The Interface vs the Archive
The Interface vs the Archive
Will Allstetter
I can easily ignore the truth. Cause and effect are opaque concepts in the algorithmic age. Common sense suggests the extent of your impact is your immediate environment. But moving through cyberspace produces a ledger of consequences. Each fleeting tap grows a far away and nebulous register of damage and exploitation.
Archives are made from leftovers: notes scrawled on a napkin, buttons taken home from a rally, lingering documentation of happenings. An archive is a place that takes the byproducts seriously, acknowledging the importance of process in production. The archive of the algorithmic age will not solely be C++ files and old MacBooks, however. Researchers will also collect carbon emission-thinned tree rings, grey matter shrunk by blue light exposure, and dystopian minute-by-minute worker surveillance logs. Beyond the screen, tech generates a now-invisible record where otherwise forgotten clicks will still linger.
Existing on the other end of the spectrum, interfaces would like you to believe that interactions—terms defining the logic of digital life—are inconsequential and efficient. In one sense, they are. Their rule-based (read: algorithmic, though that term has baggage) automated systems appear frictionless. Activated by the user, each interaction quickly and alchemically transmutes data to value. On an interface, keystrokes, clicks, and drags seamlessly progress along a rigid track, funneling attention into shareholder value. Liking photos, streaming, and playing games just obscure those avenues.
But computers are not ideal machines. The funnel collects significant byproducts. Electronics’ production, usage, and eventual disposal pollute the earth. They’re likely physically changing our brains. The rise of the interface has exacerbated inequality and consolidated power in the hands of very few. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of gadgets are made with slave labor.
Despite these detriments and growing techno-skepticism, the logic of interaction and interface have permeated from the digital into offline spaces we once held sacred. Efficiency and value creation are no longer solely the domain of business, but culture. In 1954, Jacques Ellul identified the inescapability of techno-ideology in The Technological Society, naming it technique. Ten years later, Marshall McLuhan famously claimed the medium was the message. The modern medium, across domains, is now the computer.
When passed through the functional, results-oriented computer logic, “What does this do (for me)?” replaces all other messages. The byproducts are forgotten or ignored. For example, therapy-speak perpetuated by algorithms turns social connections into an unfeeling HR meeting. Community and ethic-based religion shrinks while productive, actionable, and codified instructions (dare I say algorithms) from nebulous New Age spiritual entities gain traction. Art, however, may be the most susceptible to the message (efficiency) of the medium (interactive digital technology). In a purpose-driven world, art is superfluous. Aesthetic experience is not an actionable good. So, to remain relevant, art becomes an interface, with all the damage that follows.
Interfaces not only invite the viewer in but require them for the piece to function. Seamless interaction is closer to a big tech marketing campaign than to art. Engagement claims echo empty corporate promises like “Facebook was built to bring people closer together.” Some artists interrogate the hollowness well, acknowledging it directly (American Artist’s A Guide to Engaging with Security Theater). Others don’t know how to face it, embracing the machine and letting the growing byproducts lurk in the background (Mercer Labs).
The art at TECHNE, as much contemporary art does, bent to the interactive paradigm. In The Vivid Unknown, cameras hung from the ceiling, injecting audience member outlines into AI-generated images. I wasn’t sure which elements to interact with. Paranoid knowledge of tech’s often covert data collection and hidden analysis haunted my experience. There were a few obvious avenues. A lever triggered a slot machine of more AI images. I was still suspicious that I was covertly being used as a data point elsewhere. Fruitlessly, I stared at the cameras dead-on, hoping I would appear reinterpreted through the AI interface.
A few days later, the space screened The Golden Key. Trained on folktales, the piece narrated fables using dramatic AI voices. Keyboards stood on either end of the room. Two TVs displayed what I assumed were prompts people had written. The stories often took left turns and ended abruptly, prompting murmurs of confusion. I typed three or four prompts into the terminals but never saw evidence of the algorithm acknowledging them. A group of preteens near me successfully incorporated Shrek into one of the stories. The pieces were prototypical interfaces, transforming inputs using obscure, hidden, and polished methods.
Admittedly, technology has always shaped the art it facilitates, from oil paint to language. Yet, interactivity now forces the viewer to participate. Keyboards, computer vision, buttons, and levers implicate the body in their digital worlds. Immersive tech pieces draw the viewer into an environment in which they have no control yet allegedly exert significant power. It’s unpleasant. Do I need to be a medium through which technology is given a voice, often to ideas I stand against? Sadly, the answer is an inescapable yes. So… now what? Hibernate? Stop making art?
