In a book collection concernedwith Performance Studies, then, I was intrigued to consider how it mightbe possible to meld together some transversal processes of thought initi-ated by my engagement with Deleuze to offer a posthuman theory ofemergent aesthetics which embraces the scintillation, the electricity andthe passion of much performative art, in this case of a filmed operaticperformance

Chapter 10. . . of butterflies, bodies and biograms. . . Affective Spaces in Performativities inthe Performance of Madama ButterflyBarbara Kennedy

This blank surface/legible depth dualism is reproduced in the various theories of travel and travelling that try to distinguish between travellers andtourists, the latter oeing portrayed by the former as the poor unenlightened souls unable to detect the deeper meaning of things.16 But evidentlyit is becoming more and more difficult to sustain: postmodern space doesnot seem to yield the depth of meaning its classical and modern antecedents did.

In the previous chapter I described the interface as a generalmode of mediation. While readily evident in things like screensand surfaces, the interface is ultimately something beyondthe screen. It has only a superficial relationship to the surfacesof digital devices, those skins that beg to be touched. Rather,the interface is a general technique of mediation evident atall levels; indeed it facilitates the way of thinking that tendsto pitch things in terms of “levels” or “layers” in the firstplace. These levels, these many interfaces, are the subject ofanalysis not so much to explain what they are, but to showthat the social field itself constitutes a grand interface, aninterface between subject and world, between surface andsource, and between critique and the objects of criticism.Hence the interface is above all an allegorical device thatwill help us gain some perspective on culture in the age ofinformation. For this reason, we look now to the “deeper”realm of software, the realm below the screen, with an eye tothe possible ideological construction of this hidden electronickingdom.

New media foreground the interface like never before. Screensof all shapes and sizes tend to come to mind: computer screens,ATM kiosks, phone keypads, and so on. This is what Vilé mFlusser called simply a “significant surface,” meaning a two-dimensional plane with meaning embedded in it or deliveredthrough it. There is even a particular vernacular adopted todescribe or evaluate such significant surfaces. We say “theyare user-friendly,” or “they are not user-friendly.” “They areintuitive” or “they are not intuitive.”