Zuzanna Zgierska
Bachelor Thesis
Graphic Design
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Supervisor: Füsun Türetken

ABSTRACT

In my bachelor thesis I focus on the concepts of surface as techne. I track the outset of the technical flatness back to the accessory used by the archaic accountants. I analyse how the reinvention of the surface for economy shaped the social structures of the first city-states. Next, I inspect the production process of the capitalist fetishised shine embodied in a polished car bodywork. I speculate on how the linear movement of the conveyor belt’s surface as well as the catered sequences of the first film projections shifted the agency of a user. I present the haunting, zoomorphic surface of an oil film as the ultimate product of the ‘turbo-capitalism,’ as coined by Susan Schuppli. Finally, in a reference to Jane Bennett, I focus on the concept of the vibrant surface within. I inquire about the crystalline surfaces of today's screens, which resonate with conductive proteins in our bodies. Together, they extrude and transcend the flatness into the impenetrable architectures of power.

SURFACE /ˈSƏːFIS/
N A CONTINUOUS SET OF POINTS THAT HAS LENGTH AND BREADTH BUT NO THICKNESS

In geometry, a surface is a continuous set of points that has length and breadth but no depth. What is the productivity of translating the three-dimensional space into a flat surface? According to Sybille Krämer, ◑ since we are not able to see what is behind us (we have no eyes on the back of our heads), by inventing flatness, we introduce a controllable space. ◑ It is the capacity of the human mind to conceptualise from reality, push it through a process of interpretation, and eventually create a physical representation of it. Already thousands of years ago, early humans isolated bisons, aurochs, rhinoceroses, hyenas, horses and panthers from the patches of colour the eye sees in nature. The first painters projected the animal shapes onto the surfaces of subterranean grottos. The action of delineating the beasts from the natural background proves the emergence of the conceptual process of differentiation (structuring) between elements. ◑

However, in the film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” ◑ Werner Herzog unearths the surfaces of the Chauvet Cave, which break away from the category of a controllable space. In Chauvet, the flickering light erratically illuminates the uneven walls. The projection sculpts the subterranean shapes on the go, inviting the viewer’s imagination to engage in these rock-readings. Observing the light which embraces the stone phenomena moulded by the geological processes, early painters take part in the process of interpretation and modification. They finish whatever the surface suggests. Hence, the division between the author and the viewer remains blurred. These early painters performed the breaks in the flow of stone; they saw the mineral as movement-matter, untamed by the categories of time or concepts like electrons or atoms. ◑ Yet nowadays our knowledge of physics confirms that “(...) surfaces are also, in a sense, a separate state of matter, distinct from solids, liquids, and gases: surfaces are where the properties of matter change most rapidly.” ◑

Surfaces exist in nature: the uncanny flatness of water, which succumbs to the laws of gravity; the iridescent camouflages of a bobtail squid, a beetle’s carapace, a peacock’s plumage. In this essay however, I focus on the concept of surface as techne. With the background in Industrial and Graphic Design, I am interested in how the market envisions both disciplines as primarily concerned with the production of surfaces.

I track the outset of the technical flatness back to the accessory used by the archaic accountants. I analyse how the re-invention of the surface for economy shaped the social structures of the first city-states. Next, I inspect the production process of the capitalist fetishised shine embodied in a spick-and-span car bodywork. I speculate on how the linear movement of the conveyor belt’s surface as well as the catered sequences of the first film projections shifted the agency of a user. I present the haunting, zoomorphic surface of an oil film as the ultimate product of the ‘turbo-capitalism,’ as coined by Susan Schuppli. Finally, in a reference to Jane Bennett, I focus on the concept of the vibrant surface within. I inquire about the crystalline surfaces of today's screens, which resonate with conductive proteins in our bodies. Together, they extrude and transcend the flatness into the impenetrable architectures of power.


I
EXTERIOR /IKˈSTIƏRIƏ/
1 ADJ OUTSIDE
2 N THE VISIBLE PART

A cone, a cone, a cone equal a ban of grain, a ban of grain, a ban of grain; a punched cone, a punched cone, a punched cone equal an eše of land, an eše of land, an eše of land; a sphere, a sphere, a sphere, a sphere equal a bariga of grain, a bariga of grain, a bariga of grain, a bariga of grain; a pinched sphere, a pinched sphere, a pinched sphere equal a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep. ◑

*

Skin to mud, ground to muscle, bone to dust. I knead the clays with my earthen fingers; bless me, Inanna. ◑ After the lush harvest, I gave the herdsman a ban of grain, a ban of grain, a ban of grain. In return, he offered me a fat-tailed sheep, a fat tailed-sheep, a fat-tailed sheep. I waited for the shepherd to deliver the lambs to my eše, but he failed to bring them in the flesh. Now, I mould the mud into the shapes of his obligations.

