Wasting Time on the Internet (12 page)

Cornell spent an enormous amount of time drifting around the streets of Manhattan, where he would see his reflection in the glass of shop windows. Like social media, when we see ourselves reflected in a window display, we become entwined—literally overlaid—with what is being sold to us. Shop window displays invoke Renaissance scholar Leon Battista Alberti's dictate that the proportions of the spectator and the display figure should be nearly the same, creating a symbiosis between the consumer and the desired object. In 1435, Alberti wrote a treatise about perspective and painting called
De pictura
. In it, he positioned the human figure as the basis for the division of the canvas into proportional parts. He was among the first to imagine the canvas as being a transparent window on to the world—like a plate of glass—upon which an image could be literally traced, resulting in accurate representations of reality. In doing so, he theorized the idea of perspective: if the canvas was indeed a transparent glass or window, we could look into it toward a vanishing point far in the distance. For Alberti, the canvas/window was a twofold surface that was both opaque (canvas) and transparent (illusionistic).

Alberti's ideas percolated throughout Europe over the centuries. In the 1680s, for instance, when Versailles was built, the vertical casement window—which still reflected
Alberti's human proportion as a standard—was extensively employed, resulting in a national idiom called the French window. This type of window remained the standard in classical French architecture for the next 250 years until the early 1920s when Le Corbusier introduced the horizontal window, a concept that was widely attacked as being unpatriotic. Le Corbusier, of course, was part of modernism's thrust toward “flatness,” which reached its zenith in the 1950s when Clement Greenberg insisted that the surface of a painting was not a space of depiction for anything other than the act of painting itself. His hard-core anti-illusionism was exemplified by the abstract expressionists, for whom flatness was the gospel.

As consumer technology evolved, it also adopted an ethos of flatness. Similar to modernism, it strived to strip away vestiges of cumbersome apparatuses. When televisions first appeared, they were encased in wood, posing as pieces of furniture, an attempt to seamlessly integrate the cold, mechanical technology into cozy domestic environments. By the 1970s, led by the smart design of Sony's Trinitron, TV sets were freed from their furniture function, and like modernist painting, were able to become what they were, leading the way for today's floating flat screens and plasmas. Similarly, each subsequent release of smartphones and tablets is thinner. Yet contradictorily, there is a drive to render believably illusionistic depths of field on these flat surfaces: video games and virtual reality interfaces seek to literally move you through “worlds” in hyperdimensional detail.

It's been said that as interface design has progressed, it's grown more childlike with each passing iteration. The first computers were unquestionably made for adults. Their command lines required you to know how to read and how to type. But with the introduction of graphical user interfaces, operating systems migrated to large and overly simple iconic representations of complex phenomena—so simple that children could operate them. When interfaces were strictly linguistic, their languages tended to be logical, with a one-to-one correspondence between command and functionality: the “ls” command in Unix or “dir” in DOS listed your directories—and that's all it did. But once GUIs appeared, the visually expressed commands became interpretative and vague. Every icon set is drawn by a graphic artist and is therefore interpretative, with each operating system attempting to visually distinguish itself from the others: think of Windows' recycling bin as opposed to Mac's trash can. But neither is accurate: computer documents are neither permanently deleted nor recycled. In truth, they are partially overwritten.

The idea that the content of any medium is always another medium is expressed in the metaphor of the desktop. From the very beginning of GUIs—screen interfaces displaying icons and folders, etc. which mask the lines of code that actually run your computer—it's as if the entire contents of a mid-twentieth-century office had been dumped on your computer. There are stacks of “paper” you can click on, “notepads” you can write on, “folders” where you can store your “documents,” “calculators” that have “buttons” you can
“push.” To this day, I still edit my documents in the program “Office” while browsing web “pages.” (I often ask myself what exactly constitutes a web page. I still haven't found the answer.) The office DNA is so embedded in our computing operating systems that even our mobile devices, bereft of desktops, still bear its predigital iconography. On my iPhone, my Notes app depicts a square legal pad, my camera icon looks like a 1950s Nikon, my Mail app is a standard number 10 white envelope, and my Phone app shows an outline of a mid-twentieth-century telephone receiver.

Early graphical icons were flat, nondimensional representations. A folder—based on a classic manila folder—was a simply drawn outline of a tabbed folder. With successive iterations folders became dimensional, modeled with drop shadows. Later on, when you'd click on that 3-D folder, it would animate, literally opening itself up to show its paper contents before spinning off into a new window. (And now, on Apple products at least, everything's flattened back out again in the latest OS.) While these animations and heavy graphics slowed systems down, they also opened up the role of the interface and graphic designer to inject playful surrealist elements into the once-dry textual environment. It's hard to imagine an interface designer not wanting to reference Dalí's melting watches when creating desktop icons (even the clock icon on my iPhone is depicted by a clock with hands). The title of his famous painting
The Persistence of Memory
has echoes of RAM (temporary data, such as files that can be easily deleted, altered, or overwritten) and ROM (permanent data, such as your operating system, that can't be
easily deleted, altered, or overwritten), the foundation of our computers. About his painting Dalí wrote: “I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images I see appear upon my canvas. I register without choice and with all possible exactitude the dictates of my subconscious, my dreams.” Substitute the words “upon my canvas” for “in my browser,” and it becomes clear how surrealism and its ethos are hardwired into the very core of our computing experience.

