Interface as a process – art, agent systems and the constitution of open spaces of meaning

In the common understanding, human interface design describes the design of a user interface through which a person interacts with a technical system. However, this instrumental understanding reduces the interface to an operating tool whose task is to facilitate communication between two separate entities. From a broader, systemic perspective, however, the interface becomes something fundamental: a place where a relational relationship is constituted, in which meaning emerges and reality is jointly produced.

In this model, the agents involved are not necessarily human. They can be sensors, machines, algorithms, software instances, animals or hybrid human-machine systems. The relationship between them is not just a transmission channel, but a dynamic field of mutual interpretation. Meanings are not fixed in the individual actors, but arise in the ongoing process of interaction – in line with actor-network theory (Latour, Callon), which understands communication as a network performance in which human and non-human actors contribute symmetrically.

This perspective can be directly linked to the processual concept of art. If art is understood not as a finished work but as an open, generative system, then it too functions as an interface: it is a relational hub that integrates different actors – artists, viewers, material, context, discourse, technology – into a communication process. Artworks, understood in this sense, are not end products, but temporary states of aggregation in an ongoing, self-organising network.

Processuality becomes a structuring openness: the interface – whether in art or in a technical agent network – is not a passive transmission space, but a semiotic machine that produces meaning by enabling relations. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe such processes as ‘rhizomatic’: not linear, not hierarchical, but network-like, branching out and always open to new connections. Similarly, Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics) understands the artwork as a social space generated through interaction.

In this reading, the design of an interface – whether in the field of art or technology – is the design of a world:

- Each interface is a set of conditions under which meaning can arise between heterogeneous actors.

- The relationship it creates changes all the actors involved and the network in which they are embedded.

- It is a process that does not aim at a final state, but continuously produces new interpretations and actions.

Thus, the fields of human interface design and art as a process overlap where both are understood as open systems whose task is not to create a final form, but to establish and maintain a space of resonance in which meanings circulate, transform and reconstitute themselves. In this sense, every interface – whether it connects a human being, a machine or a complex ensemble of both – is itself an artistic act: the conscious construction of a situation in which the world is not simply represented, but jointly created.