Pieces of Coffeen layed out as a screen. A screen of seeing which is not my own, but it has now become my own. I am seeing layers of thoughts and processes running through the seeing of Coffeen.
Perhaps like the thick brushstrokes of a painter, here I am perceiving thick strokes of windows, links, internet spaces, files and folders. Merged into layers of a seeing, they provoke new thoughts in me...
I suddenly conceive of Gutterriez as a folder, with subfolders as well. And the photoshop photoshopping itself is both startling as well as a perfect frame.
Like a visual lecture, but instead of words flowing through the voice of the professor, I slice through the flow itself, cutting into the seeing of his seeing.
Multiple multiplicity of identities live in this image: the teacher, the creator, the writer, the father, the consultant, the complainer, the consumer, and many more. The intertwining of work and pleasure with layers upon layers, windows upon windows, frames upon frames of openings into the life that is this image. The complexities of the day to day (such as searching for a portable infrared heater) meet longer activities (such as creating campaigns for Neosporin) and throws them together into a hot pot of mush. All is available at once and can be accessed at once. This is the age of instant gratification displayed in the image for all to see. Here, the boundaries of the professional life and the private life are not clearly distinct. Files of Felix's art and Facebook can live alongside articles written for work. So many things can be done at once and at the same time. Pleasure and work become blended together.
Because this picture is on a blog, it is already enmeshed in and guided by a certain type of seeing: desktop seeing. No window is privileged because of the cluttered nature of desktop seeing. Even the image itself, as a window on the viewer's computer screen, loses its privilege to anything else that may inhabit the viewer's particular desktop. And yet, just because it is not particularly privileged does not make it unimportant. On the contrary, the image complicates the viewer's world by confusing the image with so-called reality. How easy would it be to mistake the image's clock for a real clock, especially if you are viewing the image from a Macintosh computer? Would it not be understandable to try to open the Rhet140_F_08 folder? I didn't know my computer had Photoshop installed! Clearly, I am viewing this image from a Macintosh computer; of course, this image would be very different on a Windows OS or Linux, and even more different as a printed image or as a projection on a screen. Is the fact that this image is very dependent on its medium unique to this image? I think not. Perhaps this image simply points out a certain characteristic of imagery. Or, more interestingly, perhaps this image complicates imagery by creating a new characteristic for it.
His desktop on my desktop points out the vastly different ways a desktop can go. In the tiny squares of his grey frame some things lie dormant while the rest of his now is burgeoning with the data he provides. The life of the individual who provides the window through which the viewer looks is invisible in the frames that inhabit, fragment, focus, distort, categorize, and connect the data that comprise his life. The icons foreign and familiar, textual tabs, photo links, work, notes, research, all testimonies to the hypocrisy of the freedom of thought or creativity contained in boxes, within boxes, proclaiming themselves windows onto a world that indexes, classifies, and sorts us. The data forming the picture is presented; windows did not open themselves up for display nor did they select which files would be opened and which remain outside of the viewer’s purview. False promises of information show the viewer nothing but the cold technological arrangement of a prolific mind.
The private seeing of a personal laptop is now released to the public. Anyone who wants to can find this image and see how this person sees: in an intricate, multi-layered, multi-tasking manner where everything and anything goes and goes at the same time. The tease of this image is that it is just an image. The viewer can't go further than what he sees. He can't click on the links or tabs. The image's setting on a computer screen begs for such clicking, but the viewer is limited by the image. Yet, the image gives so much. A little bit of everything. A whole life splayed onto a screen.
ah, the potential for an infinite regress! This image is conceptual, to use our new method of commentary beyond affect. One could read this as the endless commentary on commentary on commentary on any text or more specifically a text that is an emblem of “the digital age”.Another familiar comment would be to address the self-fashioning of “postmodern identity” (photoshopped, blogged, created selves that break with the "real identities" of their authors), an annoyingly obvious interpretation. We are no longer authentic?! As if we ever were in the reified sentimental sense.Another old the idea that we can appropriate for these purposes but in the contemporary context is the idea of a blog within a blog, a self referential, mirrored entity reflected through a distorted prism that could be echoed forever. This is a literary interpretation since I have no new ideas that will break such a tenacious habit! These texts within texts, images within images, monads in monads, (here is the twist) all invite the participation in the imaging (my way of teaching an old dog a new trick, or a one trick pony a half trick?). My blog post adds to the blogging blog-image. But my question is, so what?! What have we learned once we turn the camera onto itself, what does the involution do? What are the effects, (how can we talk about this without being repetitive, falling flat into a ditch of cliches?!). I am growing unsatisfied with pointing out the fact that things fold into each other, and saying that it is complicated. And to the interpretation that this image is "a [human?, Daniel’s?] life" before our very eyes seems a little ridiculous at this stage in the game. I mean yes, our "lives" are on our computers in a metaphorical sense. But can’t we be more specific, since we are not literally living in the matrix of our macbooks? We are flesh and blood as well as some other substances. An aspect of our lives is on the web... it is certainly not a whole life, (yet?). Oh the banality of the blog image, the desktop, the blogpost these days. These objects/images are things we fiddle with when we are bored or required or interested in doing so. They are part of our being like our toothbrush is. We take them up, touch them, possibly invest more emotions or concentration into them, but what makes them fundamentally different, if anything? Why aren’t we getting all worked up over our metaphysical relations with our toothbrushes?!