I sculpt a few pinched spheres. Each piece corresponds to a singular fat-tailed sheep. When I smooth the tiny clay surfaces, the amorphous chunks become value: the counters of debt. My ceramic inventory suggests that the herdsman owns me a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep. I fire the counters in an open-pit to confirm their certifying rigidity. In this act, the shepherd’s duties become solidified.

With countless harvest seasons behind, I stand in the precinct of the Stone-Cone Temple in Eanna district of Uruk. ◑ The atmosphere of an ominous power radiates from this monumental piece of architecture. The priest-king, bless him, Inanna, traded a large amount of obsidian to embellish the façade of this holy place with some of the rarest stones. The snake-skin patterns reflect the splendour of Uruk with the uncanny myriad of colours.

The lavish mosaic came to light thanks to En, bless him, Inanna, who controls the riches coming to the Stone-Cone Temple. Following the harvest, our countrymen surrender a share of their produce, while our urban workshops give up a part of their manufactured goods. People of Uruk fulfil the tax offerings out of respect for the priest-king, bless him, Inanna, and under the penalty of corporal punishment.

I hold the prestigious post as the Temple accountant. I do the reckoning of the donations; sometimes I sculpt the debts. Just like my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather used to mould his mud counters, I, too, am concerned with the conception of tokens: cones, spheres, dodecahedrons, cylinders, balls, disks, small cups, tetrahedrons, ovoids, quadrangles, triangles, biconoids, paraboloids, bent coils, ovals, rhombioids…

Whereas my forefathers exchanged raw materials, our modern city-state produces a variety of finished goods: bread, oil, perfume, wool, rope, metal jewellery, cloth, garments, mats, pieces of furniture, tools, pottery and stone vessels. These novel commodities advocate for a range of alterations in the long-established shapes of tokens.

With a blunt stylus, I incise the lines in some of the counters; other clay items I treat with a couple of notches; often I punch all the way through the objects, leaving holes; the other times, I pinch the muds creating appendixes. This superabundance of shapes only hints at the complexity of the system. Due to the sudden increase of the creditors, I archive the ever-expanding number of tokens inside clay capsules.

I knead the clay with my slender hands; the metal bracelets clang around my wrists. I authorise the tokens in an open-pit. Fire confirms their signifying rigours. I pick a larger chunk of mud. It comfortably rests in my palms. I bury my fingers inside the solid and hollow it out, leaving the traces of my fingertips. This clay envelope will shelter the tokens.

Yet before I conceal the pieces of debt, I impress their shapes in the surface of the capsule. No longer I have to break the clay open to determine which tokens rest inside. Their incantations on the envelope’s surface inform me about the contents they guard. With a single cylinder, I imprint the image of the identity seal. I accredit the envelope in an open-pit fire. I cache the tokens and close the container. Finally, I archive the capsule of debt in the Stone-Cone Temple until the creditor pays each token back. Inanna, bless the powerful priest-king, for he confers the meaning to the act of giving.

In “How Writing Came About” (1992), acclaimed as one of the most important scientific books of the 20th century, Denise Schmandt-Besserat tracks the origins of writing to an archaic accounting device. Quite excitingly, she proves that the written word arose out of a bureaucratic necessity rather than a divine inspiration granted to an ancient genius (a demigod from “One Thousand and One Nights” or a character spawned by Erich von Däniken). Nevertheless, in this part of the essay, I am less concerned about the outset of writing and more interested in the rise of the surface as a technical object.

