Metainterface

The "metainterface" is a concept that highlights the current ubiquity of networked and responsive interfaces. This ubiquity makes the interface more difficult to locate yet more influential in peoples’ everyday lives. In their book The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (2018), Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold explain that their conception of the metainterface refers to "an interface to the many hidden interfaces and clouded exchanges of data and signals in a series of platforms that connect the everyday use of apps on a smartphone to large-scale, globally networked infrastructures" (10). As such, the many layers for the interface create a metainterface that is inherent to the development of online platforms, mediated urban experiences, and the cloud data storage. Andersen and Pold consider net art, software art, and electronic literature as gateways into understanding the functioning of the metainterface which "concerns the ways in which the interface reflects new perspectives as well as new ways of perceiving, organizing, and thinking brought about by media technological changes" (Andersen and Pold 23). In their 2021 Electronic Book Review article, Andersen and Pold build on the findings in their book by analyzing the metainterface paradigm as related to the notion of "spectacle" and media politics.