A screen shot of Coffeen's desktop? Interesting...
This is an image of Coffeen himself. Sure, the medium is his desktop but the organization and what is on it represent him like a mirror represents what is in front of it.
I wonder how he chose to organize these windows and what lies just behind them. Did he open them before taking this screen shot in order to hide something back there? Or perhaps they are open to highlight something about himself that he would like us to notice?
I see a sample of his facebook friends, a clip of this class blog, and what looks like a color pallet on the right. I see that he is a Mac user, which by itself makes him a bad person, but this is not a time to judge Coffeen. It's a time to judge the image for what it is, not what it may represent.
This image, taken as an image and not a representation of Coffeen, however, is cluttered, colorful, and deceptive. I say deceptive because I cannot help but wonder what is behind each open window.
A foreign desktop framed by my desktop becomes... My desktop? The conglomeration of images are, "a visual symphony of choruses, each distinct, each singing in its own register". The navigator is perched above and afore the collage of windows below it, teasingly offering some sense of orientation while the windows wrestle each other and time, each vying for the operator's attention. These images are unlike the previous images that we have examined: They are portals, and touching them makes predictable operations happen. The comportment that relates to each is different, and the desktop is reflective of the complexity of the operator's experience.
The moment I try to click on something and drag it away so I can see what’s behind the layer, the whole image refuses (in more ways than one!?!?!). It shrouds itself in a green ice blanket, and I have to return to the border to reclick and orient my position; only when I return to the border does the green ice melt away. So its untouchable for a self-orienting viewer. That layer of this image is a discovery of rules involved (turned within). Not rules but guidelines. The background layer is definitely locked, but the history of picture 2 is open, which is cool.
Guidelines: Color is a layer serving as a meeting point. Hiding the bounding box makes game of hide and seek. What skill is absolutely important for a seeker, or explorer? Hiding the auto select layer only makes sense, because… Portable infrared heaters sound really cool, err, hot, err worth searching? I don’t know what in the world a portable heater is?! What else might be worth searching? Folders have a unique action. “Synthesizers…from the…center stage… would start in… the center an… pulse outward… to the ends.” The seeing seeing frame takes up a bunch (more than a bunch? The bunch is fragmented?) of the page.
So many things are folded into this image it is incredible. Scattered throughout the image are numerous different instructions on how to read the image. The color tab suggests a reading of the image in which the various patches of color in the image hold prominence over the symbolic significance of words. The navigator box appears to privilege a certain part of the image as if it were not a part of the image. The red frame in the navigator box focuses on a certain portion of the image as the viewer must focus on certain parts of the image at different times, unable to fully take in and process all aspects of the image at once. The box on the desktop labeled layers points towards a reading of the image that concentrates on the overlapping of images within the image. The box labeled “history” even points to a narrative evolution of the image, in which the clutter on the desktop accumulated with the passing of time and the opening of more and more documents and browser windows. Everything needed to read this image is openly displayed within the image. It makes it easy for the viewer to read; all he needs to do is pick one of the methods the image suggests.
this image imagines and inaugurates ways of organizing the world: with folders, with lists, with words, with symbols. alphabetized or not. with popping tangerine hues. with anonymous shapes floating and jamming into others, grazing and departing. with big screens and littler screens and itty bitty screens, repetitions of each other, born of each other, yet impossibly existing within each other. thumbnails and swatches lose a duty and gain a force in inhabiting their perfect hollow in the atmosphere. greys and lines and texts and over-flows assemble exactly as is on thursday at 7:39 pm: a spontaneous, fated, and sublime explosion of organization.
In seeing Professor Coffeen's desktop freeze framed, we not only see a particular moment of seeing that he saw on his computer screen, but we literally see the "seeing seeing" blog on our seeing seeing blog. In the context of our blog, the image is self-referential.
We see tabs: "navigator," "history" and "layers" and behind the tabs we see a kind of navigation, we glimpse a bit of the history of this computer-user, and we see this all among layers upon layers. The image itself literally is a conspiracy of whimsy: it's insane and complicated and colorful and hilarious but infinitely unfinished--there are facebook notifications to be read! files to be opened! windows to be closed! and essays to be printed! There's portable infrared heaters to be researched and bought. There are blog comments to read and folders to organize. The image is also highly stylized; some things we can see for a reason. It is an once spontaneous and contrived, accidental and purposeful. It demonstrates the amount of specific character a lifeless computer can radiate.