The French-American archaeologist reports that the so-called tokens (Fig. 1–2) appeared around 8000 B.C. on the territories of today’s Syria, Iraq and Iran. The tokens were used to keep the financial accounts of agricultural and, later on, manufactured goods. However, the globular envelopes, “(…) which started as an accessory to the token system, came to transform it in the most unexpected way. They triggered the mutation of the three-dimensional tokens into twodimensional graphic symbols.” (Besserat)

Yet, not only the counters changed; the envelopes themselves took part in this shapeshifting. They supplanted the tokens carried inside with their graphic echos visible outside; they aborted their own cavities, and became solid again; finally, they squashed, unfolded, pinned and levelled out, trampled, flattened, debased! The clay razed back to the ground. The techne surfaced, the surface techne-d, so as the surface started acting as techne. ◑

Before I surf away with the analysis of the technological flatness, it is necessary to chisel out all pieces telling the full story of tokens (as described above, depicted in the images 1 & 2). These miniature objects travelled and mutated through different clay instantiations. To paraphrase Hito Steyerl’s analysis of the contemporary screens in “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” (2013), tokens as well “(…) morphed across different bodies and carriers, acquiring more and more glitches and bruises along the way. Moreover, it was not only form that migrated (…), but also function.” ◑ The comparison is not accidental: Denise Schmandt-Besserat called tokens to be the first first code—as the earliest known system of signs for conveying information.

According to Besserat, while the computing of time had already existed in the egalitarian communities of hunters and gatherers, ◑ the accounting of goods occurred in the first so-called ranked societies. These civil structures came as a result of the Neolithic Revolution. When hunters and gatherers started to settle down in the semi-permanent compounds (around 8000 B.C.), they began to domesticate plants and animals. As a consequence, they accumulated and exchanged their goods. They used the plain tokens with smooth surfaces for “(…) counting items related to cultivation: grain, livestock, land” ◑ (Besserat).

These small ◑ clay tokens represented debts. They were used when one side of a barter failed to deliver the promised stock. Sculpted in a particular shape, each token stood for a single concept, or, in other words, referred to a unique type of asset. For example, a cone signified a measure of grain and a cylinder was attributed to an animal. The Mesopotamians counted in the model of the so-called ‘one-to-one correspondence’ (Besserat), where 1 token stood for 1 unit of a commodity. To illustrate that, 15 animals had to be represented by 15 singular tokens.

As Besserat suggests, the evolution of social structures prompted the mutation of tokens. After the rise of the highly organised city-states around 4000 B.C., the tokens became rapidly diversified. They no longer stood for raw materials, like measures of grain or units of land. Rather, the inhabitants of the early city-states used the tokens to count finished goods—for example loaves of bread or jars of oil. In other words, the new array of manufactured products demanded a modification of counters. That is when the complex tokens appeared. They bore markings, such as incised lines, notches, punches, pinched appendixes or appliqué pellets.

The Mesopotamians used the more elaborate counters to reckon the “(…) goods donated to the temples, which served as the administrative centres” (Besserat). In the city-states, the élite controlled communal property, while the commoners offered their surplus goods in the form of tax donations. These offerings were mandatory, secured by the threat of sanctions or corporal punishment, and executed by the priest-king, also called ‘En.’ From that point on, as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss points out, “(…) whether the aim was to keep a check on material possessions or on human beings, it is evidence of the power exercised by some men over other men and over worldly possessions.” ◑ Counting grain evolved into counting people—slaves.

The donation system scrutinised for articles which failed to arrive at the temple. This in turn increased the need for the archives. With the inflated bureaucracy in the cities like Uruk, Susa, Chogha Mish or Habuba Kabira (3700–3500 B.C.), the Mesopotamians began to store the tokens inside the hollow clay containers. The cavity to hold the counters was “(…) shaped by poking a hole with the fingers, as is shown by traces of fingertips inside.” Spherical or ovoid in shape, these capsules measured between 5–7 centimetres. They comfortably fitted within a human hand. ◑ However, the globular envelopes concealed the tokens and the only way to verify their contents was to break them open.

In response to this problem, the Mesopotamians started to impress the counters in the surfaces of globular envelopes (when the clay was still soft, that is before firing it). These token notations facilitated the decoding of the contents, only by looking at the outer layers of the capsules. To begin with, the impressions at face value functioned as supplements to the counters enclosed in envelopes. After some time however, the accountants realised that the markings on the surfaces made the physical tokens sheltered inside altogether unnecessary. Coming to understand that demonstrates a groundbreaking cognitive departure: “(…) the impressed notations supplanted the counters; they still perpetuated the shape of tokens, but they assumed an entirely different function.” (Besserat) The substitution of signs for tokens marked the first step towards writing (3500–3000 B.C.).

Consequently, with tokens stored inside classified as redundant, solid clay balls bearing signs replaced the hollow envelopes filled with counters. Following that, they mutated from their awkward three-dimensional globular shapes to the almost two-dimensional tablets. ◑ This was the moment when the ancient accountants conceived surface as a technical object.

