My thesis investigates the role of touchscreen interfaces, specifically the Apple iPad and Procreate app, as a becoming-legacy medium. Specifically, to prepare it for service as an ethical benchmark, toward addressing emerging issues around techno-capitalist power and control. This being as human/computer interfaces affectively 'become the body’ - I ask how these interfaces shape metacognition, the ability to think about one's own thinking, allowing minds to self-regulate by organising sensory stimuli into ‘theory of mind’. Applying these terms, iPad/Procreate is framed as part of a developing history of 'apparatuses', imposing how meaning making works socially and semiotically. To this end, a ‘meta-interface’ methodology is employed, grounding critical phenomenological readings of my iPad/Procreate interface, through that of visual/tactile metacognitive doodling. I do this by remediating Nick Sousanis' comic art 'Unflattening'. By doing so, I trace an otherwise sensually withdrawing fractal grid: an 'operative chain' acting as a manipulative 'subface' of the touchscreen interface surface.

My practice-led research was informed by a seminar exhibition designed to test this executional hypothesis, in the form of sister artworks: 'See Feel Say' and 'Feel Say See'. This led to an analysis positioning iPad/Procreate as an actor of Alfred Gell's 'Art Nexus', an aesthetic of social competition for power to embody and control meaning. After Gell, I describe this competition as conducted through ‘abduction’ of metacognition, producing different orders of self/other abstraction. That is, a social aesthetic relation between myself as artist, iPad/Procreate as index, the fractal grid as prototype, and surveillance/platform techno-capital as recipient – amounting to a ’technological unconscious’. To conclude, more research is proposed, toward further detailing and evaluating my fractal tracing as a ‘cultural software’ syntax of affects, through which technocratic agents can act.