# Emergent Interfaces: Vague, Complex, Bespoke and Embodied Interaction between Humans and Computers
### The Challenge of Resituating Abstract Representations  
A situated label becomes an abstraction when it is detached from the context it emerged from and is instead treated as a symbol that can be dropped into a new context. This enables rule-based reasoning and computation. However, when the abstraction is imposed back onto the world, we risk what Hayles describes as the 'Platonic backhand': deviations from the abstraction are regarded as noise or distortion masking this idealised form rather than as the ground truth the abstraction approximates [13]. For example, Rajko offers a critique from an embodied stance of Google Glass, a pair of internet-connected'smart' glasses with a mounted camera. She quotes one of its designers reasoning that a camera on a pair of glasses was no different than the many security cameras surrounding us [9]. This reasoning considers the camera in the abstract. The camera becomes any camera, rather than the camera that I, of all people, have chosen to attach to my face to record specifically you while we hang out. Friction between formalist and embodied thinking can become particularly apparent when we introduce computers into embodied activities. Much of my own artistic practice has involved collaborating as a coder with dancers in the studio. For the dancer, an idea may be immediately materialised into movement. Indeed, in many cases choreographic material is not so much invented as it is encountered through exploratory improvisation. This is often captured in the term _instant composition_, of which dancer Neuhaus writes:  
_The performer's body and mind need to be specifically tuned for perception, imagination, intuition, inhibition and action. At the same time one must be able to constantly read and respond to one's body, the other dancers and the composition itself, including all its different layers. These seemingly elusive qualities are actually skills that can be learned through specific training and practice._[14]  
Her description reminds us that embodied thinking can be fully immersive and require the complete focus of the mind, much like Csikszentmihalyi's concept of 'flow' [15]. In a dance/tech collaboration, this process can be frustrated by the slow pace of the coder, who must imagine, plan and execute, doing their best to work in short iterations. Of course, while slower to create, once it is written code becomes endlessly reusable (barring technical failure). However, this fixed nature means that any abstract representations of movement that have been conceived in the coding process, such as gestures and trigger zones, are now fixed constraints to work with. Yet, movement of the body remains ephemeral and in flux. For the dancer to 'fix' the material they encounter, should they so wish, additional work and skill is required. Even when working with non-tactile sensors such as cameras, coded abstractions can constrain the body's physical movement. For example, suppose we encounter a moment where one dancer reaches a hand out towards a person across the room. We want to return to this so we give it a name, 'the reach'. Our understanding of what we mean by 'the reach' is situated: the representation it triggers is embedded in the situation we all experienced when that material was encountered. In this way, the name is a label to an implicit representation we share that has emerged from the activity. If a new person joins the performance, we cannot expect them to understand what we mean by 'the reach'. To share this, we would need to recreate the situation for them. What the label represents has emerged from a shared context. Gillies describes this as an _emergent representation_[1]. Now, suppose we want to represent this moment digitally, say to trigger a sound. The coder might abstract 'the reach' into 'a hand pointing within \(\theta^{\circ}\) of direction \(v^{\prime}\). If that is too general, then we might try a more complex abstraction, such as 'a hand pointing within \(\theta^{\circ}\) of the line connecting its body to any other body'.