This novel device incited an array of new inventions; as on the surface, things behave differently. In the token system, the counting was concrete, which means that the numerals were always assigned to an object they represented. On the clay tablets, instead of the one-to-one correspondence counting, the Mesopotamians used a numerical symbol to betoken each quantity (3100 B.C.). They abstracted the quantitative from qualitative, or the counter from the counted. Thereupon, rather than reckoning ‘a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep, a fat-tailed sheep,’ the clerks noted ‘three fat-tailed sheep.’ In other words, numerals were born. ◑

The emergence of pictography coincided with the outset of numerals. The Mesopotamians wrote picture signs by pressing the tokens against tablets and tracing them with a blunt pointed triangular stylus. However, these pictographs referred to the physical counters, not the objects counted. Therefore, true is the claim that “writing emerged out of counting” (Besserat). The French-American archeologist separates the roles of markings on the envelopes from those of the signs impressed on the tablets, since the latter not only repeated or the message encoded in tokens, but rather—the pictographs themselves were the message. In reference to Sybille Krämer’s idea, ◑ the surface established a non-discriminatory hierarchy: it opened up to represent the things which did not have a token. At the given time it was a revelation, which stimulated the expression of new concepts. For example, pictographs referring to the human body parts, such as ‘a mouth,’ ‘a head of a man,’ but also signs relating to services, for instance ‘10 days of labour.’

The physicality of a material object which has the inside and an outside created the need for abstract representation on the outside of whatever lies inside. I would then speculate that the spatial logic of the exterior and an interior contributed to the development of the ways of decoding, therefore the outset of abstract numbering (which, later on, sparked the dawn of pictographs and phonetic writing). Perhaps there is a symmetry between decoding of a globular envelope and the decipherment of a present-day black box? While the ancient capsules unfolded into the ever-empowering flatness, today’s tablets, only disguised as flat, virtually extruded their surfaces into the impenetrable architectures of power.

In her installation “Black Echo” (2017, Fig. 7.), the German artist Antonia Hirsch collates the materiality of present-day devices with the residue of an ancient technique. Like a piece of chewing gum stuck under a bench, a small clay object clasps onto the table’s leg. This wormlike specimen retires outside of the display box. Its chunky body of mud bears an imprint of the fingertips. This mark indexes the intimate meeting between the bare skin and the raw material. Quite on the contrary, the two black objects are handled only through the silky gloves. They occupy an environment, which mimics a controlled setup of a laboratory. It means that their rare-earth carcasses were too dangerous to touch—hence the yellow gloves, to warn about the toxic hazard. However, one aspect of the installation remains especially interesting. The gloves were left outside the box, hanging from it in an untidy manner. Such cue draws the viewer’s attention to what these gloves were used for, rather than towards the thinking of any possible future purpose. The spectator can therefore imagine that someone smashed the chunk of the mineral, creating the perfect fracture. Therefore, the black echo of the blast reverberates between the two pieces; a remnant of their common past conceived back in the deep-time.

Starting from Greece, the ancient philosophers proposed the worldview based on dualities: form versus matter, positive versus negative, transcendent versus immanent, epistēmē versus techne, mind versus body, subject versus object. In “Physics,” “Metaphysics,” “On The Soul” and other works, Aristotle formulated the concept of what nowadays is called hylomorphism. ◑ The Greek philosopher envisioned being as a compound of matter and form. ◑ His theory stated that the transcendence holds its place outside of the material world. ◑ Therefore, an individual, through an active involvement, shapes the negative matter into the formulations which anticipate the divine outside of it. In this case, besides creating the dualist fracture, Aristotle also instituted the concept of the exterior and an interior. The German philosopher Erich Hörl criticised Aristotle’s hylomorphism for it “separates the active subjects, who give form and meaning, from the passive material or object, which is formless and senseless.” ◑ Certainly, such division presupposes a hierarchy, in which humans rule over matter, however animate or inanimate it may be.

Whether commanded by God or on the service of the contemporary economic plan, this order finds its expression in the famous: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” ◑ This privileged subjectivity derives from the ancient artisanal and agricultural techniques, based on the archetype of a master wielding his tools. ◑

Carving symbols in clay tablets evoked an unmediated sensory experience, in which the scribe's body played an active role. Stripping away the layers of the resistant clay surface required some understanding of the material’s properties. Most importantly, the trajectories of the writer’s hand movements translated directly into the corresponding visual outcome. ◑ In Ancient Mesopotamia, Biblical and Aristotle’s times, humans made objects by hand, ◑ used them with their hands and powered them with human or animal muscles. The physicality of the objects was bound to the anatomy, ◑ but the nature of this corporeal experience was hierarchical. The power structure was represented by an individual exerting pressure in passive matter with the use of his tools.