The image can perplex the viewer at first; the desktop is traditionally a means of navigation, a way to open up different possibilities. The viewer can make certain selections and use that to bring forth different images, texts, etc. Images, by contrast, are often thought of as static, as being composed of particular, unyielding sets of images. However, just as a desktop can be navigated, so too can images be explored. The viewer, in looking at an image, chooses to elicit certain possibilities, and perhaps not others, privileging certain aspects of it. Hence, the image of the desktop can be taken up in a different ways, just as a desktop can.
What can you really learn from an image? Is this an image of Professor Coffeen? While this desktop image seems to reveal the work (and possible life) of a man, it is only an image, and separated from that man, it is an image of itself not of him. The image is multilayered, no one layer taking precedence over another. Parts of it are visible while parts of it are not. Countless frames, a desktop as a giant frame. These frames offer no real focus and thus no real central understanding of what is going on. All the viewer gets is tid-bits—no narrative is offered, yet no narrative is rejected. The viewer can make sense of this photo, yet is not told how to do so. By choosing to focus on a different layer and a different frame a different narrative can be achieved. The narrative exists within the imagination of the viewer and within the multiple interpretive capacities offered up by the image.
The image pushes the viewer away, both with its extreme lack of a central theme and with a sense of inappropriateness. Seemingly unrelated windows and pieces of images collide and overlap. They vie for attention. There is no center to the image, and seemingly nothing tying them together. There are images within images, each framed within their own window. Within the windows or images are more images that make up those images. The titles of the windows are a descriptive title of the contents within the window, but the title itself is merely an image within a title bar that is also an image within a larger image. The viewer is immediately disoriented and uncertain of where to start to look. Beneath the collision of infinitesimal images and images of images lies a sense of intrusion into the privacy of another person. The image is reflective of the activities and preferences of its creator, but provides a more direct view into the persona of the creator than merely an artistic creation of the creator. The image is a snapshot of the creator's activities and a snapshot of his life. The sense of unease at the inappropriateness of intruding into someone's life furthers the image's power of pushing the viewer away.
There is a sense in which this desktop image is more desktop than Cezanne’s apple is apple, but this cannot be true; Cezanne never intended to actually put his apple in the fruit bowl with other apples. There is a sense in which the desktop image requires the push and pull of mediated fingers to be a desktop. I view this desktop on my desktop and discover that the fullness of the desktop image requires its functionality. I’m confronted by the fact that layers of text and information are haptic concepts, notwithstanding the mediation, with a particular give. But what do I mean by mediation? Is the skin not of the avocado? There is a particular suppleness to the digital dimples that allow the instant privileging of one arbitrary vessel of information over another. (A certain scrolliness to digital text, a certain friction on the surfaces of digital photos). Absent this suppleness, the desktop image is less than desktop image. This desktop image is, perhaps, one way in which desktop images can go, but only because I view it on a desktop, where the dimples are supple and I am in control.
This image is not just a screen shot of Coffeen's Mac, it is the site and sight of image-making. This image transports the viewer to the moment of its conception: 7:39 on Thursday night. Intermixed with Coffeen's facebook profile, "A Conspiracy of Whimsy", and this blog are the Photoshop tools used in the creation of this image. The process of image-making exists within the image itself. This image creates itself at the moment of it being seen: this is seeing creating.
I did not know that an image (or images?) could go that way. There is nothing to center on. On the contrary, there is too much to center on. The image is becoming. Too many thoughts consist in these images, which present the viewer with an emerging form of being and becoming. The banality of this image completely counters itself because it presents the simple as “too much.”
One snapshot of a desktop opens layers upon layers upon layers of images. This image is sensory overload as a proliferation of images expound within this one frame: multiple tabs are open within one internet browser, another browser on Facebook, a window containing the local disks, some folders, Photoshop is open and running, along with an essay entitled "A Conspiracy of Whimsy." Does this title explain the essay or does it explain this image with its multiplicity of layers. All these layers of images are always already happening and yet it is just happening right before my eyes as I view it.
This one fleeting moment, now an image, an event of so many happenings. So many frames, so many sites of seeing, so many things that are seeing, so many things to see. I see what Coffeen saw on his computer screen for this one moment on Thursday, 7:39 PM. I see the world from his perspective, and I don’t see the world from his perspective. I see the same things differently since I am my own seeing, and he his.
All these separate, minimize-able, click-and-drag-able, closeable windows on the desktop are flattened out when they become a singular image in Photoshop—one background layer, one image. And there is another flattening, another perspective of seeing, with the screenshot of the screenshot of the desktop within the Photoshop frame. But this flattening, however, is not a suppression or suffocation of these various frames. Quite the contrary! This image has so much depth: seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing, on and on and on.
