



Any interest in the relationship between today’s popular culture and images or visibility cannot escape the sustained signi cance of images delivered by various forms of graphical user interfaces. Since these interfaces are not only tools or even mere preparations of presentations but meaningful presentations themselves, this essay proposes to analyze them as operative images. By delivering a sort of signs, that combine iconic as well as symbolic and indexical qualities, operative images sketch out and perform interrelated concepts of both: the user and the computer/the digital.
From this follows the importance of analyzing popular interfaces as a special kind of staging – as a mise-en-scène ‘depresenting’ the power and work of the computer and interrelating with the promises/fears shaping the myth of ‘the digital’ since the late 1980s. Struggling for a critical position against the mythical term ‘digital’, I have proposed the neologism ‘digitalicity’ [Digitalizität]. I will argue that establishing the analysis of ‘interface-mise-en-scène’ as something like a vital part of today’s media studies is largely and indeed long overdue. The graphical user interface of YouTube will be taken here as a case study. It will be discussed as a particular performance of the ‘aesthetics of regulation’ [Ästhetik der Verfügung], that informs the aesthetical appearance of computers, allowing and framing our handling with them. Characterized by a dialectic motion, the aesthetics of regulation raises questions of power: interfaces empower users to regulate and condemn them to be regulated at the same time.




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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers
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Cinéma & Cie
Jan Distelmeyer
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Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers
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Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers1
Jan Distelmeyer, University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam/
University of Potsdam




Abstract

    Any interest in the relationship between today’s popular culture and images or
    visibility cannot escape the sustained significance of images delivered by various
    forms of graphical user interfaces. Since these interfaces are not only tools or even
    mere preparations of presentations but meaningful presentations themselves,
    this essay proposes to analyze them as operative images. By delivering a sort of
    signs, that combine iconic as well as symbolic and indexical qualities, operative
    images sketch out and perform interrelated concepts of both: the user and the
    computer/the digital.
    From this follows the importance of analyzing popular interfaces as a special
    kind of staging – as a mise-en-scène ‘depresenting’ the power and work of the
    computer and interrelating with the promises/fears shaping the myth of ‘the
    digital’ since the late 1980s. Struggling for a critical position against the mythical
    term ‘digital’, I have proposed the neologism ‘digitalicity’ [Digitalizität]. I will
    argue that establishing the analysis of ‘interface-mise-en-scène’ as something like
    a vital part of today’s media studies is largely and indeed long overdue. The
    graphical user interface of YouTube will be taken here as a case study. It will be
    discussed as a particular performance of the ‘aesthetics of regulation’ [Ästhetik
    der Verfügung], that informs the aesthetical appearance of computers, allowing
    and framing our handling with them. Characterized by a dialectic motion, the
    aesthetics of regulation raises questions of power: interfaces empower users to
    regulate and condemn them to be regulated at the same time.


   If the present is to be understood as what is frequently and interdisciplinary
called ‘our digital era’,2 the triumph of the computer is nominally all-encompassing


1
  This article further elaborates a paper presented at the Media Archaeology Section of the
XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School in April 2017, devoted to explore the
interrelationships between the machinic networks and the processes of subjectivation inherently
to the ‘There is No Turning Back. Re-thinking the Postmodern’ general project.
2
  Cathy N. Davidson and Danica Savonick, ‘Digital Humanities: The Role of Interdisciplinary

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, Fall 2017
                                       Jan Distelmeyer


