Spotify, software disforme: a secundarização da interface gráfica como maturidade do software na tecnocultura

Abstract

The present research studies the mutation process of software’s graphical interface taking as empirical object Spotify’s graphical interface and its historical relationship with others sound reproduction softwares. The alignment of these materialities aims to understand the ethics that guides the transformation of these surfaces representation throughout the ages, the reason why these are increasingly visually simplified and what makes feasible such synthesizing progression. Aligned to a theoretical set that a) recognizes on the graphic interface process of constitution an effort of replica and remix with other media; b) recognizes the software as a pure information entity whose purpose and way of acting go beyond what the graphical interface exposes and; c) recognizes the human being as a bearer of interpretative codes acquired in contact with the media and that are followed as a source for the media’s positioning in state of implantation, the crossroads research offer the heuristic possibility to understand the software as a non-representational creature and the graphical interface as a temporary representational element adopted by the software due to its adaptation to the initial receptor regimes, and from which the software itself dissolves as it transmits to the user the ability to understand the interaction devoid of forms. This process of capacitation is identified on Spotify from graphical-discursive measures that destabilize principles considered common to classic graphical interfaces, either in its hidden operation as installed software, or in the adoption of its low fidelity flat design in relation to physical objects, whether in the breaking of spatial navigation logic and content depth. The same analysis concludes that, while discarding the need for emulation of form and space, the software approaches its own (in)visibility and acquires layers of autonomy and mastery over the machine and over the user that operates it, being, to the software, the exercise of its (in)visibility also, therefore, a search for self-strengthening and expansion on the environment.