I'm seeing what Coffeen is seeing after it's already been cut up and then uploaded to another place, copied yet again for me on the blog.
An infinite type of seeing a reproduction far from the original. It is full but also lacking.
A type of voyeurism is attached with this privilege of seeing and gives a type of scopophilic eroticism knowing what Coffeen looks at while sitting alone at his computer...
The image is a clutter of boxes, excessive amounts of visual information cascade over the frame. Here we see the limits of the visual conceptual space offered by the computer. These boxes designate the areas /spaces for information. But the space is limited and for that reason the boxes give into one another by overlapping. When that happens it forces concept on top of concept, words are cut and finished by different boxes. The structure meant to designate and isolate fails under the limit of space.
the desktop as an image, an argument for it's existence as an image. It's in photoshop, ready to be cut, rearranged and re-composed to something new.
(I have the strangest urge to use the photoshop buttons)
It's interesting, that it's not that I can't interact with this piece the way I can with a desktop, (these window's are fixed, I can't actually use the icons), but instead, I can interact with it on a more affective level.
Here is something I usually rearrange standing still, arranging me.
*also, it's locked in as background, but really, this whole image is foreground to me. A busy, hectic multiplicity of a foreground
At first, this image seems to capture the whole computer screen. But then, the image of the photoshop breaks the line of capturing and creating. It is no longer capturing and copying but it is a repetition of the image being reformed and reshaped. Each windows and text seems to be placed randomly but with closer readings they are carefully placed to take up the new shape. Each image is identifiable. Yet, each image along with all the other images recovers and recreate. It doesn’t resemble anything.
In this desktop image its functionality becomes performative because it will not perform. Merleau-Ponty contrasts Cezanne's seeing with that of ordinary folks: "We live in the midst of man-made objects... and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use" (16). Cezanne "suspends these habits of thought" by painting a seeing that is conspicuously strange, but Coffeen and his computer seem to suspend habit in the opposite way. The desktop does not look strange; it looks rather familiar. Of course, Coffeen's desktop is much different from my own, but it's undeniable that it almost looks like it could be used like anything else in the frame of my computer--and that is what makes it seems strange. It looks familiar until one realizes it cannot be touched in the same way. The image which is commonly understood to be functionally performative in its responsiveness to human interaction becomes aesthetically performative in its lack of such.
In this use of palpable vison perhaps it is not so unlike Cezanne's painting after all, but instead of presenting an odd (yet supposedly common to all--primordial) haptic vision of the painter's, we are confronted with the conspicuous lack of a thoroughly familiar haptic vision of our own.
There are two areas that I see as “most-framed,” and in that sense, as having particular structural importance to the overall image. They are balanced in the top right and top left corners of the image.
On the right, the mini-window within Photoshop with the tab labeled “Navigator” is framed almost in the way that you are, in perpetuity, when you stand between two mirrors. The borders of the image as a whole, and the exterior surfaces of internal frames (windows) frame the Navigator window. It then frames itself, first with the bars at top and bottom, then with the Navigator tab, then within that tab by an image pairing, then further still, by a box which draw attention to photographs framed within the pared images. The movement that this frame within framing all but requires is a movement into the image, which can only ever be a movement into the viewer’s experience of the image.
On the left, the space that counts as “most-framed,” in my view, is the portion of the desktop itself that remains visible within the boundaries established by Photoshop’s toolbars, a Finder window, and a Firefox window. And what’s contained within this frame? Folders for Neosporin, Rhet140_F_08, and Writing. The presence of so many reminders of this class within the image as a whole gives the slight elevation of the Rhet140_F_08 folder a little more significant than it might otherwise have. If this space in this corner is indeed privileged in that it is “most-framed,” it’s groovy that Rhet140_F_08 is a little bit above writing. Of course, the two must be inextricably woven together. After all, my syllabus has as more pieces written by Coffeen than anyone else. On the other hand, the writing and teaching that seem to register so high on the list of “things-that-Coffen-gets-excited-about” are sharing their privileged space with Neosporin. But why shouldn’t this be the case? When are bliss and banality really separated by more than a moment?
Nobody now looking at this image can separate their seeing of it from their knowledge of its origins. Its structure and movement are as much things built and directed by the viewer’s ideas of Daniel Coffeen and Rhetoric 140 Fall ’08 as they are things in, of, and unto themselves. That being the case, it seems necessary to read more than just this image, to include the milieu that’s made up of what I think I know about Coffee, what I think I know about Rhet140_F_08, and what I think I know about seeing seeing.
I know Coffeen made the image, and that the image simultaneously made Coffeen. But the latter is more difficult to talk about.
