This paper addresses interaction in multi-surface environments and questions whether the current application-centric approaches to user interfaces are adequate in this context, and presents an alternative approach based on instrumental interaction. The paper presents the VIGO (Views, Instruments, Governors and Objects) architecture and describes a prototype implementation. It then illustrates how to apply VIGO to support distributed interaction. Finally, it demonstrates how a classical Ubicomp interaction technique, Pickand-Drop, can be easily implemented using VIGO. Author Keywords Ubiquitous Computing, Instrumental Interaction, Multi-surface interaction, UI Architecture, Interaction Paradigm ACM Classification Keywords H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. - Graphical user interfaces.