Dissenting the user interface

Critique and writing in the age of digital Self-referentiality

Abstract

This article presents an inquiry into the current condition of writing and critique within contemporary digital mediations focusing on artist’s Daniel García Andújar web project e-valencia.org. Its argument develops from the work of Tiziana Terranova (2004), Scott Lash (2002) and Bernard Stiegler (1994/2002, 2010) to make sense of the role that interfaces and technological indetermination play in digital critique and writing. These authors characterize digital mediations through hypercomplexity, acceleration and self-referentiality which make critique and writing partial and situated endeavors linked to the inherent imprevisibility of any technological order. This article focuses initially on artist Daniel García Andújar’s e-valencia.org as a form of collaborative writing and ends up recalling Andújar’s work in order to highlight how critique as a form of digitally mediated writing is intertwined with dissent and oblivion as its condition of possibility.

Keywords: digital criticism; alphabetic writing; digital mediations; originary technicity; hypercomplexity.