What's on your desktop?
Mar. 13th, 2007 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
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Date: 2007-03-13 07:11 pm (UTC)