Desktop is - The right for a desktop

Exhibition review by Shirley Shor, 1998

Images from Desktop Is exhibition

‘Desktop is’ ( www.easylife.org/desktop ) was the first on-line exhibition that showcased desktops. The exhibit theme and the presented images wer captivating and worth browsing. Each desktop relates to a specific person who owns it. It reflects his/her habits, daily needs, passions and preferences. Sometimes it turns out that the Desktop is the one that chooses/produces its user.

A profile of a desktop

Desktop is… “The primary metaphor for the Macintosh interface. It appears to be a surface on which people can keep tools and documents. Several other metaphors are integrated into the desktop metaphor. It makes sense in the context of a desktop environment to include folders and a trash can (even though most trash cans don't sit on the desktop). Menus are an extension of the desktop metaphor. People can connect the idea of making choices from a computer menu with making choices from a restaurant menu. Although people don't keep restaurant menus on the edge of their desks, using the term menu in the computer environment reinforces the idea that people can use computer menus to make choices. “ Cited from “Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines”, Apple Computer, 1995. 

The desktop operates as a common framework/green-house for managing daily activities (since it hosts the phone book, notebook and the Calendar) and game-like operating system personalization (since it allows the user to choose desktop cover color, select desktop icons, and set its idle time appearance - its screen saver).

These parallel layers of meaning (the life layer and the game layer) are realized in a visual and a conceptual dialectical manner. This realization happens when these layers are superimposed together on the same surface while being separated from each other by their presentation-window frame. It is no coincidence that the Windows 98 operating system marketing slogan is “Works better, plays better”. The personalized organization of the desktop elements (such as icons, windows, task bars and short-cuts items) establishes a new kind of information and a new relational information system.

Desktops also establish a new kind of individual.

Desktop is the private territory in which every individual can exercise his selections, decide which applications or documents will populate it and decide in which frameworks he/she desires to work or play. Desktop is the main method in making the Personal Computer personal. Desktop is the place where only one window can be active. The active window determines where the user is and what exactly he/she is capable of doing. It sets our frame of mind on a specific virtual context. In this manner, desktop is a virtual optical lens that focuses, and determines our virtual vision. Desktop is the is the visual playing field in which multiple software processes can execute in a parallel manner; each in its own bordered visual frame. In this playing field the user is free to experiment, change and redefine contexts/windows. The Be Operating System (www.be.com ) which was bought by Apple Computer and adapted to the Macintosh platform, included a design feature that allowed the user to create several independent desktops. The user can select to show one desktop while hiding all others. The Windows family of operating systems allows for some degree of customization of its desktops based on the current logged-on user. This multiplicity of desktops on one computer hardware somehow reflects on the user’s freedom of choice within the system. Desktop is a special kind of software. As such, Desktop is an implementation of a technical design specification that attempts to capture future desktop users “Use Cases”. This specification is almost always written for a specific kind of operating system and is partly limited by its previous implementations/versions. In this sense, the desktop is currently enslaved of the operating system.

Desktop is a bad habit  

Desktop is also something which computer users are getting used to. Once one is getting used to the specifics of a certain desktop, it is hard for him/her to consider or to use any alternative as the case is with other bad habits. The nature and one of the primal design principles of the desktop graphical user interface is that with usage, the user internalize the common operations and acts in a more or less intuitive mode of operation. This is why software is always marketed as intuitive. Since desktop is a slave to the operating system, we enslave ourselves to the system when we internalize it. Desktop is becoming universal and more accessible since 90% of PCs share the same kind of desktop and since PC usage is steadily increasing, but this also means that we are more limited in our freedom to select other kinds of desktops. The Desktop is interesting as a cultural focal point since it’s a basic universal uncopyrightable metaphor of the western civilization. So decided the court in response to Apple’s claims of breach of copyright by Microsoft’s Windows system. Desktop is located on the learning curve of any person who tries to master the personal computer. One can not operate these machines without mastering their desktop. Desktop is becoming the main portal to the virtual social web. The battle on the control of the desktop is in many senses the battle on the future of the online world.