II
ECCENTRIC
/ƐKˈSƐNTRIK/
1 ADJ UNCONVENTIONAL AND SLIGHTLY STRANGE
2 ADJ NOT PLACED CENTRALLY OR NOT HAVING ITS AXIS OR OTHER PART PLACED CENTRALLY

Strung, tight, taut and strained. The shiny rubber skin moves in an endless loop. Stretched over a series of rollers, followed by the procession of hooks, gears and buckets. Steered by the friction from a drive pulley, the surface continues to roll on idlers. The line expands perpendicularly to my body, from left to right, at the height of my hands. It conveys horizontally in a desired direction. I wonder: whose appetite had unleashed the beast? ◑

One can charm black cobras with the dexterity of his hands. When a foreman in our assembly plant turns up the speed of the line in notch, I start to move faster. He turns it up another notch; I move faster, until I scream. In this way we can produce fifteen more a day. My body folds under the pressure, but the black surface commands me to keep the pace. It dismisses my thoughts; or, rather, it sets the pace of my thoughts. I use my imagination to understand why he shouts at me. ◑ I admire him. We reach 380% of turnover.

I work on 8946. Here, my name is 8946. Other autoworkers comply to thousands of different allotments. The scales of a serpent, the segments of the line, sequentially summon us for our contributions. The plant expands vastly. I can hear its enormity from the orchestra of accumulated noises, echoed by the distant walls. As yet, I have only visited the corner behind 9189, where I urinate into a trough.

When evening rays hit the band, our foreman switches the boisterous beast off. The mechanical movement gives its way to the cavalcade of bodies lined up towards the exit. Some of us will never come back. Those will pass on their uniforms to the next ones. We are as interchangeable as the parts we produce.

Hang on. I sometimes dream about 8946 being a part of an elaborate instrument in the hands of a beautiful, intelligent creature. I like to make up stories about 8946.

In the early 20th century, the progressive assembly’s tentacles reached every nook and cranny of the factory space. Strikingly enough, the idea of the line came from the disassembling of body parts from slaughtered animals. Developed by textile manufacturers, then popular in steel production, and later perfected by the automobile makers, the line revolutionised both the industry and the labour itself. In progressive production, the mechanically driven conveyor belt delivers the semi-finished aggregate to a stationary worker. As the line unrolls, each labourer contributes his allotment to the moving assemblage. Before that, it was the skilled operative who carried parts to a standstill piece. Therefore, Henry Ford “(…) moved the car instead of the worker.” ◑ As a result, the car could ride off from the factory floor faster and with less effort.

However, the employees at the Ford factory hated the job. The assemblers would carry out tasks on separate interchangeable parts. ◑ In this way, the labour became segmented into a linear series. Those who stood in front of the line would perform one small task over and over. In consequence, the workers knew little about the degree of their contribution into the end product. In a different manner, the technically educated masters could no longer apply their expertise in the construction process (for example by following their own rhythm and planning, creatively solving the unexpected problems or choosing their preferred tools). Such mode of working refused to offer any fulfilment or satisfaction, as opposed to the old artisanal techniques where the subject controlled every step of the shaping operation. Moreover, many of the specialists had lost their jobs, replaced by the unskilled autoworkers, who cost the company less. This resulted in Ford employing more men with less skills. The labour became mindless, boring, monotonous, regimented; effectively degraded. It had lost its primary meaning.

The proliferation of conveyor belts unfolded into another type of moving surfaces. Before Charlie Chaplin became swallowed up by the cogs of the factory machine, ◑ Dziga Vertov had declared the emerging fiction film the new opiate for the masses. (Certainly, by the end of the 1920s, the moving image had already manifested itself as a powerful propaganda tool.) Against the fabricated reality of fictional pictures and aware of the very nature of the fraudulent film medium, Vertov’s Kino-Pravda upheld to show the truth of the daily life in Soviet Russia in a very subversive way.

One of the masterpieces of the moving image ever directed, “The Man With a Movie Camera” (1929) by Dziga Vertov, has no narrative, no scenario, no actors, no sets nor inter-titles. The sequence displays an objective vision on social life in the cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa; but also, it reveals the film-making process itself. Vertov included the making-of sequences within the final edits. What follows, the eyewitness not only gains the insight into an extensive range of filming techniques, but also observes the cameraman looking for perspective angles, watches the meticulous montage process and engages with the reactions of the audience.

