I noticed a bunch of the terms we've been using to describe this stuff and 'the surface' whilst rereading some of the cyberspace bits in Neuromancer last night; lots of mentions of ice (although in a different sense in the context of the story), frosted glass, blues, neon, windows. . . .
consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.
Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information than the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.
The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)
Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.
The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).
When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=14358
SCREEN IS NOW PRIMARY ENVIRONMENT.