Iconography of desktops

Desktop preceded the personal computer: The history of the Desktop began to be written/unfold with the need to explore/browse the information world. This happened long before the personal computer phenomena. The practice of Navigation in a real or a virtual three-dimensional architectural space for the purpose of information archival and retrieval appeared already in the classical culture as an accessory; as a practice of rhetoric and of memory. The sophist understood that linkage to specific locations in a spatial mental image could help in memorization of long speeches. While speaking, he/she enters the virtual memorized “Palace of the soul” and navigates from room to room while performing a mental linkage between the rooms’ objects and sought after knowledge. This visual or audible object/icon is more than a jumping point to knowledge – It also allocates a virtual location for information.

In his book Being Digital, Nicolas Negroponte dedicates a chapter to the iconography of the desktop through two important projects that deal with the development of the spatial data management system. The first, which is dated back to 1976, is a computer generated animation concept movie titled “Dar-El-Mar”. This project was produced for the cybernetic department of DARPA. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – www.darpa.mil ). The movie exposes an imagined desert city from the viewpoint of a plane pilot. The pilot circles, dives and climbs the skies above the city. He/She maneuvers through the city’s streets and high-rises. Based on the assumption that you are in the pilot seat and that you previously stored information in the virtual buildings; all you have to do to retrieve this information is to fly the city to the location of the stored information – A tour of a information world. It is not difficult to see the similarities between the computerized city of the late 20th century and the sophist’s “palace of the soul”.

The second project Negroponte writes about in known as “Dataland” – An information world that is presented to its users through a sofa like interface. The user sits in front of a huge screen that stretches from ceiling to the floor. The user is capable to fly-through data that’s projected on the screen/desktop. “Dataland” is made of a two dimensional landscape which is composed of a collection of small images or icons. Each image relates to a function or to information. Dataland gave birth to the first desktop. By the end of 1997, IBM estimated that 300 millions desktop exists worldwide.

Desktop is – the exhibition, contains desktops with familiar icons that live on most of our desktops. Besides that its desktops contain diverse media – Video, Sound, 3D art, etc… This multimedia presentation enriches the exhibition’s otherwise mostly graphical nature. The exhibit also, as most other interesting web sites exposes us to meaningful links to other related web sites. Interesting questions come into being when the desktop (The local playground) is uploaded to the net (The global playground) and presented for public view. In the web, the desktop metaphor expends by the fact that desktops are now linked to other desktops. While once isolated desktops existed, We are now faced with a web of inter-related desktops. This relation, as nay relation, gives birth to new information. The exhibition is an invitation to peek into private worlds; to peek, not through keyholes but rather through the Internet’s optical fibers constructs. The desktop becomes to a form of a virtual calling/business card that reveals various fields of interest that the Artist (or his/her desktop) click to. Beyond the graphical design aspects of the exhibition’s desktops, the exhibition provides us a chance to think the desktop as a communicational/artistic medium that is a focal subset of our somewhat vague concept of ‘digital media’ or ‘digital art’. By this it legitimize the existence of other artistic digital mediums such as phone (phone art), fax (fax art), chat (chat art), e-mail (e-mail art) and ASCII (ASCII art). The exhibition hints on a new technological evolutionary phase which is under development today by leading software companies – The desktop becomes active in our decision making process. The active desktop evolutionary phase reflects our sociological/cultural desire for communication, information exchange and reception of real-time updates. The future desktop will operate as the container for the virtual social web. It will be the place where avatars (Representations of human/non-human cognitive entities) perform social activities through the net. We will be able to host other guests on our personal desktops. Reports in leading technology magazines (such as Byte Magazine June 98 Issue’s Cover Story) on the upcoming Windows NT 5 system, indicate that in the future, some of us will download our desktop from a central network or web server. This means that we would be able to ‘log-on’ to our desktop from any PC – At work, home and from coffee-shop internet stations. This also makes easy for others to share our desktop with us.

Since the desktop is the most accessible visual place on our PC displays, corporations already started fighting for a place on its limited virtual space – a fight for our attention span. They will try to convince us to receive continuously updated information straight to our desktops through their own channels of bits distributions. This information will have great affect on our on-line browsing, entertainment and shopping habits. The future desktop concept blends the TV, the Browser, the Application and Document metaphors. That’s why it is crucial for our understanding of technology and digital art. The future desktop technical capabilities allow it to perform as the container for digital content. The content is imaged inside it. By this the desktop includes and wraps our classical notion of the artistic ‘Canvas’. The desktop will be one of the primary places where digital art happens in the 21st century.

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  From: Alexei Shulgin (desktop@easylife.org)

Sent: 10.20.97

To: list@rhizome.org 

Subject: DESKTOP IS