Animal Interface: Digital Design beyond the Humankind

Abstract

Humankind has always coexisted with other species: its mimetic features and abilities, which include science and art, as well as the graphical user interface that appears at their intersection, express empathy, understanding, premonition, receptivity and adaptation to the complex dynamics of other species, to being among them. At the same time, the interface is considered exclusively as an “anthropological machine,” i.e. as a technical and symbolic representation of the idea of the “absence” of “nature” in man, creating conditions for rupture and isolation with the original factors of mimesis, stirs the need to compensate nature, hypostasis, fantasmatize, stigmatize, etc. — i.e., to think of the experience of nature in terms of a collision with a monster or catastrophe, and to expect salvation from AI, artificial intelligence. Therefore, in order to adequately think through and evaluate interfaces, it is necessary to return to the most “natural” intelligence — mimesis, autopoiesis, biophilia, live communication — it is necessary to give a word to nature, i.e., to take into account the experience of non-human beings, animals, their behavior, communication, dynamics, everything that was considered in the exclusively functional assessment of interfaces rather, “noises,” “interference”. In fact, in order for the interface to express our characteristics, take into account certain aspects of character and behavior, and give us a sense of attention and care, it is necessary that it interact not so much with “pure consciousness” as with our physicality, responding to existential patterns, “deep time” enclosed in our physicality by evolutionary processes, pre-predictive ways of our presence and orientation in reality. We need not only linguistic, neural network, large, etc. data, but also “live” data — for this purpose, the article examines and analyzes the experiences of interaction with animals in interfaces, the features of biophilic information and animalistic design, the participation of animals in the design of interface shells as living environments.

Keywords

• interface
• animals
• media
• computer games
• affordances
• tigmotaxis
• metaphors
• biophilia
• animalistic design
• internet of animals