How can interfaces be reclaimed as spaces of agency, negotiation, and critical awareness in the age of AI-driven conversational systems?

This lab proposes an intervention into the ongoing dissolution of the interface. This process is neither new nor inevitable, yet with the rise of AI-driven modes of interaction it has reached a critical threshold. Interfaces are increasingly rendered invisible, displaced by conversational systems that obscure their own structure while shaping user behavior. The rise of the “agentic web” undermines the idea that the WWW can belong to the people who make it.

The lab frames the interface not as a surface, but as a frontier: a site where users exercise agency, negotiate meaning, and encounter the limits of systems. Its disappearance is therefore not only aesthetic, but political. When interfaces dissolve, so does the user’s awareness of how systems operate, shifting us from active participants to passive consumers.

Through historical inquiry and speculative making, the lab revisits the interface as a staged performance, from early graphical systems to conversational paradigms. Participants will critically examine how invisibility functions as control, and explore alternatives that resist the reduction of interaction to mere “requests”.

The lab invites the development of prototypes, gestures, and fictions that reclaim the interface as a space of imagination, negotiation, and agency in relation to artificial systems.