Behind the Blip

New from British new-media cleverton Matthew Fuller (currently in residence at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam). Matthew’s been involved with some pretty interesting critical-software projects in the last few years, digging into the myths behind Human-Computer Interface design, and revealing the political choices behind the sheen-of-neutrality found in most everyday-use software. “Behind the Blip” comes out of these projects, and is largely an articulation of what he found working on them. Lev Manovich, the author of “The Language of New Media”, says that “what Fuller gives us is not just a usual book of theory but rather a kind of software — a ‘critical help system’ to help us understand what is really going on behind the menu and the windows of our computer screens.”