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

A Knight On The Rim Is Dim

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, the viewer as an 'opponent'. Could this be the difference between 21st century art and Duchamp's century? Why test, why joust 'knowledge capital' at perceived critics, why fight perceptions of what a gallery space is for, why not just have fun with friends? Game theory turns opponent into a part of the game, it levels. How do we know this post isn't game theory at its finest? A brilliant piece of adaptive dynamics - by working on one level, it works on any. Checkmate!

I really am bored today...

[(Anonymous)]

Why?

Because I want to be something more than just a consumer. Art curators often by default view their audiences as passive.

Duchamp acknowledges his audience with a strange mix of provocation and disregard, like a chess player.

Which engages the audience and makes them respond in strange unpredictable ways. Which is what I really like about art. The reaction of the audience. I mean it's just a urinal at the end of the day.

Your right - it would be conceptual genius at its finest but I think it might be the product of a 'down' day.

He could always do Malcolm Mclaren, and claim it was intention all along.

Oddly, enough Momus would kind of fit into the point between Malcolm Mclaren and Duchamp. Which isn't a bad place to be...

Re: I really am bored today...

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

what do you make of pointillism, rasta?

Re: I really am bored today...

[(Anonymous)]

I don't see the point.

What do we give a blush out of 10?

[(Anonymous)]

Duchamp paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling asking "Call that art?" Provocation works when something that shouldn't be elevated is elevated, hierarchical. If we look for provocation - academia, state, the church or the market - we find it. It's here to stay! Although, take away the expectation, third parties and Goliaths, take away the place, post-provocation might be interesting. The meaning in which something is given rises to the top. Will a rich and vulnerable Banksy stress his 'street' attitude, mainstream out or simply have fun with shame? Why does Patti Smith worry one dot we'll object her accepting entry into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame? These things are piss and dust, nothing important (maybe Duchamp's point..) A voice is immeasurable, what do you give a blush out of ten..