This presentation will situate the cockpit as both a proto-media object and a form of relation that typifies interfaces. Here, cockpit refers to both a lineage of artifacts (flight controls, instrumentation, etc.) and a site of negotiation and contestation, where what is at stake is the conjoined shaping of humanness and machine-ness in an age of technological mediation. The cockpit is important to the history of mediation for two reasons. The first is its unique historical situation: the near coincidence of the invention of controlled flight with the start of WWI brought unprecedented attention—from multiple directions, including military, engineering, psychology and medicine, and culture—to problems of human-machine interaction. This work was foundational to the evolution of interfaces.
The second has to do with the conceptual slipperiness of the cockpit as a threshold space. Janus-like, the cockpit is at once an entrance into and exit from flight. Such entrances and exits are multiple and polyvalent. As a form of mediation by which human cognition is translated into a natural language of control surface and laminar airflow, the cockpit transcodes across otherwise distinct contexts and categories. It is an object but also a space of inhabitation and a choreography of human gestures and machine actions: a room with a view that opens up onto a space of controlled flight. Such flights may also be metaphorical, connoting any technologically intensive and immersive control environment where large amounts of information are streamed into a time-critical decision-making process. As one navigates the air, so one navigates complex data flows, virtual cities, or social networks. In each case, one finds the production of a space within which certain actions are rendered possible that otherwise would not have been.
The cockpit is also an entrance into a diegetic space. It is a threshold crossed and then forgotten when one assumes controlled flight as a function of self-directed agency. One might say: “I fly,” or “I performed this or that maneuver.” The advent of flight was accompanied by a proliferation of memoirs, particularly by wartime pilots. Paul Virilio suggests a link between selfhood and cockpit—the co-production of I and aerial camera eye—in his paraphrase of Nam June Paik in War and Cinema: “cinema isn’t I see, it’s I fly.” One might extend this to other areas of mediated agency: I draw, I compose, I program, I socialize. Yet these entrances also entail their exits: with respect to the cockpit, this includes not only loss of orientation or accident, but also the test and the simulation, wherein the identity of pilot is transformed to that of experimental subject. The continuous threatening presence of exit—the moment of separation inseparable from any process of augmentation—is the unfulfilled negotiation of the cockpit and the uneasy unconscious of the cyborg.
The presentation will sketch out the territory opened up with the emergence of the airplane cockpit through a selection of research drawn primarily from the early twentieth century, including: etymology and precedents; psychological apparatus, tests, trainers, and simulators; WWI aerial combat and surveillance; blind flight and vertigo; and contemporaneous cultural responses. The presentation will relate this research to a theoretical model of the interface as an irreducibly doubled moment of separation and augmentation.
Branden Hookway is author of Interface and Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World. He has worked in architecture and design, and currently teaches in the departments of Architecture and Art at Cornell University.