Over the course of the twentieth century, art evolved in the direction of according more and more importance to interactivity, performance, installation and the participation of the public. The emergence of an aesthetics of the media arts in which networks, interface machines and sensors play an increasingly important role in the creative process raises questions pertaining to the status of the artist and the nature of the work. Technological interfaces, especially in the field of the visual arts, abolish the old aesthetic and cultural categories. These technological interfaces then spread through sensory and extra-sensory channels, availing of multi-modal processes in which proprioception, tactility, emotivity and body posture become forms, so many new indications of the return of the senses. Multimedia installations no longer rest on any given medium but on processes in action, retroaction and becoming. This leads in turn to the disappearance of the medium, of the material substratum. What becomes of painting when machines start to paint? What becomes of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction? How do these art forms combine to bring about the emergence of a new aesthetics? This paper is a response to the various questions raised by the use of digital interfaces in the technological arts as witnessed in contemporary artistic practice.
Before it is something technological, the interface is essentially a place, a marginal zone which facilitates communication and the spatial and temporal interrelation of two different conceptions of the world. It is an intermediary zone which creates friction, contact with which obliges the spectator to undergo the strange experience of a separation of the self, as in peter campus's 1972 installation Interface. In this work, as the spectator approaches the middle of the room, his image is reflected in a large window located in a dark part of the room. At the same time, a video camera placed on the far side of the window projects a video image of the spectator onto it. The window becomes both a mirror and a screen and is the place where two different representations coexist. It is an interface.