and decisive. That seems to leave ‘us’ with just one task: deal with it. This essay
is interested in the various conditions and implications of this highly charged
issue: dealing with computers. It addresses the real and imaginary, the well-
prepared and consequential relationships between humans and computers, as
applied in computers and implemented through many-faceted interfaces. This
essay combines several aspects of a research project that started in 2012 and led
to the published volume Machtzeichen. Anordungen des Computers.3 The latter
presents the computer as a unique power machine, studying its interface politics
and in particular its ordinary manifestations: graphical user interfaces, that build
powerful models but have been underestimated as tools for a long time. Its
ambition is to pose a series of questions on interface politics as an important part
of today’s digitalicity.
   Of course, graphical user interfaces describe only one of the multilayered
aspects that characterize interfaces in digital computing. These ‘symbolic
handles’, as Florian Cramer and Matthew Fuller have put it, ‘which […] make
software accessible to users’ depend on four other interface aspects: ‘[h]ardware
that connects users to hardware’, ‘[s]oftware, or hardware-embedded logic, that
connects hardware to software’, as well as ‘[s]pecifications and protocols that
determine relations between software and software’.4 Moreover today’s interface
culture is shaped significantly by several non-graphical forms of interface with
computers, such as gestures, voices, and embedded interfaces.
   The ongoing development of the increasingly concealed dissemination,
interconnection and implementation of computers — described for instance
by Mark B. N. Hansen’s view on ‘twenty-first-century media’5 — cannot be
investigated without also accounting for interface processes. Interfaces induce
the various procedures of connectivity and transferences, marking the current
presence of computers — so often described as being ubiquitous. It is important
to remember, that the term ‘interface’, introduced by the physicists James and
William Thomson in the late-nineteenth century, was originally used to describe
the transmission of energy.6 With this in mind, the question of the pursued


Humanities in the Information Age’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed. by Robert
Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Carlos Dos Santos Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), pp. 159–72 (p. 159); Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 4; William A. Cohn, ‘Led Astray: Legal and Moral
Blowback from the Global War on Terror’, in Assessing the War on Terror: Western and Middle
Eastern Perspectives, ed. by Charles Webel and Mark Tomass (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp.
163–95 (p. 173).
3
  Jan Distelmeyer, Machtzeichen. Anordnungen des Computers (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2017).
4
  Florian Cramer and Matthew Fuller, ‘Interface’, in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. by Matthew
Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 149–52 (p. 149).
5
   Mark B. N. Hansen ‘Ubiquitous Sensation: Towards an Atmospheric, Impersonal and
Microtemporal Media’, in Throughout. Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed.
by Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 63–88 (p. 73).
6
  See Pater Schaefer, ‘Interface: History of a Concept, 1868-1888’, in The Long History of New
Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness, ed. by David W. Park, Nicholas

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                        Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers


ubiquity and networked embeddedness of computing, relying in essence on
the transportation of signals and the transmission of electricity, is a question of
interfaces to an even greater extent. The term interface helps to describe the
‘interior telegraphy’7 of the computer as well as all forms of its networks, its
relations to us and its incorporation.
   Mark B. N. Hansen’s description of the experiential shift in twenty-first-century
media depicts the complex diversity of interacting interface politics:

       Thus, well before we even begin to use our smart phones in active and passive
   ways, the physical devices we carry with us interface in complex ways with cell towers
   and satellite networks; and preparatory to our using our digital devices or our laptops
   to communicate or to acquire information, the latter engage in complex connections
   with wireless routers and network hosts.8

   Though these devices are constantly (and ‘calmly’9) interfacing with networks
and servers, we also our smart phones in active ways: this is the reason for which
we buy and update them. Even today, graphical user interfaces are so obviously
omnipresent, that this manifestation of software still is, to quote Cramer and
Fuller, ‘often mistaken in media studies for “interface” as a whole’.10 Nevertheless,
media studies analyses of common user interfaces remain noticeably infrequent.11
This absence ought to be addressed, in order to elaborate an understanding
of our interrelationship with all sorts of computers, computerized media, and
computerized things.
   In the second half of the twentieth century, film studies and film analysis
became institutionalized in European universities. Given the growing relevance
of computing and graphical user interfaces in the last 35 years, it is high time
to establish the discipline of interface studies and its analysis in the humanities.
These analyses are necessary because interfaces define today’s reality in manifold


W Jankowski and Steve Jones (New York: P. Lang, 2011), pp. 163–75; Branden Hookway,
Interfaces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), p. 59.
7
  Hartmut Winkler, Prozessieren. Die dritte, vernachlässigte Medienfunktion (Paderborn: Wilhelm
Fink, 2015), p. 294.
8
   Hansen, Feed Forward. On the Future of Twenty-First-Century-Media (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), p. 62.
9
  Florian Sprenger, ‘Die Vergangenheit der Zukunft. Kommentar zu “Das kommende Zeitalter der
Calm Technology”’, in Internet der Dinge. Über smarte Objekte, intelligente Umgebungen und die
technische Durchdringung der Welt, ed. by Florian Sprenger and Christoph Engemann (Bielefeld:
Transcript 2015), pp. 143–68.
10
   Cramer and Fuller, ‘Interface’, p. 149.
11
   For exceptions see Interface Politics, ed. by Teresa Martínez Figuerola and Jorge Luis Marzo
(Barcelona: Bau, 2016); Interface Critique, ed. by Florian Hadler and Joachim Haupt (Berlin:
Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016); Margarete Pratschke, ‘Interacting with Images. Toward a History
of the Digital Image: The Case of Graphical User Interfaces’, in The Technical Image: A History of
Styles in Scientific Imagery, ed. by Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel and Birgit Schneider (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 48–57; Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, ed.
by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011).

