Hookway Publishes Interface

The exploration of the human relationship with technology is the focus of Branden Hookway's new book, Interface (MIT Press, 2014).

In the book, Hookway, who is a visiting assistant professor of architecture, offers a theory of the interface that draws on cultural theory, political theory, philosophy, art, architecture, new media, and the history of science and technology. He finds the origin of the term interface in 19th-century fluid dynamics and traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics, and discusses issues of subject formation, agency, power, and control, within contexts that include technology, politics, and the social role of games.

"This is a uniquely subtle and compelling study of the human relation to technology," says Columbia University's Mark Wigley. "It quietly and insightfully threads itself through multiple disciplines to offer a truly transformative analysis of the ubiquitous yet elusive interface without which neither human nor technology can be thought.”

Interface is also endorsed by Malcolm McCullough, professor of architecture at the University of Michigan; and Nicholas de Monchaux, associate professor of architecture and urban design at University of California–Berkeley.

Hookway also teaches in the College of Human Ecology's Department of Design and Environmental Analysis and is the author of Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).