This is an image of a flat canvas proliferated in multiple dimensions, multiple frames, both folding in on themselves, over each other, and folding out infinitely, yet within a certain limit. And the limit of each frame is contingent upon its relationship to other frames. When one frame is shrunk or stretched, it directly affects the limit of all other frames it touches. The outer shape of one frame defines the inner shape of another. They set and define each others limits, as well as their own, and merge together to set a new limit, a new frame encompassing infinite frames proliferating over, in, and through each other. Squares intermingling with squares reproduce more squares and not squares at all.
All aspects of this image are in equal focus. From the Facebook messages to the folder entitled “Neosporin”, this screen-shot image suggests no privileged event, no focal point. Rather, this image is the totality of its parts. Indeed, the imagery upon imagery creates one image, this image.
These images are a congolmeration of Coffeen going in the world. It is an extension of Coffeen qua technology. There is no difference between the screen shot and the multifarious happenings on the screen, they are all one and the same: image.
This image is always already on the blog. The section from the blog shows a posting from a week ago, yet it is right here in the moment of seeing the image. It is the proliferation of seeing. The blog is an image while at the same time is the place where the viewer goes to see the seeing of this image. It is a constant refolding of the world upon itself.
This image is hillarious. It is the image of the photoshop-ing of the image of the screen, which is itself constituted by images, and images of images. And this photoshop-ing shows us yet another image of the image of the screen, the red lines indicating which portion of it we have access to. My brain does not adequately compute. There are images of files, which are perhaps images of concepts. Everything is so strangely folded onto and into itself; conceptually, then, it exists in a inconceivable many-dimensional space. That is, I can imagine that it must exist in such a space, but I can't understand the geometry of that space. Concept and percept are intermingled and intertwined very explicitly -- the images of the people on facebook and their names. The image of the folders and their names. What spaghetti we have here.
What I find particularly frustrating about this image is my inability to move its component pieces of it around within the frame. I figure this feeling has to do with the paradigm in which this sight existed to me before I considered it as a static image. Still, all the right angles seem to demand my immediate attention, though the composition does not easily allow me to focus on any one box. They are layered over each other with no apparent functional reason—photoshop over firefox over word over finder. I want to check the facebook notifications, minimize the word document, put things in order. As it stands, its just ornament, different combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, doing nothing in particular other than taunting my inability to wield any influence on them.
The image offers a “hard-drive” and a “network” icon with equal importance (or unimportance). The two icons cannot possibly represent a distinction between the particular (HD) and the collective (network). Instead the viewer (with a sense of stupidity) approaches a concept, newly scrambled from the familiar representations of the functions of programs and icons. The windows arise from somewhere, the tool bars were called forth for a purpose, but we cannot possibly be confident with any attempts to answer these questions. Mysterious multiplication and propagation confront the viewer, what do you do next? Assemble! Just as Coffeen contrived this image he created and is knowledgeable of the relationships, origins and functions for the information/tools present in the image. But for the viewer, this methodology is invisible and only the finished product is left. Like Coffeen, the viewer must assemble and build relationships amidst this sea of information and colors to derive a stable conception of the image. All of the programs, tools, information is represented by icons (representations) but in order to properly work with a computer the viewer/Coffeen must derive new connections and relationships between these representations to continually remake them and add to their index of self-definition. But as the viewer/Coffen embarks on this process they are simultaneously remaking image and themselves.
At first I thought this was just a screenshot of a desktop. Then, I thought it was a screenshot of a screenshot being edited in Photoshop - I have to admit I felt kind of cool when I figured that out (and kind of stupid at the same time that I didn't catch that immediately).
But then I looked at the Photoshop navigator, and I realized that the image being edited on Photoshop is not the same as the image I'm viewing. And now, I'm just confused. But in a funny kind of way. The image is just a bit overwhelming. A bit as in a lot. These strange instances of seeing seeing are uncanny in the sense that the website in the photo is the website I am currently viewing to view the photo of the website - and so there is an autopoiesis right now as this image becomes right before my very eyes. And then there are other uncanny moments as some words seem to relate to the picture, like "whimsy," and "autopoiesis," and then with "neosporin" you kinda have to create a narrative - "oh maybe coffeen is working on some design or other for them," and then "portable infrared heater" just kinda punches you in the face and knocks the narrative right out of you. Aaahahhahahaha. I am laughing right now. Seriously. Seriously laughing. Hahahaha. I surrender to the whimsy of this image.
The image is an image of a scattered desktop, the result of coffeen's preoccupation with facebook, his blog, and photoshop. What is a rather uninteresting screenshot of one man's desktop can be anything the student viewer wants it to be and will surely result in some interesting interpretations. Which is the point. It is another image that is entirely open to speculation depending on the viewer and his/her experiences.
