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

[(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?

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever been to a forum?

My point exactly - yawn.

[(Anonymous)]

Yawn, exactly.

Be thankful, it's one of his 'inclusive' posts. Momus the merciful.
Can we still download it even if we are in London?

(only joking)

I love the quick transition of subjects. You never have to explain your ideas too deeply, which is sometimes why they look a little prejudice.

But this often highlights your 'game plan' more than the subjects. Which is infinitely more interesting!!!

This time however the transition was too harsh. Or am I going to have to talk about desktop all day??? (you nicked this idea off Design Observer anyhoe)

Out of smack?

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Wow, Click Opera has an anonymous heckler. One that cares so much about CO that s/he posts several times in a row to make her point!

Desktops are fascinating to some of us so go find other ways to pass the time till your dope dealer's back in town. Maybe get a puppy, put it in a bag, and beat it to death.

Second thoughts

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

On reread, Heckler doesn't seem so bad. Heckler is probably a secret Momus admirer. Maybe we can listen to H's comments and not get defensive.

sorry about the puppy remark

Re: Out of smack?

[(Anonymous)]

THAT sir is the desktop of a mad man!

:-)

[heinzbitte.livejournal.com]

hahaha.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This time however the transition was too harsh. Or am I going to have to talk about desktop all day??? (you nicked this idea off Design Observer anyhoe)

Has Design Observer covered this recently? Must check their site. In fact, this used to come up regularly on I Love Everything, when I used to hang around there. There are probably more of my desktops on that thread, if anyone can be bothered to Google it. And possibly more interesting ones than on the Flickr pool, too.

I wouldn't be too quick, if I were you, to say that the transitions are too quick and harsh. Is a thread about computer desktops really so different from a thread about teahouse architecture? What interests me is the continuity, often unexpected. For instance, the way a theme like the Hegelian dialectic can bubble under threads on ostensibly very different subjects, yet relate them to each other. I'm too ideological and connected a beast to be scattershot, you know!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Just to point up the continuities a bit more clearly: Fujimori's huts and teahouses yesterday were seen as part of "the post-bit atom", fake folk simulations dialectically related to the digital revoltion (which Fujimore, of course, explicitly condemns). Today we wonder what it means to turn our digital space into something that looks like a room in meatspace. We also link to an article in Wired News about how marketing software like Mosaic "recursively" (in other words, dialectically) shapes the real world. That was also Friday's theme here at Click Opera, where we talked about property. Saturday's theme was the error of saying different cultures are living at different historical moments. Sunday's was Baudrillard.

I think it's pretty clear that common themes run through all these pieces. How do the real and virtual worlds produce each other, just as postmodernism and Islamism produce each other? Baudrillard's interest in simulation is clearly relevant to simulating a desktop and a room, and making an onscreen environment is clearly related to making an onscreen one.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

onscreen offscreen

[(Anonymous)]

You have an answer for everything!

OK. The old 'desktop-computer-real-world-metaphor' is a bit old hat and you didn't give it enough of a shiny new spin for my tastes but since you mention Baudrillard who is a personal hero, I don't mind.

Since I don't mind asking a dumb question (which is really masquerading as a bigger one - in relation to the Curtis / Laing stuff)

What's is your game plan? Why DO you write a blog everyday?

[(Anonymous)]

You're fifteen aren't you? Sixteen, tops. It's the spite and urge to lash out that gives it away.

My suggestion, for when you're a little older, is to try not to worry about whether Momus is saying anything interesting, try to say something interesting yourself. Either that or get a girlfriend/boyfriend.

JS

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Whoo desktop rage. Click Opera rage.
I am back to watching this Memories of Berlin film.
Louise Brooks. Mmmm

[(Anonymous)]

Capital idea.

First rule of Click Opera. Don't talk about Click Opera.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah no, not rage at all really. I just get so bored with these daily anonymous snide comments. Nothing useful to add, so why add it?

To track down each daily post and then to feel the need to vent one's spleen strikes me as deeply adolescent. If Momus is, as anonymous says, so boring then why read him? Do something else. Most articles in daily newspapers are pretty boring, but I bet he/she doesn't write a daily letter to the editor about it.

And as for Louis Brooks, I'm in full agreement with Mmmm.

My own venting done I shall retire to put my toys back in the pram.

JS

[(Anonymous)]

Come now, "what's on your desktop" is a boring meme from every crappy forum ever. That's not to say that Momus is boring in general, but he evidently feels the need to post every day come what may, even when he has to resort to recycling something that's been done to death a million times elsewhere.

Momus, here's a post topic I'd like to hear you on: You're in your late 40s and therefore a good two decades older than me and, I'm guessing, your average readership. So what's it like being that age? I have no idea. In what ways is it better than being 27 and in what ways worse? Has the age bought wisdom or not? Does age bring contentment? Does being closer to old age and death frighten you? Is it harder to feel excited about things? Do you feel developed rather than developing? Are you worried about turning 50?

[(Anonymous)]

Why are you scared of desktops? They obviously touched a nerve.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, here's a post topic I'd like to hear you on

Now this I can really get behind. Excellent suggestions all. And valid observations too. But I think you're making my point for me. I'm not interested in blanket approval, but criticism of the 'boring Momus' type with nothing to put in its place goes nowhere.

JS

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Are you worried about turning 50?

Are you worried about turning 28? Are you worried about getting hit by a streetcar? Are you worried about getting your dick caught in your zipper?

So many topics. So few blogs.

[(Anonymous)]

Anon. is playing with the "infinite regress" of interrelation and interplay between these two types of commodified entities, the "object-as-subject" and the "subject-as-object."

I'm not sure what that actually means, I just wanted to sound clever, before I get back to my desk job.

I miss that Whimsey character for a change.

He would say something charming and we would all laugh. Outrageous!

Good times.

1960 was a banner year

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< You're in your late 40s and therefore a good two decades older than me and, I'm guessing, your average readership. So what's it like being that age? I have no idea. In what ways is it better than being 27 >>

1. You begin to lose your teeth. You actually sometimes don't eat something because it's too much trouble

2. All those drugs you did in your twenties when you thought you were untouchable come back to haunt in subtle ways. You get peripheral neuropathy from drinking so much and walk with a cane for six months.

3. Ulcers.

4. You begin to understand conservatism because you see how so many times you and your associates have tried to make change. And it has failed (usually). So you don't dislike change, you just know that the chances the change will be positive, or will occur at all, are not as high as you once thought. The younger ones don't understand this because they are still brash and invincible.

5. Despite the gradual failure of your body, you wouldn't go back, because you like having wisdom and experience.

6. You wonder if you will be around for the 2045 Singularity. Would really like to make it.

Re: 1960 was a banner year

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, Harriet's honesty is disarming! Maybe I'll do this topic tomorrow. It needs more space than a mere comment supplies. It's an interesting theme, though.

hospitality!

[poncif.livejournal.com]

daily anonymous snide comments are the price of opening your space to strangers. (just to further underline the continuity post to post....)

XXX Busty Go-Go Vixens Dancing On Tanks!!! Click Here!!! XXX

[(Anonymous)]

Possible twists for 'who cares'-ers: if desktops are a depiction of where your head is, what do Momus's say about him? But also, like anything that could 'say something' about an individual - isn't there a battle between the real them and how they'd wish to be perceived? Isn't the end result a kind of aftermath of this 'synthesis', self/mirror, ego/conscience? Is he just hiding his collection of go-go poppets with rocket grenade launchers?