                                                                                               95
                                          Jan Distelmeyer


ways. Understood as the complex of various processes of connectivity and
conduction, interfaces do carry — on all levels of its acceptation — the worldwide
computerization, whereby graphical user interfaces create the equivalents of
blockbusters in today’s visual politics. The fact that they function so differently
to cinematic and televisual appearances and inevitably rely on other interface
processes between hard- and software makes interface analysis and critique so
urgent. One example I would like to comment on here is the YouTube interface:
those immensely popular conditions with which we organize and encounter the
vast array of videos on the second most popular website worldwide.12 But before
that I would like to outline my approach a little more.


Depresentation by Operative Images

   The interdependency between aesthetics and dispositifs signals the need
for attention to the special status of these images and signs, which, to quote
a Windows 10 commercial, ‘help you do your thing’ (2015). Of course, these
so called ‘computer icons’ could likewise be symbolic, and depend merely on
the specific interface design. But regardless of the potentially iconic or symbolic
character of these images and signs, all these clickable or touchable appearances
correspond to Peirce’s idea of indices. These images and signs must have a
physical relation to the (variously) presented processes of computing, to the
‘interior telegraphy’13 of the computer; they ‘show something about things, on
account of their being physically connected with them.’14 Were this not the case,
they simply would not work.
   Graphical user interfaces visualize, in a special way, what the computer offers
to perform, albeit without actually showing what is happening ‘inside’ the
machines. ‘Software, or perhaps more precisely OS’, as Wendy Chun has stated,
‘offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent the
motherboard or other electronic devices but rather desktops, files, and recycling
bins.’15 This is obviously true, but at the same time this relationship, depresented
by symbolic or iconic signs, offers not only an imaginary relationship to the
working hardware of the computer, such as the motherboard. Simultaneously
these clickable or touchable signs are electronically linked to the inner processes
of the machine, to its interior telegraphy, where the flow of electronic signals
connects, among many others, the motherboard and the indexical signs of the
graphical user interface. We click or touch them in order to initiate the promised,

12
   See <http://www.alexa.com/topsites> [accessed 23 June 2017].
13
   See Winkler, Prozessieren, p. 294.
14
   Charles S. Peirce, ‘What Is a Sign’, in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-
1913), ed. by The Peirce Edition Project, 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), ii,
pp. 4–10 (p. 5).
15
   Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2006), p. 20.

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                       Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers


hidden algorithmic processes; precisely for this reason Frieder Nake calls them
‘algorithmic images’.16
   The contradictory character of these images and signs has led Marianne van
den Boomen to the very fruitful term of ‘depresentation’. They present what we
can do; they do not (re)present the ‘procedural complexity’ and the multitude of
attached requirements and consequences:

        [T]he icons on our desktops do their work by representing an ontologized entity,
     while depresenting the processual and material complexity involved. This is the way
     icons manage computer complexity, this is the task we as users (in tacit conjunction
     with designers) have delegated to them.17

