/ Software to User
The software to user interface, commonly referred to as the graphical user interface (GUI), has long been a subject of extensive research within media and cultural studies owing to its visually mediated characteristics. Yet my focus here is not on the typology of GUIs but rather on their conceptual function as interactive elements that enable communication between user and computer, allowing machine logic to converge with human cognition to establish a functional communicative node. As Frieder Nake observes, “To speak of the ‘interface’ between human and machine (computer), a system-theoretical approach is required. Systems are summaries of elements (components) between which relationships exist. The components can also be systems. Through abstraction, real systems become system-theoretical ones” (Nake, 2019, p. 40). 2 What is compelling in this statement is not only the conception of the interface as a communicative agent but the role of abstraction in facilitating this exchange. Abstraction, in this context, invokes the symbolic nature of signs—a concern with deep roots in semiotics—yet for such abstraction to function at scale, it must employ recognisable symbols or representations of specific machine functions that remain intelligible to humans.
This is exemplified by the historical development of widely recognisable symbols, such as the folder icon evoking physical document stacks, or the magnifying glass representing search functions. In his text Inside Photoshop (2011), Lev Manovich proposes a dual categorical framework for understanding such interfaces. The first category concerns how data is processed, utilising both media-independent and media-specific operations. The second involves the application of new media logic to predigital forms, a recurrent strategy in Manovich’s work. This latter approach entails the “simulation of prior media augmented with new properties and functions” (Manovich, 2011), 1 a phenomenon clearly illustrated in the design of the Xerox PARC interface in the 1970s, which simulated an office environment through graphical metaphors. A pertinent example is the “Wind” filter in Photoshop, which applies horizontal distortions to mimic the effect of wind on an image. Although users may never have considered how to represent wind in a digital image visually, the effect remains intuitively recognisable. As Manovich notes, “we can think of the name ‘Wind’ both as a metaphor—to help us imagine what particular algorithmic transformations do to the image—and as a simulation of a particular photographic technique (long exposure)” (Manovich, 2011). 2 In other words, while the filter retains a connection to a physical effect, it does so through a predigital visual language that ensures legibility.
It is the second of Manovich’s categories, however, that most interests me here: the process of abstraction through which entirely new symbols are created—forms without direct real-world referents that nonetheless become universally understood markers of computational functions. These “born-digital” symbols enable computers to operate directly with data. Consider, for instance, that digital images are fundamentally arrays of pixels, which are in turn sets of numerical data. From this perspective, every operation, distorting, resizing, or smoothing, is ultimately a numerical transformation. While such processes remain largely opaque to human perception (we see images, not matrices), they constitute the computer’s native mode of engagement. Even a filter like “Wave”, which initially appears metaphorical, can, through parameter adjustment, produce results wholly detached from any real-world wave, thereby exceeding its representational origins.
In short, stepping beyond Manovich’s Photoshop case study to consider graphical user interfaces in their entirety, it becomes evident that they are replete with abstractions, metaphors, and adapted resemblances to real-world objects, as well as entirely novel symbols that have been normalised through use. These forms constitute a visual language that is at once culturally embedded and computationally operational, enabling the continuous negotiation between human intuition and machine logic that defines contemporary digital experience.
This visual language finds its most ubiquitous and naturalised expression in the desktop metaphor itself. The main argument here concerns how the desktop environment is operationalised and why the symbolism of “folders,” “windows,” and “trash cans” becomes intuitively sensible to the user. This symbolic layer constructs what Eric Schrijver, in The Foundational Myth (2013), terms a "myth of naturalness." Schrijver argues that the GUI presents the computer not as a complex, abstract machine, but as a direct, intuitive extension of the familiar physical office—a myth that masks its underlying computational procedures. This stands in stark contrast to the Command Line Interface (CLI), which, as Florian Cramer explores in Command Line Poetics (2007), operates through a poetics of textual command and procedural logic, requiring the user to learn a specific syntax to converse directly with the machine's operating system. Cramer notes that command-line interaction foregrounds the "materiality of programming" and the "constructive, rather than representational, nature of computing" (Cramer, 2007), 1 stripping away the representational icons to reveal the textual processes beneath.
However, the critical point is that this profound experiential difference is, from the computer’s perspective, largely superficial. The machine executes the same fundamental operations—file creation, data movement, process initiation—regardless of whether it is commanded by a user clicking a folder icon or by a programmer typing “mkdir” or “mv”. The symbolic layer of the GUI, therefore, is a semiotic construct overlaid upon machine logic for human comprehension. It is an abstraction designed to make the alien, procedural nature of computing navigable. As previously discussed with Manovich’s analysis of Photoshop filters, these interfaces rely on a "simulation of prior media" (Manovich, 2011) 3 or familiar objects to ensure legibility.
This symbolic layer is not a neutral given but a conventional system that can be interrogated and distorted. Artistic projects often reveal the arbitrariness of these conventions by repurposing their logic. A prime example is the web-based work Triple Pocket Napkin Fold (2022), which translates the quintessential GUI action of dragging a file into a folder into the absurdly literal, step-by-step instructions for folding a napkin. This project cleverly defamiliarises the desktop ritual, exposing the ingrained symbolism of the “folder” as a container. It demonstrates that our understanding of UI is deeply symbolic; we have learned to associate a specific graphic and a drag-and-drop gesture with the abstract computational function of moving data from one memory address to another. By mapping this onto a slow, physical, and materially consequential act, the project highlights the constructed nature of interface metaphors. It distorts the seamless, automated logic of the GUI, forcing a conscious reflection on the symbolic pact we accept for the sake of navigational ease. Thus, while the computer perceives no difference between a CLI command and a GUI icon, the user's entire experience, and the very possibility of widespread digital literacy, is predicated on this carefully designed world of symbolic difference.
This fundamental assumption, that interfaces construct their own symbolic logic for users to learn, is present in my practical work. It begins with the conceptual map of the Curatorial Interface website, which functions as a primary navigation menu. At first glance, its structure may appear unconventional or confusing, but upon engagement, it reveals its own internal symbolism and navigational purpose, requiring and then rewarding a process of user learning. The same principle of constructed symbolic order is operational within The Wrong Archives. Here, the specific tagging system and the innovative categorisation of data create new categories that specifically show the curatorial spaces rather then identifing the artworks that are presented in those spaces. By imposing these new frameworks, the archive does not merely store content but actively produces a specific interpretive lens, shaping how the history of The Wrong Biennale is accessed and understood.