Orality and the Algorithm

A Genealogy of Interfaces as Forms of Computational Writing

Abstract

The dissolution of the visual interface in contemporary conversational systems does not mark a discontinuity in the history of interaction design: it reveals, rather, its deeper nature. This contribution argues that the object of interaction design has always been language, understood as a structured semiotic system, endowed with its own syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In support of this thesis, the contribution reconstructs, through artifacts and by means of them, a critical genealogy of interfaces as forms of computational writing and devices of knowledge: from orality to writing, from typography to machine languages, from graphical interfaces to ubiquitous computing, up to the dissolution of the interface in conversational systems based on artificial intelligence. The trajectory that emerges is spiral in shape. Primary orality and computational orality occupy the same formal position, natural language as the sole mediator between the one who formulates and the one who responds, but at historically, technically, and infrastructurally different depths. Every historical configuration of the interface established a shared code to make accessible those functions that had no perceptible form: what changed were the expressive materials, not the semiotic nature of the problem. Conversational systems bring this logic to its point of maximum coherence, restoring natural language as the interface itself and reactivating within computation the constitutive properties of orality: situatedness, performativity, the unrepeatable uniqueness of each exchange. In this scenario interaction design doesn't disappear, it is redefined, shifting from the design of the generated form to the design of the conditions of generation: the grammars that govern variation, the constraints within which the system produces meaning without producing arbitrariness.