat performatives as = to literal performances by 
the user in 'interactivity'. i suspect a more interesting trajectory 
(unless i've misunderstood) is something about the surrendering that 
the performative requires (it seems to involve some contractual 
felicity with an other) and how this relates to wht it is 'like' to 
click and surrender choice to the machine (just because the choice 
appears to coincide with yours doesn't mean tht each click isn't like 
the roll of the dice...)

cheers
adrian miles
-- 
    
+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+ media studies. rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]

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