   To address this special quality of the ‘symbolic handles’,18 I have defined them
as ‘operative images’, adopting a term introduced by Harun Farocki to describe
the production of images by machines for machines.19 The term ‘operative
image’ or ‘operational image’ is driven by an interest in processes: not processes
that are represented by such images themselves, but rather the processes to
which operative images contribute and are themselves a part of. The adjective
operative is thus used to indicate less the existence of these images per se nor
their opposition to a potential beholder, than their presence as components of
electronic technical operations. With this in mind, as Farocki has noted, these
images are made for ‘operative purposes and not for edification or instruction’.20
   This last point is crucial, and it marks a productive difference between
Farocki’s concept and my appropriation of it. Whereas the operative images of
the interface-mise-en-scène may not be made for edification or instruction in a
classical sense, they of course do (and have to) instruct the so-called ‘user’ on
what could be done. What they instruct, and are a part of through depresentation,
is a form of knowledge of computers, of their usage and of us — an ‘implicit
knowledge’21 that Wendy Chun has labelled ‘implicit memory’.22
   Operative images as depresentations of computer labour are, in my opinion,
parts and thresholds of mutually connected operations — that is interface
operations within the meaning of the multilayered aspects of the term interface
— and four in particular are as follows:


16
   Frieder Nake, ‘The Semiotics Engine: Notes on the History of Algorithmic Images in Europe’,
Art Journal, 68.1 (2009), 76-89.
17
   Marianne van den Boomen, Transcoding the Digital. How Metaphors Matter in New Media
(Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014), p. 36.
18
   Cramer and Fuller ‘Interface’, p. 149.
19
   Distelmeyer, Machtzeichen, pp. 92–98.
20
   Harun Farocki, ‘Quereinfluss / Weiche Montage’, in Zeitsprünge. Wie Filme Geschichte(n)
erzählen, ed. by Christine Rüffert and others (Berlin: Bertz, 2004), pp. 57–61 (p. 61).
21
   See Medien Interfaces und implizites Wissen, ed. by Christoph Ernst and Jens Schröter,
Navigationen – Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturwissenschaften, 17.2 (2017).
22
   Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016),
pp. 87–88.

                                                                                           97
                                        Jan Distelmeyer


   1. Operations of the various interrelations between hardware and software,
that have these ‘general purpose machines’ fulfil their tasks;
   2. Operations of the correlation of several computers, leading to further co-
action between hardware and software through protocol-driven networks;
   3. Operations of the connection and communication between computers and
forms of interconnected materiality that are not computers — like, for instance,
human bodies or technical artefacts, thus creating problems of surveillance and
cybernetization of beings and (an internet of) things under programmed control;
   4. Operations of ‘us’ dealing with ‘them’, i.e. handling and dealing with
computers, and hence operations within the meaning of technical, physical and
cognitive processes, including questions regarding the links between software
and ideology raised by Wendy Chun23 and Alexander Galloway,24 as well as
Cynthia and Richard Selfe.25

   Let me highlight here just two aspects of the last category. The first aspect
relates to the indexicality of these images, that is, confronting us with one of the
most (if not the most) thought-provoking characteristic of computers, computer-
based media, and computer-based things: their programmability. Graphical user
interfaces constantly propose ideas and depresentations not only of the computer,
rather ‘[i]nterfaces and operating systems produce “users” — one and all.’26 And
since all our computer use has to be envisaged and enabled by programming,
computer interfaces always empower users to regulate, while nonetheless forcing
them to be regulated at the same time. Hence — and this is my central thesis —
the depresenting interface-mise-en-scène shapes the aesthetical appearance of the
computer as an aesthetics of regulation [Ästhetik der Verfügung].27
   This aesthetics of regulation is marked by a specific power structure: actively
regulating users are being regulated in a system, in which they have to play by
the default rules and with the provided tools and prerequisites. However, this
is not one-way. Given that every computer operation relies on programs, all
programmed functions, regulations, barriers, and pre-settings are principally
alterable and expandable by users or hackers. Bearing in mind this processuality
of the aesthetics of regulation, the act of dealing with computers becomes a
power struggle, thus triggering political issues.
   The second aspect of operations relating to the human use of and interaction
with computers relates to knowledge, which informs that interaction. Criticized
by various media scholars,28 the mythical term ‘digital’ has become an extremely


23
   Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
24
   Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
25
   Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, ‘The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in
Electronic Contact Zones’, College Composition and Communication, 45.4 (1994), 480–504.
26
   Chun, Programmed Visions, pp. 67–68.
27
   See Distelmeyer, Machtzeichen, pp. 65–126.
28
   See for instance Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001); Chun, Control and Freedom.

