140 x 190mm, 186 pages, Risograph printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, Includes bookmark, Ed. of 180, 2023

Contact, translation, transfiguration, breakdown. The interface takes many forms. Consider the movement between print and digital media, the architecture of buildings and public space, the frame of a painting or the format of an academic paper: our possibilities for experience and knowledge are shaped by interfaces of myriad kinds. Front desks, government websites, border checkpoints. As we move through the world we likewise encounter a range of interfaces that structure access, infrastructures that place us within matrices of history and power. But is the interface simply an object or threshold that offers a seamless transition from one state to another? Attending to its materiality quickly points towards the interface as a type of activity; mediation as an event. For this issue of Soapbox, a graduate journal for cultural analysis, we invited researchers to critically engage with the concept of the interface, and specifically the ways interfaces are entangled with local, national, global, and planetary formations today. Responding to this theme, the texts gathered here become a diverse set of theoretical, poetic and visual interfaces for thinking about mediation at large.

Contributors: Maša Seničić; Jason Wallin; Manuela Zammit; Robert Barrett; Ron Ma; Clara Pasteau; Alexandre Guern; Danae Tapia, Javier Bertossi, and Andrés Tapia; Devin Griffiths.

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