Floating in the middle of my screen is a series of vertical blocky gray images, one atop another, on a jet-black background: a birdhouse with two holes in it, a bell that tilts to the right, an envelope that has the stem of a speech bubble protruding from its bottom-left corner, a series of three vertical dots next to a series of three vertical lines, a head without a neck, and a magnifying glass tilted to the left. All are the same size and all are rendered in the identical style. Like a rebus, I could assemble them into some sort of a narrative or simply enjoy their playful visuality, their randomness, their absurdity. They hang in the space of my screen the way a moon and stars poetically dangle in a Joan Miró painting or how vaguely abstract figures hauntingly populate a desolate Yves Tanguy landscape. But there's very little that's artistic or poetic about it; it's a description of the navigation bar on my Twitter app.

The icons in the dock that runs along the bottom of my
screen are equally surreal. If I turn on the magnification function and enlarge them, I'm surprised at what I find. Several times a day I use my Preview app to view PDFs and images.
*
As an icon no larger than a cufflink, nestled in my dock with all my other icons, I think of it as “the blue one with a few lines through it.” I click on it, it does its job, and I never think about it again. But if I scale it up, a bizarre and rather incomprehensible series of images reveals itself. The icon consists of two photographs printed on “paper” with a white border, each skewed, laid atop one another. The photo on the bottom appears to be a picture of an old yellow stone wall and the photo on top, the most prominent image, is of a child standing on a beach, framed by a crisp blue sky. As the waves crash behind him, he's got his hands clasped in what could be interpreted as a quasi-religious salutation, the kind of thing you always see the Dalai Lama doing. He's got a sort of beatific half smile and his hair, in cowlicks, is soaked as if he just got out of the water. He's clothed in a gray garment that is open at the chest, which could either be a raincoat (why would anyone wear a raincoat on the beach on a sunny day?) or a drenched gray karate
gi
(a gi is a strange choice for a beachwear). On top of the photos sits a magnifying loupe, the type used to examine
photographs or media spreads while editing them. It strikes me as odd that the imagery in this icon refers to dead media: printed photographs and a loupe. After all, Preview examines only digital imagery and if you wanted to zoom in on what you're looking at, you'd click a button, not gaze through a lens. A similar nostalgia permeates contemporary art as well. “Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology,” observes the art historian Claire Bishop. “The gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or 16-mm film reel . . . Today, film's soft warmth feels intimate compared with the cold, hard digital image, with its excess of visual information (each still contains far more detail than the human eye could ever need).”

While these Preview app images tell a certain story, they also refuse to tell a story, a textbook example of the nineteenth-century poet Comte de Lautréamont's definition of surrealistic absurdity: “a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” Like a Cornell box, they're
suggestive
: of place, ethos, nature, environment, corporate values, positivism, world peace, and religion, while deftly avoiding taking an explicit position on any one of them. The icon is
evocative
, not
narrative
; and its style of evocation is grounded in the disjunctive surrealist tradition. The icon gives two conflicting messages: functionality (it reads documents really well) and non sequitur (I can't figure out why these images represent a functional program). They're not really in conflict with one another—
they seem to work quite well together, if bizarrely—but it points to the fact that underlying the strict surface “logic” of our operating systems is a subconscious irrationality or sentimentality.

Your computer's ROM is the basement, attic, or toolshed of your computer, where stuff goes into deep storage. Cornell's house was one big hard drive, particularly his basement, where he stored his vast collection of ephemera, much of which went into making his boxes. Down in the basement was also where he kept dossiers stuffed with scads of flotsam and jetsam on various starlets like Greta Garbo and Hedy Lamarr, with whom he was obsessed. When he attended film premieres or spent evenings at the ballet, he'd return home to his basement media collection to pore over his archived images of the stars he'd seen, ultimately incorporating their images into his boxes.

Joseph Cornell was the ultimate fanboy. In the mid-1950s, for instance, Cornell became obsessed with Allegra Kent, a gorgeous young ballerina he had read about in
Newsweek
. Finally, he got the courage up to meet her by writing and asking her to appear in one of his films. She agreed to see him at her home in Manhattan, but the meeting didn't go well. “He was terribly thin, a strange, gaunt, intense-looking creature,” Kent recalled. “I noticed his hands which
were discolored from perhaps shellac or varnish. I immediately sensed that he really liked me, which was a little scary. Fans can be crazy. You don't know what to expect from a fan.” On the spot, Kent told him that she wasn't interested in appearing in his film and sent him on his way.

Cornell's crushes remind me of Internet fanboy culture, in particular, of Harry Knowles, the founder of the influential website Ain't It Cool News, a vast repository of geek culture, comics, as well as information on sci-fi, fantasy, horror and action movies and TV shows. Like Cornell, Knowles built his site from his bedroom, where in 1994 he started posting to newsgroups, swapping rumors about upcoming films. He ended up writing film reviews on the newsgroups, which formed the basis for his website, which he launched in 1996. Quickly, the site drew hundreds of collaborators, many of whom leaked scandalous insider information about Hollywood—rumors, secret film scripts, advance screening reviews—much to the chagrin of the Hollywood studios, who up until that time were able to keep a tight rein on the publicity surrounding films before they were released.