The image strikes the viewer because it is not a single image, it is frames and image within image. What would the focal point of this image be how could you classify it. But that classification doesn't matter, what is more important is the chaos the juxtaposition of imagres crates and the dificult a viewer has making any sort of percise sense out of it.
The image has so many layers. Within the windows are bits of more image and information. Each click pulls back an image while revealing more and more. But in another sense its a splattering of images, or a pile of spaghetti as someone else has noted. Each window is its image itself, not the inference of what lies beneath other tabs and windows. Again mosaic comes to mind. Even more interesting are the thin slices of "desktop background." This is supposedly the base, core or end of the layers. But this assumption of a hierarchy is challenged in the still frame desktop. Ug
This image is the spontaneous self-creation of the world. It does not not seek to capture Coffeen's desktop; rather, in the exact moment of looking at the screen shot, the view becomes witness to the sublime organization of Coffeen's life and being at that exact moment. The information explodes in a scattered, overlapping manner, which, when looked at all at once, becomes a sort of ordered chaos. The shot has a limit- the computer in which we choose to view it, the screen in which it was framed; but the limit only frames a seamless mass of inflected bits of information. The concept of voyeurism infuses the image with a certain flavor, but it is the merging of this concept with the scattered windows that allows the entire image to constantly move. The stakes of this are that the viewer must re-constitute what it means to "create" an image, and in doing so cannot help but become enmeshed in the event of Coffeen snapping this shot.
The image is hectic. The eye is drawn, not to the "bulk" or "focus" of the image, and definitely not towards the center, but instead, the eye is drawn to the sidelines, the little gray corner in the top. It's "lack" of information allows the viewer respite from the busyness, squishedness, and overall stressfulness of the rest of the image. I say stressful in that the image offers a plethora of information, full of text and inner images, yet none of it is complete.
We should strive to see this image without the existence of Coffeen, Photoshop, screenshots, etc. in mind. To do so would be seeing an image of an image of a program editing an image of someone's desktop, where we ought to look at the image flatly, as an image in and of itself.
By pointing to its own production, the image effaces the distinction between camera and image; interestingly, the desktop screenshot is at once camera and image. This particular kind of image, the desktop screenshot, can only be apprehended by means of the same device that initially produced it: the computer. Hence, by deploying itself via its original medium of production, the image engenders a sense of intimacy between itself and the viewer. That the image appears before the viewer on her own desktop occasions a personal encounter with the image.
I can't help but to be overtly anecdotal and self-referential in regard to this image. It felt like it stole my idea. Haha, the humor in that egoism. Age old epiphany: ideas are not owned nor one's own. Especially ideas spawning from proximal environments. Point is being: I had created an image of my computer screen as well for my project, only it had in its forefront a picture of a dicephalic newborn with Craniopagus parasitic and on the side of the monitor the two-headed infant at a different angle in which the parasitic head was looking at the viewer and not the real head. Not quite so subtle in my personal metaphor of the camera and the internet as a technological rhizome of annexed heads, faces, perceptions, but it does a similar trick in this now repetitive logos of images of themselves, art as looking inward instead of outward. But what does this proximity in ideas mean? It felt personally that the images were fashionable, innovative, and the moves became trite in having already been made (of a sort of fixed sentimentality, though, I admit, subliminal plagiarism is also in play at my part much as it seems to be on this message board). The language of the image seems too unilateral, too collective. I could go on in the comment about how the internet is itself a screen of anamorphic infinity; that it is a world embedded with manifold frames and screens that can fold, minimize, maximize, scroll, draw, overlap, write, record, and be manipulated by my touch on its appendage of keys. OR that the image gives the myriad frames of the idea world in a multi-task, in which all are sprawled out, some latent, and hidden beneath, some larger, some moved to the corner, but all areas, zones, spaces of variation. And this argumentation is just another move. But banal when made profound or becomes art becomes banal again, creation is constantly dying to be reborn. This very mode of thinking is already a dying breed, and I am getting anxious for a new framework.
This one overarching frame presents images on top of images, partly exposed and partly hidden. It is convoluted to the point that it is difficult to work out exactly what is going on in the image. What is the frame of a window and what is the frame within a window? Where does that window end and the next begin? It is simply an overwhelming cornucopia of colors, words, and frames. It reworks the notion of space. As one's eyes travel across the screen the depth of each frame appears to be constantly changing as the relative depth of each, constantly in flux, makes a mockery of the concepts of background and foreground. Background and foreground are are folded over and coiled around each other to the point that they lack sense. This convolution transforms the image. It lacks sense as a representation of a functional computer screen. It is not devoid of sense; that sense is merely of a different nature. The death of the functional fertilizes the birth of the aesthetic.
This image is free. It's random, out of linear order yet in its own order with its own linear consistencies. Even though it's two dimensional, it takes on depth because of the multiple layers overlapping one another. Each box almost appears to be floating horizontally, framed by the top nav and tool box. This image brings the viewer, for a brief moment, into the chaos of a working desktop.
