Joana Moll

This course seeks to critically reveal, analyze and connect the complex network of agents that converge on the configuration of the Interface. Far from being a purely immaterial entity, the Interface is an extremely complex physical structure composed by a massive number of actors that have a direct and deep impact in every aspect of our daily lives. Despite its crucial role in many aspects of our society, the material and computational architectures that allow the Interface to exist are widely ignored by most of its users. The seminar will focus on revealing, deconstructing and re- articulating, the material and immaterial agents that construct the Interface in order to reflect on its role and influence within the social, political, economic, cultural and emotional spheres of the networked society. The course is structured around three interconnected parts:
1. Reveal // The physical layer of the Interface
This part focus on revealing and exploring the different architectures that build the Internet, such as its material infrastructures, the physical paths of data, geopolitics of the Internet, the environmental impact of communication technologies, online tracking, social profiling, and privacy.
2. Deconstruct // Code, Algorithms, Language and Governance
The second part of the seminar analyze and discuss the effects of algorithms on the intimate and social bodies, minds and languages, and the influence that such colonization has on the social, political, cultural, economic and environmental spheres of our society.
3. Re-articulate // Interface, Design and Ideology
During the third part of the seminar we will analyze the methods, processes and structures by which unquantifiable information such as language, human communication and cognition become quantified and commodified. We will discuss the role that UX Design has in this process and we will develop and test experimental methodologies that will help us to critically intervene the Interface in order to reflect on our individual and collective needs, interests and values and articulate them within the Interface design.
The main goal of this course is to stimulate and re-appropriate subjectivity, an essential process in the generation of critical thought about the true nature of technology, and in the imagination of alternative techno-paradigms which may coherently respond to our environmental and human conditions.