Against the Frictionless Interface! An Interview with Lori Emerson

Furtherfield interviews the author of READING WRITING INTERFACES.

Reading Writing Interfaces by Lori EmersonAS FOUNDER/DIRECTOR OF THE MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY LAB IN COLORADO, LORI EMERSON HAS (since 2009) been surrounding herself with "dead" media technologies in order to help make sense of (and critique) today's much-hyped alive ones. Being also a scholar and critic of contemporary poetics, she is keenly aware of how such devices are equipped to influence and constrain our writing/thinking. 

Emerson's work celebrates and calls for a "frictional media archeological analysis" aimed at the continual "unmooring" of the accepted conventions of reading and writing. Towards this end, she critiques consumer-oriented trends in computing--trends which unfortunately seek to "efface the interface" in the name of so-called user-friendliness. Montgomery Cantsin conducted the following interview by email upon the release of Lori's new bookReading Writing Interfaces (recently published by University of Minnesota Press).

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Published in: Furtherfield
By: Monty Cantsin