What's on your desktop?

[imomus]

"I'm intensely interested in what people's computer desktops look like," says the initiator of the Flickr Desktop Pool, a collection of 830 screenshots of people's desktop environments.



Here are four of mine, the first from 2000, featuring a Julian Opie installation, the others more recent snaps of real world rooms I've seen and liked. Although the clumsy metaphor is that you have a desktop with a picture on it, it would be better to say that a desktop image featuring an environment places the computer OS's desktop metaphor in a recognizable real world space. It's amazing how quickly we stop seeing the absurd juxtaposition of two completely different modes of representation -- those silly little 3D folder icons floating (in snap-to-grid zero gravity) in a photo-realistic room.

And it's not even our own room -- this is a harmless kind of "location theft". My current desktop image (the bottom one on that strip, with the bulbs) is a photo I took a couple of years ago on Schlesischestrasse in Berlin Kreuzberg. It's the ceiling of the workroom of a clothes designer called Florinda Schnitzel. The other day someone called Kim emailed me, desperately seeking this image:

"My friend Stephen went to Canal Street and came back with a crate of neon orange construction lamps... When I heard this I immediately thought of an image you once posted of a Berlin apartment where there was an intricate neon orange construction lamp web / chandelier in the dining room. It was expansive and beautiful, taking up perhaps 75% of the ceiling. I told him about it and we both became really excited and decided that we could use a little of that DIY radness in our lives... I plan on taking that image to try to recreate that wonderful sculpture in Stephen's Bushwick loft."

A big-size photo of Florinda's installation is here. Feel free to make it your own desktop image -- or reproduce it on your own ceiling. If we all have this image on our desktops, it's almost as if we're all working in the same space, the same big office. And if we reproduce the lamp idea in our real spaces, that's a neat example of software recursively shaping reality -- the theme of my latest Wired piece, From Junk Mail to Junk World.

Comments

[lilredbite.livejournal.com]

I like the last :)

[purveyorofchaos.livejournal.com]

The mental space our desktops inhabit are very particular. For many people they use pictures of were they would rather be, as if to tease themselves into reaching for it or getting lost in it on a long, boring workday.

Before I get wrapped up in rambling about people's desktops and their possible psychological motivations for choice of desktop background, I'll end this with the opinion that people's desktops inhabit greater mental space than hard drive space.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> For many people they use pictures of were they would rather be
My boss's desktop has a picture of a cemetary on the Isle of Man....

soundedit 16

[(Anonymous)]

Ah good to see Soundedit 16 on the desktop. Possibly one of the best soundediting apps ever made. Sadly though as it is classic you can't use it on intel anymore...except by using sheephaver in whcih it surprisnlgy works quite hapily.........
www.paouper.co.uk

Re: soundedit 16

[(Anonymous)]

that's psouper not paouper, though the latter sounds possibly more interesting?

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

i've just got a plain light-pink at the moment, but photos are nice sometimes too. i prefer photos of surfaces that it looks like your folders are scattered upon, medium close-ups of grass, cloth, wood and so on..

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

good boy. well done.

[urban-ospreys.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

Who cares what's on anyone's desktop? If you can't say something interesting, Momus, better not say anything at all. The relentless day-in day-out posting means too many posts like this.

[heinzbitte.livejournal.com]

Have you ever been to a forum? The post your desktop threads are usually pretty popular.


Momus, have you started to keep your desktop tidier over the years, or did it just happen to be like that when you took the screenshots?

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated, but someone sent me this (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ee7f11fc-cc75-11db-9339-000b5df10621,_i_email=y.html) recently, which I thought might interest you:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ee7f11fc-cc75-11db-9339-000b5df10621,_i_email=y.html

It's very broad and general, but still a pleasant read.

Also, I have recently discovered a great new (to me) artist called Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (http://www.lunerouge.org/spip/article.php3?id_article=195). Of course, he's not really new at all, being dead and everything, but I can't help wondering where he's been all my life. And I certainly wouldn't mind having him on my desktop. So to speak.

writers blop vs self promotion

[(Anonymous)]

A painter, and a very fine man that I once met in Venice, told me something about discipline. "It doesn't matter what you write or what you paint, important is to do it every day, because when it arives, you are there."

I should actually try to put this quote in a ten words phrase, then it would be a universal truth.

Any way, the image of the writer staring at a white piece of paper, in some occasions got replaced by a writer staring at his desktop.

And while you think what Baudrillard would have made out of that, you can listen to some radio:
http://www.testcard.org/Radio-on/radio_on.html

greetings from Berlin,

Rinus

Re: writers blop vs self promotion

[(Anonymous)]

Oh Rinus, you've done it again.

see-through desktop

[(Anonymous)]

i've always been a sucker for these:

tinyurl.com/2hwcpx

Re: see-through desktop

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, I've been expecting you, Mr Anon!

I was so sure someone would mention those things that I left them out, knowing this comment would come!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

[jainabee.livejournal.com]

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/12834647@N00/420193022/)

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

been to iraq?

[runawaytoday.livejournal.com]

yep, that lighting scheme IS great! it's like if eva hesse were an interior decorator!
man you were e-busy in 2000!

[dddario.livejournal.com]

The last two are awesome and pretty weird for desktops. I never had the idea of using pictures like that for desktop, i should try it.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I use my desktop background as a pin-up wall.


But then I seem to use everything as a pin-up wall. I´m such a 15-year-old.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

pictures, any damn pictures, on the desktop would be my equivalent to your 'hell is other people's music'.



many years ago i wrote a small cgi script that uploaded a snapshot of my desktop daily onto a website.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

I like that, though. It looks like a constellation.

I made four environments for my laptop, so that I could have different environments to suit my mood.

I have an art and design background, so I changed all of the icons and folders to images. It takes about three or four hours to do something like this:



The way I look at it, your computer is your home and it should look like one.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

I wonder if, provided that a radically new interface paradigm doesn't get really popular in the next fifty years, we will be able to chart our lives through desktop images and icons.

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Also, please tell 1999 Momus to recharge his iBook battery. It's dangerously low.

[4minutes33-2nds.livejournal.com]

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/27127561@N00/420500357/)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wait, don't tell me -- Nicholas de Stael?

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

(http://www.unibrows.com/images/compuware.jpg)

(http://www.unibrows.com/images/goodgrey.png)

[nightfire12020.livejournal.com]

(http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=backgroundhy2.jpg)

It's from a Japanese SRPG's Digital Illustration Artbook I got as a gift from a friend when she came back from Japan last year.

Invasive questions from some jerk you don't even know...

[autojosh.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy reading your blog. The level of the writing is so consistently high I feel almost as if I'm reading a magazine. I have a few questions if you get a sec:

1. Are you writing all this? I'm not trying to be rude, it just seems like a huge amount of output.
2. Are all the pieces written specifically for the blog?
3. How much time do you spend writing?

Again, I really enjoy your work, the quality of the writing and the coherency of thought is very high.

Cheers.

[ovidio.livejournal.com]

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ovidio/420483295/)

[mavi.livejournal.com]

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/mavi/421408612/)