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                        Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers


powerful buzzword and sales argument since at least the early 1990s. To define
‘the digital’ as a myth, and to bear in mind the problems of coping with mythical
terms as illustrated by Roland Barthes, another not yet mythical term was
introduced some years ago: the neologism ‘digitalicity’.29 Following Barthes’
mythology, the term digitalicity offers the opportunity, to discuss popular ideas
and productions of ‘the digital’, without automatically reproducing the mythical
quality of this term — instead ‘digitalicity’ seeks to indicate and enable a critical
discussion of these mythical aspects.
   In Western-European and US-American discourse, from the early 1990s
digitalicity has been shaped to a special degree by the promises (and fears) of
interactivity, flexibility, control, freedom and empowerment — with a common
celebration of the victory of digital media’s acclaimed elasticity, as opposed to
rigid, inflexible, passive and hierarchy-based predecessors. In the sustained
debates about NSA and CIA scandals, and the fundamental criticism of internet-
regulation, these promises have since been somewhat re-evaluated. But even
these critical discussions often repeat the old myths about empowerment and
freedom in something like an act of grief.30 I would like to quote just one very
influential, quintessential, protagonist of digitalicity from the 1990s, Nicholas
Negroponte: ‘[M]ore than anything, my optimism comes from the empowering
nature of being digital. The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change
are what will make the future so different from the present.’31
   Understanding digitalicity as one important discursive aspect of computers,
computer-based media, and the highly praised fourth industrial revolution, the
question thus arises of how a given interface-mise-en-scène corresponds to the
promises and fears that have shaped digitalicity. With this question in mind, I
would like to turn now to YouTube as an example.


YouTube: Operating Data

   If you enter the URL www.youtube.com or follow a corresponding link,
bookmark or presetting, the front page of YouTube deploys several selectable,
operative images, depresenting potentially upcoming video events.32 Even
without accessing a personal account, the personalizing ‘you’ of YouTube is taken
seriously from the start: thanks to recorded, evaluated, and conjugated former
visits and interactions with YouTube, every front page provides a customized


29
   See Distelmeyer, Das flexible Kino. Ästhetik und Dispositiv der DVD & Blu-ray (Berlin: Bertz +
Fischer, 2012) and Tom Holert, ‘Globodigitalizität. Über die Zumutung des Evidenten’, Lecture
at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, 4 June 2002, <www.khm.de/kmw/kit/pdf/holert.pdf>
[accessed 23 June 2017].
30
   See Distelmeyer, Machtzeichen, pp. 98–126.
31
   Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 230.
32
   I describe the YouTube-interface performed by a browser — the interface designed for the
YouTube-app differs in details.

                                                                                              99
                                         Jan Distelmeyer


performance. This customization is ‘our’ outcome or yield of our work within
the YouTube interface, which Till A. Heilmann has described as ‘data labour’ in
current ‘capture capitalism’.33
   If you make a selection, the former depresented video begins in a frame, where
the video is a working as an operative (moving) image in its own right. If one
clicks into the running video, it pauses, until another click on the now freezed
operative image starts the movement and sound again. A double-click leads to
the full screen mode, another double-click brings back the YouTube website
interface. Here the expandable video frame is escorted by another arrangement
of selectable operative images to the right of the frame. This arrangement could
be described as a remaining gesture of wealth and richness — a power of control
related to a variety of depresented audiovisual material classified by taglines,
genres, categories, and other visualized metadata. It maintains the empowerment
gesture and the ability to effect change: even though I have already chosen a
video, this choice is accompanied by a selection of other to-be-selected material.
   This choice-empowerment relies heavily on a mode of presentation that
dominated and still dominates more than a few interface enactments. This
tradition presents the aesthetics of regulation as an ‘order of selectivity’,34
offering options and reassuring usability as a freedom of choice in the form of
menus, buttons, lists and the like. This ‘freedom as control’35 is a question of
strictly defined and prepared choices.
   We encounter this traditional (and surprisingly long-lasting) WIMP cosmos
for instance when using popular online shops like iTunes or Amazon, the grid-
apposition of apps on multi-touch devices like Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy,
the iPhone and the iPad, on the ‘active app’ and ‘ideal app’ arrangements on the
Fairphone 2, the ‘Launchpad’ from Mac OS X ‘Lion’, the ‘tiles’ from Windows
8, and the Linux-Interface GNOME 3 with its ‘Activities Overview’ described
by the GNOME Project as ‘an easy way to access all your basic tasks. A press of
a button is all it takes to view your open windows, launch applications or check
if you have new messages.’36
   Considering our familiarity with this widespread freedom as prepared choice-
control, other common aesthetics of regulation could easily be overlooked.
Computer games in particular challenge and play with this dominant overview
order. Examples can be found in different sorts of games, perhaps the most obvious
and long lasting are first-person shooters like for instance the popular Rainbow
Six: Siege (Ubisoft, 2015), where crucial objective is, of course, not to know but
to explore, to find out what actually is offered and waiting around the corner.

