Jan Robert Leegte

Buttons

Gretta Louw in conversation with Jan Robert Leegte and Mimi Nguyen.

Jan Robert Leegte on Pushing the Boundaries of Net Art Since the Late 90s

The button has been in a continuous state of shapeshifting over the expanding history of collective interface design. Endless webpages filled with designs, haptics, styles, expressions, subcultures, interactions, effects, all layered over this simple and elemental entity leaving in its wake a fundamental material presence within interface culture.

The internet is an unimaginably vast ecology of data and processes. Deeply stored data is immutable like buried granite, where other is constantly in flux like a rushing mountain stream. The whole system is in continuous evolution through endless processes reshaping the data interacting with each other and with ourselves. At the opaque surface of this churning ocean of bits is the exchange between both the realm of the computer and that of ourselves. The interface. And in the centre of this human machine culture lives the button. A binary entity reaching out from the very core of the machine's logic to touch, at the surface, our reaching finger, after which it dives back down in order to toggle some state from a zero to a one.