Feedbackmaschinen

How do we experience interaction? How is moving our hand on a computer mouse and looking at moving symbolic representations on a computer screen perceived as one coherent action: clicking on something? How is the Gestalt of this something constituted? Starting from this question, a novel understanding of interaction is developed that focuses on the notion of feedback and on cybernetics. To this end, the history of cybernetics is reconstructed as a history of interactive computing while cybernetic thought is reactivated as a tool for understanding interaction. Drawing on human-computer interaction (HCI), science and technology studies, media studies, semiotics, empirical psychology and artistic practice, this understanding of interaction can be seen as a critique of cognitivist theories of interaction and of the idea that interaction constitutes a form of conditioning, as put forward by media art and media studies. At the same time, it aims at complementing theories of direct manipulation and tangible interaction, incorporating post-cognitivist theories such as “embodiment” and “enaction” into the HCI discourse. Ultimately, it offers an answer to the question how interaction fuses bodily activity and perception into one experience, which in turn creates the very objects of interaction. Interaction, it is concluded, creates interfaces. Published by e-Publications@khm: https://e-publications.khm.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/127