--- # The Unfinished Interface: Mediations and Aesthetics from the Periphery When I think of the word interface, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a screen or a drop-down menu. It’s my grandmother’s window, the one that never quite closed right, where the street noise slipped in—the dogs, the drunks shouting at three in the morning. An interface, I think now, is always an incomplete place. A crack. A space where something happens and something leaks through. I don’t know if theory puts it that way. Probably not. But I like to imagine theory can be wrong too, that it can wobble—like a neighbor walking by with his shirt half unbuttoned and a warm beer in his hand. The periphery—that word that seems geographic but is really aesthetic and political—behaves like an interface: it connects two worlds that don’t quite recognize each other. One central, full of shine, capital, display windows; and another fragile, that nevertheless survives by inventing its own forms, its own improvised technologies. A friend once told me: “the periphery is where the cables don’t reach, where the signal arrives late.” He said it laughing, but I understood it as a definition more precise than any academic paper. Because in that lateness, in that delay, another possibility appears—for art, for politics, even for revolution. Slowness as resistance. Error as an aesthetic. --- Walter Benjamin said that every work of art is, at some point, “a constellation in becoming.” It is never completely closed; it always depends on its context, its reception, its use. Thought from the peripheries, that idea takes on a different weight: the unfinished is not a voluntary aesthetic gesture; it is the very condition of existence. Processes remain open because there aren’t resources to finish them, because the police interrupt, because the neighborhood doesn’t allow the luxury of a perfect finish. In that precariousness, paradoxically, a power appears. Marx already warned in Capital: commodity fetishism consists in hiding the labor process, showing only the final product as if it had sprung from nowhere. The unfinished work, by contrast, reveals its process. It lets you see the trembling hand, the erased stroke, the improvised cut. That’s where the fetish breaks. --- When I speak of an unfinished interface, I think of those old websites with broken links and impossible typefaces. No one would call them beautiful, but you might call them honest. Their precariousness is almost revolutionary against the logic of capital, which demands cleanliness, efficiency, closed products, flawless merchandise. The finished work. Silicon Valley’s “done.” Capitalism needs finished objects. That obsession with closure, with the perfectly packaged commodity, runs deep. And yet capital itself pretends to be in permanent “beta.” It’s the trick of the apps: there’s always an update pending, always something to improve. But that supposed incompleteness isn’t real—it’s controlled, planned. There is no true error, only strategy. On the periphery, by contrast, the error is real, the failure is authentic. The concert that cuts out because someone stole the power. The mural that only just gets finished before the police arrive. The community radio station broadcasting with a broken microphone and a host improvising. These gestures are unfinished interfaces: spaces where the artistic and the political cross without an obsession for perfection. --- I remember once traveling to a craft fair on the outskirts of Santiago. The bus took more than three hours, and by the time I arrived it was already getting dark. Stalls were lit by bulbs hanging from cables hooked up to a noisy generator. The ground was muddy. Now and then the power failed and we were all plunged into darkness. And yet, in those seconds of darkness another perception opened up: the murmur of people, children running, the sound of pots. I thought: this is an interface. Not because it’s technological in the classic sense, but because it mediates between worlds: the official market that excludes, and the precarious economy that invents. Perhaps contemporary art—with its obsession with museographic neatness—has forgotten this. It has forgotten the force of the unfinished, the clumsy, the precarious. As if only the impeccable could be called art. The peripheral insists on something else: on showing the seam, the error, the flicker. --- I think of Bolaño: “Literature is like a black hole, and the best books are the ones that let some light escape.” That escaping light isn’t perfection; it is flight, error, interface. And I think of Zambra too, of his way of writing as if doubting every word. Maybe writing itself is another interface—not a finished discourse, but a conversation with its own interruptions, its own breaths. Leila Guerriero once wrote that the crónica is “a broken mirror” that reflects reality in fragments. The same could be said of peripheral interfaces: broken mirrors where reality appears in pieces, and precisely for that reason becomes truer. --- If this essay has any meaning—and I’m not sure that it does—it would be to show that the interface is not a technical object but a gesture. A place that does not close. A mediation that is never fully resolved. And that on the periphery, in those territories where the signal arrives late and cables hang like lianas, that incompleteness is the rule, not the exception. Maybe the revolution lies there: in accepting the unfinished as a way of life. In refusing to compete with the central shine, insisting instead on the crack, on the badly closed window, on the broken webpage that still holds a forgotten poem. The rest, as always, is digression. And digressions, I already said, are interfaces too: edges where one gets lost and at the same time is found. ★ ★ ★ ---