Saint-Germain, the room is red, the film is yet to begin. On the opposite wall, a
white rectangle, large and dormant. Next to me, a stranger focuses his attention on
a different rectangle, held in his right hand, its image sliding fluidly under his moving
thumb. He scans his Facebook tirelessly. I notice that the interface has changed: it’s
clearer, less cluttered, more streamlined. To the eye, the distinction is lost between
the logo (blue letters on a white background), static at the top left of the page, and
the other images, succeeding each other in a vertical stream, draped in white, like a
binding agent. A binding agent is a product used to bind particles into a solid mass.
Particle 1: logo, particle 2: stream. In a few minutes, when the room is plunged into
darkness, the stranger will be captivated by the larger rectangle, deserting one mass
of moving images for another, of a different nature, and yet.

The film starts, Outrage, by Takeshi Kitano. A story about the yakusa. The opening
scene: a clan gathering, the lieutenants lunch while their underlings wait in the
parking lot. At the end of the meal, the 親分 [oyabun], the clan leader, confronts one
of his lieutenants, suspected of treason. A high angle static shot of a country road. We
see the procession of vehicles leaving the 親分 [oyabun]’s estate. After a beat, the last
vehicle comes into view, inside it the suspected lieutenant, delayed by the confrontation.
We hear the conversation in the car, we see the car approaching. The camera pivots,
moving above the vehicle, the stream of images freezes, and suddenly the title is stuck to
the onscreen image in red letters, warning that the price to be paid will be blood.

For a few seconds, there are two particles overlaid on screen. Particle 1: the
stream of images, particle 2: the film’s title, a word written with the density
of an image (in other words, a typographic choice). From the space in between,
meaning springs. The first and second particles do not share the same degree of
abstraction — the filmed images are designed to resemble reality, while the
typography has a symbolic relationship to reality. From the combination of the
two, the overall image of the film emerges, the one that forms in the mind of
the viewer and will remain, once the room emerges from darkness and the screen
becomes once again dormant. The image of the film, like that of the interface,
is fragmented. All images are fragmented.

(1) A man in the foreground unfurls a scroll on which we can see a map
and some writing. Behind him, surrounded by a hazily outlined landscape,
is a floating city. The man stands above the town. He overlooks the cloud
that separates him from the city, but, since he is standing in front of an
architectural structure (a parapet), he still appears to belong to the urban
space. He is at once inside, and outside the city. His attitude appears to
invite the viewer onto the balcony where he stands: the city thus unfolds
before the viewer, its interpretation guided by the information on the scroll.
(2) The figure of the man disappears. But the basic elements of the first
image — a map of the city, some written text, images of the city — remain,
although now more crudely fragmented. On the top right, the high angle
view is unchanged. A transformation has taken place: the city is cut up, with
different perspectives juxtaposed. As with the title of the film above, the
image functions as a collage. (1) In the words on the scroll of the first image,
the painter explains to the viewer that he chose to represent the building
above the cloud in its most essential form, like a kind of hieroglyph: once
placed there as a model, out of its usual context, it seemed better to show
main façade, rather than other angles, and as to its position in the city, that
can be seen from the map. The use of a second level of abstraction, that is,
the map, more distant from our visual perception than the perspective,
drawing reestablishes the truth of the city — in the end, the aim is not to
represent the city as it looks, but as it is.

1937: Sergueï Mikhaïlovitch Eisenstein, russian filmmaker, through analyzing, among
others, this painting by El Greco, offered up a new vision of the history of images. Through
what he called cinematism he chronicled the prehistory of a key cinematic device: temporal
montage. According to Eisenstein, an extra-cinematographic kind of montage, spacial
montage, already underpins the principles of painting, through the juxtaposition of different
elements within the same space: the limit of the painting. Film, the only medium capable of
bringing together the temporal (a succession of images on a film strip) and spacial (the
composition of each photogram) aspects of montage, is presented as the culmination of this
history. It seems that in toady’s post-filmic era, the matter being handled is the database,
which can be seen as collection of discrete elements. These elements - images, words,
sounds - are coherent sets of vectors of meaning, and it is their relative disposition in space
(coexistence on screen) and time (navigation sequence) which also defines the now
ubiquitous system of representation: the graphical user interface (G.U.I.).