33
   Till A. Heilmann, ‘Datenarbeit im “Capture”-Kapitalismus. Zur Ausweitung der Verwertungszone
im Zeitalter informatischer Überwachung’, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 2.13 (2015), 35–47.
34
    See Distelmeyer, ‘Objektwahl. Internetpornographie und personalisierte Ermächtigung’, in
Explizit! Neue Perspektiven zu Pornografie und Gesellschaft, ed. by Lisa Andergassen et al. (Berlin:
Bertz + Fischer, 2014), pp. 92–102.
35
   See Chun, Control and Freedom.
36
   See <https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/> [accessed 23 June 2017].

100
                       Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers


Nevertheless, this exploring mode of aesthetics is quite often supplemented by
another order of selectivity, showing available weapons, equipment, maps and
the like.
   Hence, an order of selectivity, invoking our wealth of choice by menus and
similar arrangements, is not in the least determined by technology. Instead this
order of selectivity is a cultural construction and just one still dominant mode
of regulation aesthetics. It presents the computer as an empowering decision-
making devise and shapes YouTube to a great extent.
   The aforementioned flexibility of the video appearance in the YouTube-frame
is increased by the possibility to transform the video’s appearance with regard
to language, subtitles and resolution, all potentially adjusted using the operative
image of a gearwheel on the bottom right of the video frame. Furthermore,
from 2012 YouTube videos have been presented in a paradigmatic way: when
the cursor moves the progress bar, the video blurs and a collection of somehow
representative single frames pop up as a preview, offering the viewer the
possibility to navigate through the whole video by means of this frame collection.
   In this way the video does not play, but is displayed as an area, as a visible set
of not-yet operative images. This YouTube approach to the order of selectivity
raises fundamental questions regarding moving images, elucidated by an even
more obvious and radical change in programming that altered the look of
YouTube, shortly after it has been sold to Google at the end of 2006. In the early
days of the video-hosting website, immediately after a video has been played
it continued to fill the entire video frame with one somehow representative
image, ready to start anew. From 2007, however, when a video concludes it is
replaced with a collection of thumbnails of selectable videos: a new grid order
of choice in exactly the frame that was supposedly reserved for moving images.
This programmatic displacement becomes especially picturesque, if the video is
watched in full screen mode. Regarding this familiar mise-en-scène — this grid
of selectivity — Geert Lovink’s summary of YouTube from 2008 appears loaded
with a new intention: ‘We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases.’37
   Instead of the video’s appearance (that is: the chosen succession and process of
moving images and sounds as a syntagmatic gesture), now the exact opposite takes
over: the invitation to select from a series of replaceable images is a paradigmatic
gesture, one that consists of operative images. Thus YouTube’s additional service
— an additional transformation of moving images into operative images — is
demonstrated, once more insistently. Hence, this augmentation engenders the
semiotic shift, whereby the potential indexicality of the depresented videos is no
longer only generated by a potential trace to pre-filmic reality (not to mention the
value of YouTube’s ‘authenticity’38), but also by the trace to the interior telegraphy of


37
   Geert Lovink, ‘The Art of Watching Databases. Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader’, in
Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 9–13 (p. 9).
38
   See Matt Gielen, Ten Commandments of YouTube (Westport: Frederator Books, 2016).