Maybe art (especially at the intersection of art and technology) should constantly condemn its medium. I can imagine a wall-tag disclaimer stretching to the floor: “This piece was made on a laptop which contains cobalt mined using child and slave labor. Administrative emails were sent via Gmail, owned by Google, which contracts its services to the Israeli Defense Force. Approximately 1,000 Watts were used to…” and so on. Useless and conscience-stroking, I struggle to believe this is the solution.
The Vivid Unknown and The Golden Key took another approach: diving in headfirst and making a literal and honest representation of the medium. The viewer is left to be the critic. Messiness, ambiguity, and technical failure were meaningful entry points.
Pieces like Yehwan Song’s 2025 Are We Still (Surfing)? more directly confront the lie of interactivity and its hidden environmental costs. Song removes the human from the interface, activating the technology through automated water flows. Works like hers are meditations on the medium, cheekily drawing on and participating in the system they critique.
A darker manifestation of this leave-it-to-the-viewer approach emerges in Refik Anadol’s 2022 piece for the MoMA lobby, Unsupervised. The piece’s machine-learning model grinds up the museum’s collection and real-time footage of visitors creating abstract images. It’s smooth. It’s clean. It’s uncritical. It’s an interface, transforming MoMA’s cultural capital into a billboard for the tech industry, normalizing surveillance and waste. This is the bleakest of all approaches to creating under the shadow of tech.
While critique of the medium is a noble approach (that I often employ), it’s another method for interface-ification. A friend teaching at an art school recently complained to me that her students are all interested in creating art that does something. Admittedly, so does this essay, asking art to make itself useful. Art is tasked to be an interface—to transform attention into a more righteous value.
Ultimately, we live in the world we live in. As members of a system constructed and hidden without our input, we’re constantly adding to that record of violence, extraction, and a plethora of dark aims. It’s fucking horrifying that I play on my phone thanks to Congolese cobalt mines and child slavery. We’re no longer encountering art in Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, but rather an age of mechanical culpability. Work produced today is born at a time when our data, bodies, and language are all necessary components of larger systems we have no control over. We write each of our actions into an irrevocable, material ledger on the planet and our fellow humans.
Two weeks after the beginning of the LA fires and the opening of TECHNE, Trump’s inauguration—which saw him flanked by tech CEOs—marked the end of the show. Their technology doubtlessly played a part in all aspects—from creation to installation—of the work shown and the natural disaster. In response, the only thing I can think of doing is creating art they’d hate: art for the archive. Archives are anathemas to interfaces.
Watchdog-like critique of the systems they build is the obvious approach, manifesting as works similar to Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera’s LowDrone, which appropriate tech tools and fly in the face of their violent backgrounds. Work in this vein directly confronts the ledger damage our tools create. It looks at the hidden costs big tech would rather you ignore. It collects and collates an archive of abuses that corporate actors have no interest in cataloging.
While admirable and effective, this approach still lives within the world of the interface. In a rational computational world where everything has a purpose and “there is no alternative,” making nonsense may be the only way to escape the system—to remind ourselves that process is important to production. Another way of saying this is producing work only for the archive.
If the archives are full of byproducts, of the chaos of human creativity, big tech has no interest in them. The Zuckerbergs and Altmans of the world care about usable, exploitable, and efficient products. By creating against the interface, we orient only towards the archive, creating beautiful, meaningful artifacts. This art undermines their profit and reaffirms an illogical humanity, resisting a worldview where purpose and value-creation drive everything.
That can take a variety of forms. Beauty for beauty’s sake is nonsensical. Interpreting the uninterpretable, like in Cory Archangel’s Data Diaries, is nonsensical. Art that says nothing, made for pure fun, is nonsensical. Art that does not perform well on social media is nonsensical. As we trudge along, accumulating a ledger of disturbing techno-fascist footprints, at minimum making sure our output doesn’t oil the machine provides some cold comfort. No more cut-and-dry red-chip interactive interfaces that hollowly proclaim the glory of the computer. Producing for the archive is producing for the sake of art, not the interface, expecting nothing in return.
Regardless, both orientations to the archive (cataloging abuse or non-productive absurdist) undermine the seamless, computerized logic that pervades our culture. Archives acknowledge complexity and meaning outside polished products. Our world does not resemble a sleek, flat Apple Store. It’s messier, weirder, darker, more beautiful, and more human.