In this regard, Kino-Pravda’s postulates against filmic manipulation preceded Walter Benjamin’s dismay. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” ◑ (1935), The German-Jewish philosopher warned about the filmmakers, who penetrate the space through a camera lens. He opposed them to the painters of old times, who consciously explored the territories around them, keeping the natural distance from real things. In Benjamin's view, the person looking at a still image has thoughts at every step. It means that the spectator devises a self-directed sequence of visual examination, drawing a subjective hierarchy of elements on the painted surface. In opposition, the camera takes these thoughts away, because it moves for the observer. Consequently, according to Benjamin, the moving surface renders the subject passive—gandering, but not regarding. ◑

As I mentioned in the first chapter, the Aristotle’s worldview was based on dualities: form versus matter, positive versus negative, transcendent versus immanent, epistēmē versus techne, mind versus body, subject versus object. The existential outlook on technics originated from the same dualist structure, where the individual stands in an opposition to matter. While the ancients envisioned human as an active subject, who exerts meaning on passive matter, the state-of-theart notion following the World War II considered individuals as incomplete and faulty, always missing something. In this context, tools served as prosthetic compensations, extensions or externalisations to the insufficiently equipped living beings. The ‘technicality that makes up finitude’ (Derrida) supplemented the individuals where indeterminable, unjustifiable, inaccessible appeared. This way of thinking machines as prostheses exposed human existence as external itself, therefore negative, towards the matter. In other words, to render being as outside, was only made possible by the externalisation of technology.

According to Gilbert Simondon, the dualist oppositions played a critical role in the construction of ‘paradigm of work.’ ◑ It is important to point out that since the early 20th century, Henry Ford started to employ women and African-Americans. ◑ (It happened after Ford had removed the requirement of technical expertise. The education to gain such expertise was only available for the culturally privileged white men). As a result, in the second half of the 20th century, more people had a job than previously in history. In response, the existentialist philosophers of that time proposed that the completeness of an individual was achieved through work. Simondon criticised the above notion as well as the Aristotle’s hylomorphism for providing a doubtful and dated metaphor of labour to describe physical, psychical and social processes:

“The technical operation that form imposes on passive and undefined matter is not only the operation abstractly envisaged by a spectator who only sees what goes into the workshop and what leaves it again without understanding the process as such. It is essentially an operation that is ordered by someone free and carried out by slaves… The active character of form and the passive character of matter correspond to the transmission conditions of the order, which presupposes a social hierarchy… The difference between form and matter, between soul and body, reflects a city that consists of citizens and slaves.” ◑

According to Simondon, the ‘supplementation of being’ through labour focused on ‘results and finality’ and ‘obscured relations, mediations and technical objects.’ ◑ As a result, in modern times the perspective of a subject would “(…) correspond to the knowledge of a person who remains outside the workshop and only takes into consideration what goes into it and what comes out.” It finds its expression in a conveyor belt which unfurls in a desired axis, delivering separate pieces of work. The assembly line lures the worker into its own rhythm, conducted by the linearity. In a similar way, the popular fiction film caters a sequence of prescribed conclusions. In both cases, the linear movement is ordered by someone and followed by others. Only the ultimate control of the process would bring the polished product. The finitude of a capitalist object reflects the social gap.

By the end of 1913, the turnover at the Ford factory reached 380%, but every day one out of ten labourers would not turn up to work. To minimise the absence, the manufacturer doubled the wages and shortened the day by one hour. In consequence, an assembly line employee earned five times more than an average American. What followed, the worker could afford the product he was building. ◑ In this way, Henry Ford reinstalled a new type of agency into the labour. The satisfaction from work would no longer derive from supervising each step of the production process, but from the purchasing power of the end product. Ford’s invention promoted a new type of subject: a consumer.

