:introductioN
	Now that user interfaces are relatively easy to implement, the illusion of working software is increasingly easy to demonstrate.(Mowbray 41)
This project was written for Dr. Beth Kolko's Spring '98 graduate seminar, Computers and Writing at UT Arlington. We designed this project with the intention of making the medium the message in our investigations of "interfacial concepts." We wanted to whow how specific interfaces generate environments. We present three environments: DOS, MOO, and Macintosh. This project was written in JavaScript1.2. It uses Netscape's layers technology. It will be rewritten for a wider audience in the near future, but, currently, it is best viewed using the following: Netscape Navigator 4+ on an Apple Macintosh computer with a screen size of 800x600, the MS Trebuchet font at a size of 12 points; at UT Arlington, several labs of networked computers exist with these configurations. Additionally, a fast connection is not essential; however, you may need to allow a few minutes for the project to load (28.8K users allow 3-5 minutes per interface). Many of these constraints will be lifted during the first rewrite. Minimally, you need NS4+. The problem with the PC platform is that it renders fonts differently. If you are using a PC, MS Trebuchet at a size of 9 should alleviate most of the problems you'd encounter. Unfortuntely, key-driven events will be made difficult. Nevertheless, PC'ers should have a good time. Before you click your way in to our project, here is an axiom with which to think: interface is cyberspace. This axiom is reversible: cyberspace is interface. Unthinkingly, one might assume that an interface is an insignificant medium through which one interacts with something "behind" or "before." We are supposed to (un)think this way. It is part of our logic-based, Western heritage. This thought is based on the presumption that there is a more substantial truth behind the interfacial apparition with which one interacts. It is common sense, but from where does this common presumption arise? Arguably, it is based on a psychological affect over which a host of thinkers have passed many hours of speculation. Two such thinkers include Hume and Nietzsche. For Hume, some of our basic assumptions - one of his most often cited is that the sun will rise tomorrow - are based on nothing but an expectation. We get this expectation from our senses, not from pure reason. The "rational" basis informing my belief that the sun will rise is an observed repetition of events in the past. While "the sun'll come up tomorrow," we tend to carry this expectation over into less sure areas. We call this the "Annie Factor." Advertising capitalizes on this mode of "truth-production" all the time. In a similar move, Nietzsche argues that the conceptual "discovery" of equivalence (equality; the equal sign) is a by-product of our ability to infer similarities between different phenomena. The problem is that these repetitions of events and our consequent ability to deduce equivalences between them can lead to a "logical" diminution of the status of that which appears, that which you are holding and smelling and seeing and touching right here, right now. For Plato, the world as we know it - with all of its contradictions and "illogical" events - is not real in the philosophical sense. Reality is a supersensory or spiritual realm. The world as we know it is a global set of appearances or apparitions. As Socrates says in Plato's dialogue, Gorgias, this world is a tomb. The subsequent Platonic move is to "see" beyond the temporal world in to the world of permanent, spiritual ideas. In other words, forget the interface that is life for the presumed substantial truth before or behind it. We ask that you suspend your belief in that (ir)rational presumption. The interface is all there is. The medium is the message. As you change interfaces, you change your life, the ways by which you extend yourself in the world in order to work and play and communicate. The study of interface is the study of environment. It is a gestalt study of the human psyche. As McLuhan would explain, any artifact is an interface which can dynamically change the ways in which you understand reality. As you enter this project, keep in mind, there is nothing behind or before the concept of interface but more interfaces. Thinking of Hume and Nietzsche, concepts like repetition and similitude are also interfaces; the equal sign is perhaps the West's quintessential interface by which to extend our capacity for reasoning. Think about the computing interfaces you are accustomed to using, and as you "surf" through this project, try to think of new and different computer interfaces that you wish existed. You will be rethinking the human environment as cyberspace. Matthew Levy & Dave Rieder