Interaction Esoterrorism [Writing]

Interaction Esoterrorism

Exploring mythologized interactive systems through their failures

Contemporary acceleration of technological advancement has lead to the integration of interactive systems into many aspects of daily life. From swiping your RFID Oyster card on a London bus to finding out where you are using your WiFi enabled GoogleMaps enhanced GPS phone in The-middle-of-no-where Massachusetts.

While these interactive systems are enriching/enraging our lives, the systems themselves are held behind a wall of secrecy. Piracy has forced the proprietors of our digital world to hide behind encryption and intensely regulated copyright and intellectual property laws. The specifics of the inner workings of these systems are obscured by esotericism and are left almost entirely to the users imagination.

The language of these interactive systems that have permeated our daily lives, from phones to computer games to computer games on phones, has become our second language just as the language of cinema has - through excessive exposure.

The sub dialects of these interactive languages have emerged from the methods and functions of the interaction. First person shooter games have developed a recognizable language with their graphical user interface commonly called a HUD, or Head-Up Display. These displays efficiently summarize the environment the players character inhabits, often with statistics, like ammunition supplies, and graphical displays in the form radar or maps. These displays, formed out of function, have been incorporated into our visual language as a symbol for the first person shooter genre, in a similar manner to how, the red 'record' symbol that early cam-corders imprint on the video they recorded has become a symbol for that recording method.

At the same time, the failure of these systems has become a language to itself. A recognizable residue, a semiotic fingerprint. Whether the glitch in the game's virtual environment that leaves your character falling through infinity, or a network problem leaving your GoogleMaps GPS icon floating in a grey square. The imagery generated by the failures of these systems has become a language as recognizable as that used by the systems themselves.

But to the consumers of this language, these failures represent a view into the mysterious inner workings of these systems. A glimpse through the clock face and into the assemblage of gears, coils and springs.