In 1930s, Martin Heidegger ◑ announced that “(…) the age of consummate meaninglessness” permeates “(…) the essence of modernity.” ◑ In this formulation, consummate translates into: showing the great skill and flair in its completion. It derives from Latin consummat [brought to completion], further links to the verb consummare, from con [altogether] and summa [sum total], feminine of summus [highest, supreme]. Thereupon, Heidegger's phrase indicates a thing polished in its masterly finitude, however hollow on the inside. Consequently, the modernist lack of significance may manifest itself in a ‘slick car bodywork or spick-and-span glass vitrines’ (which Monika Stricker smeared with buttermilk, in an attempt to enchant them with personality and meaning). ◑

Nowadays however, the capacity of the automotive industry to produce fetishistic surfaces transcends the confinements of the factory floor. The oil film is an indexical sign of the workings of the vast network of operations which lead to car manufacturing. However, the oil film is also an uncanny image on its own. In the essay “Slick Images,” ◑ Susan Schuppli describes this ‘iridescent image of horror (…)’ (the object shines with the whole range of colours) and calls it the ultimate product of the turbo-capitalism. The iridescence of this haunting, zoomorphic surface stays undefined: in the constant flickering it reflects the capitalist desire of the constant reproduction, the ever lasting need to stay in motion. Schuppli describes the surface of the oil film as a ‘hyperbject’ (after Morton): it is physically large, but ontologically small. ◑ It is flat, but it is so viscous, dense that it also covers something else.

III
ECSTATIC /ƐKˈSTATIK/
1 ADJ FEELING OR EXPRESSING OVERWHELMING HAPPINESS OR JOYFUL EXCITEMENT
2 ADJ INVOLVING AN EXPERIENCE OF MYSTIC SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

Today, the new object cultures are more active and automatic. Ford’s workers have given their hands to machines, if not algorithms. At the same time, humans allowed nano-, bio- and converging technologies to penetrate their bodies. Operating in the new micro-temporal fields, inside and outside of anatomies, algorithms process individual experiences. ‘Smarter’ pieces of mechanics float across eco-technological landscape and inform its infrastructures. On this groundless territory, human and non-human actors merge in a constant exchange. As a result, information has become excessive, unceasing, easily available and instantaneous.

Thereupon, Claude E. Shannon claimed semantics and signification irrelevant for the engineering problem of information and communication. In his view, under the new technological conditions, the process of experiencing the world and making sense of it happens at the same time. We share an interactive status with our tools. Technology is not a means to an end, but rather a mode of our existence. ◑ What follows, is that the cultures of sense forfeited their power to describe and provide evidence. The art of interpretation (hermeneutics) became an outdated category: “(…) an exhilaration of (…) surfaces” had cut short the “hermeneutic gesture,” the reading of a physical or dramatic expression as a “clue or a symptom for (…) reality,” or as the “outward manifestation of an inward feeling.” ◑

Surface is a partly edible installation, which exhibits the perceptive dimension of screens with human senses as a reference system. Horizontally positioned within the custom-made steel structure, a Philips flat screen has been extruded by an edible layer of xian-cao jelly. Devouring through the delicious black jelly doxa expresses “consummate meaninglessness…” ◑ or a new type of significance—beyond sense—in the age of screens. ◑ Does meaning, constructed as a result of a hermeneutic gesture, become obsolete in the technological era (since information is used to describe the world, not to interpret it)? Or maybe the concept of sense is already purely technical? ◑ “Graphic User Interface extrudes the surface with non-transparency (...) It is no longer controllable, understood, judicable.” ◑ Instead, this new type of depth fulfils our constant need for surprise, melodrama and affect, bringing immediate sensual stimuli. The new media reality is of a mercurial character, which steps out of any surface’s frame.

“If after breathing on a plate of glass, the breath is merely wiped away with the finger, and if we then again immediately breathe on the glass, we see very vivid colours gliding through each other; these, as the moisture evaporates, change their place, and at last vanish altogether. If this operation is repeated, the colours are more vivid and beautiful, and remain longer than they did the first time.” ◑

The above description refers to an experiment conducted by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The English author Esther Leslie compares the outcomes of Goethe’s research to the principles of animation, such as: ‘repetition, movement, colour, transience and transformation.’ ◑ She draws attention to the fact that the viewer of the glass plate spectacle happens to be the author at the same time.

Finger motions evoked by a touch screen are very similar to a caress. Instead of wielding tools and assigning meaning to objects, nowadays we exchange data with them. In this model, lines between humans and objects blur, allowing for reciprocal action—without subject-object division:

“While we were required to act upon our old devices through applications of pressure that were explicitly associated with feelings of pain and injury—punching lead onto paper for example—we now stroke our machines and feel their condition.” ◑

In her book “Liquid Crystals” (2016), Leslie points out that Goethe anticipated and even perverted the emergence of the contemporary screens. A crystal has an organised molecular pattern that provides channels for the flow of energy and information. Crystals amplify energy, transduce energy, process energy. They amplify energy, because the whole is no longer a sum of many individual parts, it is more than that. On a touchscreen, a human finger filled with the crystalline matter detonates touch events on the liquid crystal display. ◑ Contemporary touch screens involve human body to detonate touch events. “The screen is intimate then with the body. No longer a site for watching—it demands contact. The technology has developed to read the body: fingertip, nail, knuckle, we become multiple instruments; we angle ourselves towards the devices.” ◑ Liquid crystals with their physical properties seem to best imitate perfect flatness with a very attractive precision.

