'Grasp All, Lose All': Raising Awareness Through Loss of Grasp in Seemingly Functional Interfaces

Abstract

From baroque proto-cybertexts to countercultural gestures by historical avant-gardes, there is a longstanding tradition of disruptive strategies used by artists at the interstices of societies’ demands for order, control, and functionalism. For the avant-gardes and their multiple artistic inf(l)ections, radical changes to the way sensory perception had come to be depicted since Modernism became a central part of their strategy. By placing an emphasis on the confluence between various arts and media, the innovative character of their proposals had much to do with the ways in which they were able to embrace notions that represented modernity, including concepts such as simultaneity, dynamics, motion, and the symbiosis between human and machine. In this manner, they sought to induce estrangement and defamiliarization by using seemingly functional mechanisms to raise awareness through the loss of grasp.