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
I'll give this a fresh try...
ReplyDeletePieces of Coffeen layed out as a screen. A screen of seeing which is not my own, but it has now become my own. I am seeing layers of thoughts and processes running through the seeing of Coffeen.
Perhaps like the thick brushstrokes of a painter, here I am perceiving thick strokes of windows, links, internet spaces, files and folders. Merged into layers of a seeing, they provoke new thoughts in me...
I suddenly conceive of Gutterriez as a folder, with subfolders as well. And the photoshop photoshopping itself is both startling as well as a perfect frame.
Like a visual lecture, but instead of words flowing through the voice of the professor, I slice through the flow itself, cutting into the seeing of his seeing.
Multiple multiplicity of identities live in this image: the teacher, the creator, the writer, the father, the consultant, the complainer, the consumer, and many more. The intertwining of work and pleasure with layers upon layers, windows upon windows, frames upon frames of openings into the life that is this image. The complexities of the day to day (such as searching for a portable infrared heater) meet longer activities (such as creating campaigns for Neosporin) and throws them together into a hot pot of mush. All is available at once and can be accessed at once. This is the age of instant gratification displayed in the image for all to see. Here, the boundaries of the professional life and the private life are not clearly distinct. Files of Felix's art and Facebook can live alongside articles written for work. So many things can be done at once and at the same time. Pleasure and work become blended together.
ReplyDeleteBecause this picture is on a blog, it is already enmeshed in and guided by a certain type of seeing: desktop seeing. No window is privileged because of the cluttered nature of desktop seeing. Even the image itself, as a window on the viewer's computer screen, loses its privilege to anything else that may inhabit the viewer's particular desktop. And yet, just because it is not particularly privileged does not make it unimportant. On the contrary, the image complicates the viewer's world by confusing the image with so-called reality. How easy would it be to mistake the image's clock for a real clock, especially if you are viewing the image from a Macintosh computer? Would it not be understandable to try to open the Rhet140_F_08 folder? I didn't know my computer had Photoshop installed! Clearly, I am viewing this image from a Macintosh computer; of course, this image would be very different on a Windows OS or Linux, and even more different as a printed image or as a projection on a screen. Is the fact that this image is very dependent on its medium unique to this image? I think not. Perhaps this image simply points out a certain characteristic of imagery. Or, more interestingly, perhaps this image complicates imagery by creating a new characteristic for it.
ReplyDeleteHis desktop on my desktop points out the vastly different ways a desktop can go. In the tiny squares of his grey frame some things lie dormant while the rest of his now is burgeoning with the data he provides. The life of the individual who provides the window through which the viewer looks is invisible in the frames that inhabit, fragment, focus, distort, categorize, and connect the data that comprise his life. The icons foreign and familiar, textual tabs, photo links, work, notes, research, all testimonies to the hypocrisy of the freedom of thought or creativity contained in boxes, within boxes, proclaiming themselves windows onto a world that indexes, classifies, and sorts us. The data forming the picture is presented; windows did not open themselves up for display nor did they select which files would be opened and which remain outside of the viewer’s purview. False promises of information show the viewer nothing but the cold technological arrangement of a prolific mind.
ReplyDeleteThe private seeing of a personal laptop is now released to the public. Anyone who wants to can find this image and see how this person sees: in an intricate, multi-layered, multi-tasking manner where everything and anything goes and goes at the same time. The tease of this image is that it is just an image. The viewer can't go further than what he sees. He can't click on the links or tabs. The image's setting on a computer screen begs for such clicking, but the viewer is limited by the image. Yet, the image gives so much. A little bit of everything. A whole life splayed onto a screen.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteah, the potential for an infinite regress!
ReplyDeleteThis image is conceptual, to use our new method of commentary beyond affect. One could read this as the endless commentary on commentary on commentary on any text or more specifically a text that is an emblem of “the digital age”.Another familiar comment would be to address the self-fashioning of “postmodern identity” (photoshopped, blogged, created selves that break with the "real identities" of their authors), an annoyingly obvious interpretation. We are no longer authentic?! As if we ever were in the reified sentimental sense.Another old the idea that we can appropriate for these purposes but in the contemporary context is the idea of a blog within a blog, a self referential, mirrored entity reflected through a distorted prism that could be echoed forever. This is a literary interpretation since I have no new ideas that will break such a tenacious habit! These texts within texts, images within images, monads in monads, (here is the twist) all invite the participation in the imaging (my way of teaching an old dog a new trick, or a one trick pony a half trick?). My blog post adds to the blogging blog-image. But my question is, so what?! What have we learned once we turn the camera onto itself, what does the involution do? What are the effects, (how can we talk about this without being repetitive, falling flat into a ditch of cliches?!). I am growing unsatisfied with pointing out the fact that things fold into each other, and saying that it is complicated. And to the interpretation that this image is "a [human?, Daniel’s?] life" before our very eyes seems a little ridiculous at this stage in the game. I mean yes, our "lives" are on our computers in a metaphorical sense. But can’t we be more specific, since we are not literally living in the matrix of our macbooks? We are flesh and blood as well as some other substances. An aspect of our lives is on the web... it is certainly not a whole life, (yet?). Oh the banality of the blog image, the desktop, the blogpost these days. These objects/images are things we fiddle with when we are bored or required or interested in doing so. They are part of our being like our toothbrush is. We take them up, touch them, possibly invest more emotions or concentration into them, but what makes them fundamentally different, if anything? Why aren’t we getting all worked up over our metaphysical relations with our toothbrushes?!