While past culture regarded aesthetic things as carriers of meaning, while “banishing, ostracising and displacing technical objects from the realm of significance,” ◑ since last century things have encountered humans differently. The interaction with technology transforms into a mutual emotional experience.

The dawn of externalisation, which “views objects, tools and indeed all technics in general as an extension and projection of the human” ◑ has now decomposed under emergence of new technological understandings, for example quantum physics and cybernetisation. It destabilised centrality of the human in nowadays media culture. The main actor, who had mastered his tools during the past few centuries, created a stage of information systems and hybrid techno-ecologies, which in turn started to be an entity on its own. In other words, the elusive character of today’s media feeds and obscures new forms of agency—in which the human no longer plays an active role. Networks of information, growing bigger and more accessible, more justifiably positioned next to human, are the backbone of a potential yet idealistic visualisation of the future.

As Gilbert Simondon described in “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects," the new transcendental technicity “(…) shatters the entire significative sense culture that is centred in the hermeneutic type of subjectivity.” In “Shaping Things” the American science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling described this realm as “techno-social:”

“(…) It is easier to divide human and objects, people are alive, objects are inert, people can think, objects just lie there. But this taxonomical division blinds us to the ways and means by which objects do change, and it obscures the areas of intervention where design can reshape things. Effective intervention takes place not in the human, not in the object, but in the realm of the techno-social.” ◑

“If you believe that meaning comes in sequences and takes the form of a trajectory through a number of different points, then what you really care about is movement: the real possibility to move from one point to another fast enough to prevent the overall shape from vanishing. Now what is the source of this movement, and what keeps it going? Your curiosity, of course, and your desire for experience. But these aren’t enough, believe me. This movement is also propelled by the points through which it passes … [The surfer] has a chance to build real sequences of experience only if at each stop along his journey he gets another push. Still, they’re not really stops, but systems of passage that generate acceleration.” ◑

To scroll is to cause a movement like paper rolling or unrolling. It also signifies the action of moving displayed text or graphics up, down, or across a computer screen in order to view different concealed parts. Unlike reading an ancient scroll in search of the meaning in the traditional sense, we anxiously caress our two fingers down the touchpad to get as much information as possible. We do not always indulge in deep reading. The action is half-automatic and not always rewarded by value. Instead, we involve in a psychological process designed to trigger an addictive behaviour of seeking a reward. That makes us devour even more in this mindless activity.

We tend to assign more meaning to things which are hidden most. (action of unveiling as this old hermeneutic gesture, reference to conspiracy theories: for some they seem so credible precisely because they are hidden) Through self-exhibitionism, data dumps, media revelations, everybody takes part in the game of concealment and discovery. The private truth became “retroactively posited in order to save the structure of meaning premised upon its unveiling.” ◑ Faisal Devji argues that the contemporary media should not be considered in spatial categories, but in temporal categories of action and inaction.

CONCLUSION

Up until the invention of writing in Ancient Sumer, the surfaces of the globular envelopes and later tablets served purely bureaucratic purposes. However, it was the tablet’s ultimate flatness, which facilitated seeing in a non-hierarchical manner. The surface geometry allowed to display a set of elements without a hierarchy. The abstract character of flatness (techne in itself) incited an array of new inventions, such as the development of writing, and later the formulations of abstract ideas. When the industry unleashed its moving surfaces, the position of the human in relation to technology shifted. Nowadays flat devices remind more of the monolith from “2001: Space Odyssey” rather than a Mesopotamian tablet.

Screens long ago ceased to serve as prosthetic telescopes to capture the real: ”While we were required to act upon our old devices through applications of pressure that were explicitly associated with feelings of pain and injury—punching lead onto paper for example—we now stroke our machines and feel their condition.” ◑

On our rare-earth pieces work and play happen at the same time in a constant entanglement. Devji argues that once the surface does not mean truth or falsehood, it becomes an arena for play an illusion with instructions and clues for the real. ◑ Baudrillard’s ◑ seducer has affinity for surfaces and signs, mystery and play…