“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin
The physical space and the built infrastructures around us often lend us clues in making sense of the world in which we find ourselves in. This network of human and non-human actors give a sense of “situation” - space and time the field for it.
Space has often been the medium for me to make sense of the world around me. Especially at an early childhood stage. How I interfaced within the space of my home, my street, my school or the public park often gave me a sense of how I am positioned with respect to other entities in that space. This sense often brought with it a strong sense of “spaces I don’t belong in” or “spaces I should not be seen in”.
As a child, this seemed like a never-changing or permanent condition of my world. The World Atlas was one of the many “interfaces” that left a profound affect on me. Little did I know or was fully aware of internalizing boundaries. But my interface with the Atlas lent me the tool of the Cartesian plane and the ability of imagining the worlds I was inhibiting from a birds-eye view. As I rethink this, I am critical of how this tool perhaps also conditioned me to remove myself from the stream-of-life experiencing of the world in order to understand the world. As a process, it seems much more mechanical and objective to me today.
Another instance of interfacing with (an other) world also becomes fresh in my memory. This was the interface of a cyberspace, perhaps - a videogame. In many ways, playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on my cousin’s playstation was nothing short of a revelation. This (cyber)space challenged all my pre-existing notions of the Cartesian plain. The expanse of a space was no longer the central theme but it was in-fact the arrangement and re-arrangement of objects and actors within this cyberspace that the interface was for. Rather than lending a bird’s-eye view of things, navigating in this world was very much comparable to navigating a labyrinth. I found myself very much in the stream of life. This world, in contrast to the physical world lent me a sense of agency and subjectivity with respect to other entities.