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.

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..

Re: soundedit 16

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I like your installations! Especially the one with the birdsong and branches (http://www.psouper.co.uk/over.html).

Where can I get this emulation software of which you speak? Not being able to run SoundEdit 16 is perhaps my biggest disappointment with my new Intel iMac.

[urban-ospreys.livejournal.com]

Re: soundedit 16

[(Anonymous)]

http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/sheepshaver

[(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)]

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

[(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)

[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.

[heinzbitte.livejournal.com]

hahaha.

[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

[(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

Re: writers blop vs self promotion

[(Anonymous)]

Oh Rinus, you've done it again.

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?

[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....

[(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?

Re: writers blop vs self promotion

[(Anonymous)]

The desktop (with broadband) contains a Google-Wiki galaxy of 'knowledge capital' we can steal, appropriate or, hopefully, use for fuel. Creation as perpetual research, rather than a self-contained, authoritative voice. A butterfly in Borges' Library Of Babel.

Re: writers blop vs self promotion

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, Rinus. It IS important to produce work every day.

But it is also true in Chess strategy that, you should 'Always know your own intentions before your opponent forces you to reveal them.'

Momus doesn't need defending from 'anon's' criticism. It's a particular feature of 'blog' writing that the transition from dense subject to a light subject is highlighted by the medium. This week the transition is particularly noticable. Schizophrenic even!

I think what is interesting about this post is the way it relates to other posts this week and indeed the underlying 'game plan' of these transitions.

This is no way a criticism, infact THAT in itself is entertaining.

Quote:

One of Duchamp's great strengths as an artist is his ability to ask very basic, fundamental questions -- about the nature of art, ideas, sexuality, human relations -- with a conceptual rigor that allows these questions to remain both difficult and fundamental on all levels of analysis. Like the gamesmanship of a skilled chess player, Duchamp's art can be as basic or as difficult as its opponent, the viewer: it has the remarkable ability to rise to the occasion.