The graphical user interface in art

This essay discusses the use of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) as a site of creative practice. By creatively repositioning the GUI as a work of art it is possible to challenge our understanding and expectations of the conventional computer interface wherein the icons and navigational architecture of the GUI no longer function as a technological tool. These artistic recontextualizations are often used to question our engagement with technology and to highlight the pivotal place that the domestic computer has taken in our everyday social, cultural and (increasingly), creative domains. Through these works the media specificity of the screen-based GUI can broken by dramatic changes in scale, form and configuration. This can be seen through the work of new media artists who have re-imagined the GUI in a number of creative forms both, within the digital, as image, animation, net and interactive art, and in the analogue, as print, painting, sculpture, installation and performative event. Furthermore as a creative work, the GUI can also be utilized as a visual way-finder to explore the relationship between the dynamic potentials of the digital and the concretized qualities of the material artifact.