Fichamento: WEIBEL, P. (1996) The World as Interface, in DRUCKERY, Timothy (ed.) Electronic Culture, Aperture, New York, pp.343-351.

In this article Peter Weibel starts describing the evolution of machine-aided image generation and transfer along the history, since the birth of photography in 1839 until the development of transistor, integrated circuits, chips and semi-condutor technology, which revolutionized data-processing technology and led to the machine generated computer images.
According to the author, this conditions allows the development of machine-controlled interactive visual worlds, which has new characteristics: virtuality, variability and viability. These are the three main aspects that allows interaction between image and viewer and are the basis for one step further, the development of interactive telecommunication technology, the basis of the art in the network, televirtuality, purely immaterial art in data space, telepresence, interactive television, digital networks, etc.
For Weibel, all these transformations provides two significants distinctions: in one hand the message-sender from the message, and in the other hand, the body from the message. Now, signs travel throught space and time. He also advocates the next steps of this evolution: to link the brain as directly as possible to the digital realm.
In this times of techno-vision (the primacy of the eye in the 20^th century is supported by machine-based vision), also and of course, significant transformations of the perception occurred, as well as the turning of the image from the spatial, two-dimesional form into temporal form: the birth of the cinematography. Also he points that this change has its origin in Industrial Revolution, which formulated the human body as a machine. Later, some artists aiming to use the laws of perception and optics to create a new forms of visual experience, of visual art, started encouraging people to see differently with machines, revealing a world of images that could not have been seen or created without these machines. Their goal ended with the creation of a writing of seeing (opseography), instead of motion (cinematography).
The author also relates the transformations occurred in the image and perception with others fields of knowledge, specially with the sciences. He builds up relations with endophysics (a science that explores what a system looks like when the observer becomes part of this system), quantum and chaos theory. Quantum theory introduces into physics the observer problem. These relations guides us to questions like: Is there another perspective possible than that of the internal observer? Are we only inhabitants of the inner side of any interface? What does classical objectivity means, then? So, with this grounding, Peter Weibles points that reality is necessarily dependent on the observer and endophysics offers an approach to a general model of simulation theory. According to him „This approach provides a new theoretical framework for describing and understanding the scientific, technical, and social conditions of the postmodern electronic world. The issues that endophysics adresses – from observer relativity, representation, and non-locality to the world seen as merely interface – are the central issues of an electronic and telematic civilization.” (WEIBEL, 1996, p. 342).
In the same way, he understands electronic art as world of the internal observer par excellence, concerning participatory, interactive, observer-centered and virtual nature. “Electronic art moves art from an object-centered stage to a context- and observer-centered one.“ (WEIBEL, 1996, p. 343). About this issues he concludes that Electronic art should help us to better understand the nature of electronic culture and the foundations of our electronic world and that „Electronic technology has conducted to the insight that we are only part of the system that we observe or with we interact.“ (WEIBEL, 1996, p. 343).
Further, in this article Peter Weibel reflects about virtual-reality systems, touching in questions like simulation and the recognition that objective reality can only be a reflex of the endo side of an exo world, and citing Roger Josef Boscovich, he says that “the world is volatile without us being able to perceive its volatility, since we ourselves are undergoing the same changes.” (WEIBEL, 1996, p.345). Also, he adds that interactive virtual works follow the terms defined in meta-experiments, exo and endo sides, and that the media represent an attempt, from a position within the universe, to simulate a possible escape from that very universe, where we can be both internal and external observers. At this point the author makes connection with psychology through Lacan, who said that the media world must be equated to reality, as it is an “effect of the real”, once it the “media world expands the scope of the interface that exists within the universe between the observer and his world” (WEIBEL, 1996, p. 346).
For Peter Weibel quantum and relativity theories changed the perception of objectivity, while psychoanalysis has transformed the perception of the subject. These trends have always found space into the arts field, where they are at the same time promoted, lamented, delayed, aesthetically idealized, brought to attention, or ignored. This way, it has been inevitable a sense of loss, aesthetic or episthemological one, as “the price each alteration of reality and any new era has to pay” (WEIBEL, 1996, p. 346).
After pinpointing the new characteristics of the image of the electronic era (virtuality, variability and viability), the author points the next stage (from 1996 on): the development of art in the network, the evolving of a newer telematic culture, the development of a new conception of corporeality and the human body, through the intervention of “brain chips”, “neuro chips” and even the “knowbots”, described as immaterial intelligent and autonomous agents with virtual bodies who could be taught to learn and perform tasks in data banks.