1983. The Apple interface, Lisa, is desktop on a desktop. Its visuals mimic the
familiar (trash can, folder, window, page etc.), now integrated into the structure
of the computer. This arbitrary system of representation facilitates the use of the
machine, without requiring users to understand how it functions. A user wanting to
get rid of a document would instinctively place it in the trash. Prior to this, at the end
of the Second World War and in the following decades, researchers dreamt up
the notion of a virtual architecture dedicated to the expansion of knowledge. 1993:
the World Wide Web, a hypertext system of data transfer, is made available to the
general public. Hyper: meaning excess or, to the highest degree. Throughout
this open space, which represents only one part of the internet’s potential, inter-
faces generally mimicked the first cultural objects that researchers transferred en
masse into the machine’s memory disks: books. We moved through the web
anonymously, like people quietly wandering the aisles of a library. Sites were
compilations of pages laid out like a sheet of letterhead, with the logo positioned
in the top left corner. Later on, this format became rare, making way for the infinite
scroll, which is a direct descendant of the ancestors of books: scrolls. To scroll (circa
1600) « To write down in a scroll ». From scroll (n. circa 1400) « Roll of parchment
or paper ».

2007, bend in the road. The phenomenal proliferation of the iPhone pushed the
hypertext model to the background. The home screen began swiftly to reflect
an internal principle; that of the program. Like a script for a film, the program
determines the appearance of the interface. According to the 1970s model, a
computer program runs from the first to the last line, through successive control
structures, in which it stops to make calculations that will determine its next steps.
And all of a sudden, we could say that what you have here is less text, and more
image, even though it is an image of text. Just like in the Middle Ages, when the art
of memory Ars memoriae brought together different conceptual spaces, the iPhone
interface systematizes a tabular presentation of applications. We are confronted with
a multitude of spaces to enter, explore and escape from. Yet, we must remember
that images from a particular era mirror its relationship to the world, although the
emergence of a particular shape owes nothing to a conscious collective design. The
Middle Ages saw the development of the art of cultivating memory, organizing things
in a stable, ordered cosmos, where everything has a traditional place. Renaissance
man invented perspective, organizing things in a world where man is the central figure,
giving order to History. The iPhone interface is the symptomatic reflection of the
inclusion of contemporary society’s structures of regulation and control into a previously
borderless space. Completely stripped of our anonymity, we move from app to app
as though through a giant mall, where the closed-off, proprietary model, controlled
by private interests is the norm.

An app is a representative space made up of elements from databases: text,
images and sounds. The definition of multimedia includes textual, visual and
auditory elements – note firstly that this could also define film, and secondly
that the auditory aspects take a back seat in our day-to-day browsing. A browser
like Google Chrome for example, blocks sound on autoplay, as it is judged to be
too disruptive for users. The basic combination is therefore above all textual
and visual, as in traditional Chinese painting, where the text is a poem, whose
meaning influences the perception of the image. From the start, the image was
created in relation to the text, making it a kind of montage, or mental arithmetic.
According to a similar mechanism, the meaning of the elements that we perceive
on screen is altered by their surrounding attributes. The previous image is added to
the following image and the number of likes determines the brilliance of what is
perceived, because this information is not located outside the frame: it is within
the image. It is the white, or the black, or more broadly the unused, unoccupied
space, the fertile emptiness of the interface, that is the binding agent, the
arithmetic operator. Interfaces are gradually being striped of any superfluous
visual elements (that's what we call flat design) that would prevent them from
functioning as a unit.