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                                        Jan Distelmeyer


the networked computer. Bearing in mind the second type of interface operations,
the indexicality of collected videos is based not only on the fact that they ‘all refer
causally and physically to a set of software instructions to be executed’,39 but also
their operative trace to the processing of recorded and algorithmically evaluated
data labour, with which these appearances are causally and physically linked. The
grid collection of recommended videos — that is, the idea and promise of this
reference — refers to the recorded viewing and search history. Precisely because
these operative images are therefore both depresenting and (inter)acting, these
aesthetical questions are also and unavoidable political ones.
   With this in mind, a displacement, or more precisely, a diversification of film/
video aesthetics by regulation aesthetics can be witnessed here. The logic of the
filmic syntagm becomes involved in the paradigmatic logic of digitalicity and its
performed freedom as choice-control. In this way, I would like to add, another
relationship could be conceived: the connection of this exhibited flexibility,
a crucial promise of digitalicity, with the sociocultural ideal and pressure of
flexibility in today’s formations of flexible and communicative capitalism. Jodi
Dean and Franco Berardi describe ‘a key contradiction of communicative
capitalism’: if you ‘want to survive you have to be competitive and if you want
to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an
immense and growing mass of data.’40
   The preliminarity and replaceability of the selected video can be interpreted
as the visualization of and perhaps familiarization with what Dean calls ‘the
competitive intensity of neoliberal capitalism’.41 This aesthetic fate of chosen
videos may be understood as a reminder of the competitive pressure, analysed
by Boltanksi and Chiapello,42 and as an echo of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘societies of
control’.43 Even these, which may once have been selected among the many, have
always to face new competition, immediately after the very selection. Ongoing
flexibility and changeability is to learn and to become reliant.
   I would like to conclude with the observation that even this well-established,
paradigmatic logic of YouTube is subject to changes. The installation of the
‘Autoplay’ mode, switched on by default from 2015, forms a counterpart to
the order of selectivity: ‘The Autoplay feature on YouTube makes it easier to
decide what to watch next. After you watch a YouTube video, we’ll automatically
play another related video based on your viewing history.’44 With its ‘Autoplay’,


39
   Marianne van den Boomen, ‘Interfacing by Material Metaphors: How Your Mailbox May Fool
You’, in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. by Marianne van
den Boomen et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), pp. 253–64 (p. 257).
40
   Jodi Dean, ‘The Limits of Communication’, Guernica, 1 October 2012, <www.guernicamag.
com/features/the-limits-of-communication/> [accessed 23 June 2017].
41
   Ibidem.
42
   See Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2007).
43
   See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59 (1992), 3–7.
44
   See <https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6327615?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
&hl=en> [accessed 23 June 2017].

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                        Interfacing with Power: Orders and Computers


YouTube creates a new emphasis of ‘flow’ that can be discussed from various
perspectives: for instance, both in terms of YouTube’s acclaimed reputation
as ‘the new television’45 and in terms of the ‘data stream’. Lev Manovich has
described the latter as the new cultural form of presenting data in web-based social
network services, heightening ‘the experience of the “data present”’.46 Another
form of flexibility is performed here — an ongoing flow of change that seems to
be no longer under our (prepared and advised) control, but rather controlled by
information processing, as a showcase for ‘algorithmic governmentality’.47
   This deserves a closer study. My observations here are intended as starting
points for an interface analysis that — in the case of YouTube — account for
the complex procedures enabling and pursuing the options of uploading,
searching, watching/hearing, ‘sharing’, classifying, valuing, and exposing data in
the form of videos, comments, clicks, and all sorts of metadata.48 In the end, all
of the options depend on processes that challenge new attention for intertwined
interface operations.




45
   Jonathan Ford, ‘Is YouTube the New Television?’, Financial Times, 24 November 2014.
46
   Manovich, ‘Data Stream, Database, Timeline’, Software Studies Initiative, 27 October 2012,
<http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2012/10/data-stream-database-timeline-new.html> [accessed 23
June 2017].
47
   Antoinette Rouvroy and Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic
Governmentality to a New Rule of Law’, La Deleuziana – Online Journal of Philosophy, 3
(2016), <http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf>
[accessed 23 June 2017].
48
   In the case of YouTube interface analyses overlap with ‘platform studies’ insofar as ‘platform’
is understood as ‘a broad enough category to capture a number of distinct phenomena, such as
social networking, the shift from desktop to tablet computing, smart phone and “app”-based
interfaces as well as the increasing dominance of centralised cloud-based computing’. Joss Hands,
‘Introduction: Politics, Power and “Platformativity”’, Culture Machine, 14 (2013), 1–9 (p. 1).

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