Abstract
Advances in artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing are expanding human-computer interaction (HCI) in everyday life; turning phones, TVs, cars, etc., into computer interfaces. Such changes affect how humans perceive and interact with digital information. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual-interactive art experiments and Roy Ascott’s technoetic art, this text deploys Søren Brier’s Cybersemiotic framework to bridge practice and theory. Cybersemiotic provides a powerful framework for comprehending and interpreting changes in human experience and consciousness wrought by the digital revolution. It achieves this by enabling an understanding of humans as complex adaptive systems; consequently, anything that involves or is involved with humans becomes an integral part of the system. A practical implication of this statement reveals the need to consider all internal and external variables within interactive hybrid environments. Even such minor factors as slow Internet connection or inadequate text size affects how human users perceive information or relate to an interface and consequently to the whole system. Through the lens of the Cybersemiotic a series of visual representations are introduced to highlight the interactions among user, information and interface, here addressed as meta-environment, with the potential for an ever-changing system, demonstrating the manner in which a change in one element affects each and every other part of the system. The analyses of the elements of the meta-environment reveal characteristics of a complex adaptive dynamic system promoting the expansion of human knowledge and consciousness here called Cybersemiotic Experience.
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Notes
- 1.
WNYC is the name of a local National Public Radio—NPR—station in New York City. http://www.wnyc.org/
- 2.
Amazon Echo Show is the proper name of this gadget. Detailed information about Amazon Echo and the different skills the Voice Service Alexa can potentially learn are documented on Amazon’s website. It offers videos and detailed information on the Echo family (https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Echo-Bluetooth-Speaker-with-WiFi-Alexa/dp/B00X4WHP5E)
- 3.
Here is an example of how the language of embodiment applied to the digital world is, at a minimum, misleading. It should be the proper pronoun used to address and describe the cloud voice server named Alexa, but the entire discourse surrounding the voice server intentionally leads the user to embody the experience as relating to a woman.
- 4.
Richard A. Courage, PhD., The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932 to 1950 (2011, Rutgers University Press) and Root, Branch and Blossom: Social Origins of Chicago’s New Negro Artists and Intellectuals (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press).
- 5.
Here is another example where the language of embodiment applied to the digital world seems misleading. How can an inanimate box which processes bits of energy deliver an action? The word content seems more appropriate to me since it refers to digital information, but the context of the sentence gets lost.
- 6.
“People with dyslexia have been found to have problems with identifying the separate speech sounds within a word and/or learning how letters represent those sounds, a key factor in their reading difficulties” (https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics/).
- 7.
ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder “is a brain disorder marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development” (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/index.shtml).
- 8.
The term semiotic dance was proposed in an informal conversation by Jeanette Bopry, editor of Cybernetics and Human Knowing journal (Jacques 2018).
- 9.
This understanding will later be crucial on the analysis of the elements in interactive hybrid environments.
- 10.
Joselit (1998) attempts to explain Duchamp’s usage of language through Saussure’s dyadic signified-signifier semiotics. Duchamp’s triadic usage of signs in the creative act, along with his writings and readymades through object reinterpretation, coupled with the usage of language in his titles seem to be evidence that if he was not directly knowledgeable of Peirce’s understandings of signs–semiotics, he had at least the same triadic understanding of signs. A deeper investigation of this matter is not relevant for this research but it is an attractive future research.
- 11.
These two terms refer back Lovejoy’s (2004, p. 15; 1997, p. 14.) quote shared under the subsection 2.3.1. Introduction:
“The way we see is shaped by our worldview, which governs our understanding of what representation is. Thus, we can say that representation is a form of ideology because it has inscribed within it all the attitudes we have about our response to images and their assimilation; and about art-making in general, with all its hierarchies of meaning and intentionality” (2004, p. 15; 1997, p. 14).
- 12.
Cyberperception is defined as “the emergent human faculty of technologically augmented perception” (Ascott 2007, p. 376).
- 13.
Term user is elaborated later in this chapter.
- 14.
Ascott was referring to second-order cybernetics.
- 15.
The techniques of atmospheric perspective, value pattern sizing and overlapping when employed with linear perspective help reduce the visual distortion it creates and consequently visually render more realistic representations of reality.
- 16.
Second-order cybernetics.
- 17.
The practice of attempting to make the medium transparent to the user is not new. According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), immediacy is a “transparent interface [that] would (be one that) erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium …the desire for immediacy itself has a history that is not easily overcome. At least since the Renaissance, it has been a defining feature of Western visual (and for that matter verbal) representation” (p. 24).
- 18.
Source: The original TV advertisement for the first Apple Computer Macintosh (Apple 1984).
- 19.
Led by Nicholas Negroponte, MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology Architecture Machine Group was an avant-garde research center for the study of human-computer interactions and is the precursor of today’s MIT Media Lab. https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040959/dataland-mits-70s-media-room-concept-that-influenced-the-mac
- 20.
Initially developed by Aldus in 1985 (Fox 2015) and later (2004–2005) bought by Adobe Systems, PageMaker was a desktop publishing application introduced with Apple Macintosh computers. Today Adobe PageMaker is superseded by Adobe InDesign.
- 21.
Hot type press is a somewhat obsolete printing press process where the type setting composition is made of metal melted into type molds where the text is composed manually, character by character. In the late 1800, the Linotype machine, a line by line metal press, was introduced revolutionizing the newspaper industry (Roberts 1980).
- 22.
Cold type presses appeared in 1960s and are officially known as phototypesetting. There is a great movie from the era introducing the new system to the press labors. https://vimeo.com/127605644
- 23.
Meaning without exchange of matter.
- 24.
The Oxford Dictionaries online define context as: “The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed” (Context 2016).
- 25.
“Project Zero” is still vibrant today. More about the Project can be found at http://www.pz.harvard.edu/who-we-are/about
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Jacques, C. (2021). Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience. In: Vidales, C., Brier, S. (eds) Introduction to Cybersemiotics: A Transdisciplinary Perspective. Biosemiotics, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52746-4_10
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