A screen shot of Coffeen's desktop? Interesting...
ReplyDeleteThis is an image of Coffeen himself. Sure, the medium is his desktop but the organization and what is on it represent him like a mirror represents what is in front of it.
I wonder how he chose to organize these windows and what lies just behind them. Did he open them before taking this screen shot in order to hide something back there? Or perhaps they are open to highlight something about himself that he would like us to notice?
I see a sample of his facebook friends, a clip of this class blog, and what looks like a color pallet on the right. I see that he is a Mac user, which by itself makes him a bad person, but this is not a time to judge Coffeen. It's a time to judge the image for what it is, not what it may represent.
This image, taken as an image and not a representation of Coffeen, however, is cluttered, colorful, and deceptive. I say deceptive because I cannot help but wonder what is behind each open window.
A foreign desktop framed by my desktop becomes... My desktop? The conglomeration of images are, "a visual symphony of choruses, each distinct, each singing in its own register". The navigator is perched above and afore the collage of windows below it, teasingly offering some sense of orientation while the windows wrestle each other and time, each vying for the operator's attention.
ReplyDeleteThese images are unlike the previous images that we have examined: They are portals, and touching them makes predictable operations happen. The comportment that relates to each is different, and the desktop is reflective of the complexity of the operator's experience.
The moment I try to click on something and drag it away so I can see what’s behind the layer, the whole image refuses (in more ways than one!?!?!). It shrouds itself in a green ice blanket, and I have to return to the border to reclick and orient my position; only when I return to the border does the green ice melt away. So its untouchable for a self-orienting viewer. That layer of this image is a discovery of rules involved (turned within). Not rules but guidelines. The background layer is definitely locked, but the history of picture 2 is open, which is cool.
ReplyDeleteGuidelines:
Color is a layer serving as a meeting point.
Hiding the bounding box makes game of hide and seek. What skill is absolutely important for a seeker, or explorer?
Hiding the auto select layer only makes sense, because…
Portable infrared heaters sound really cool, err, hot, err worth searching? I don’t know what in the world a portable heater is?! What else might be worth searching?
Folders have a unique action.
“Synthesizers…from the…center stage… would start in… the center an… pulse outward… to the ends.”
The seeing seeing frame takes up a bunch (more than a bunch? The bunch is fragmented?) of the page.
So many things are folded into this image it is incredible. Scattered throughout the image are numerous different instructions on how to read the image. The color tab suggests a reading of the image in which the various patches of color in the image hold prominence over the symbolic significance of words. The navigator box appears to privilege a certain part of the image as if it were not a part of the image. The red frame in the navigator box focuses on a certain portion of the image as the viewer must focus on certain parts of the image at different times, unable to fully take in and process all aspects of the image at once. The box on the desktop labeled layers points towards a reading of the image that concentrates on the overlapping of images within the image. The box labeled “history” even points to a narrative evolution of the image, in which the clutter on the desktop accumulated with the passing of time and the opening of more and more documents and browser windows. Everything needed to read this image is openly displayed within the image. It makes it easy for the viewer to read; all he needs to do is pick one of the methods the image suggests.
ReplyDeletethis image imagines and inaugurates ways of organizing the world: with folders, with lists, with words, with symbols. alphabetized or not. with popping tangerine hues. with anonymous shapes floating and jamming into others, grazing and departing. with big screens and littler screens and itty bitty screens, repetitions of each other, born of each other, yet impossibly existing within each other. thumbnails and swatches lose a duty and gain a force in inhabiting their perfect hollow in the atmosphere. greys and lines and texts and over-flows assemble exactly as is on thursday at 7:39 pm: a spontaneous, fated, and sublime explosion of organization.
ReplyDeleteIn seeing Professor Coffeen's desktop freeze framed, we not only see a particular moment of seeing that he saw on his computer screen, but we literally see the "seeing seeing" blog on our seeing seeing blog. In the context of our blog, the image is self-referential.
ReplyDeleteWe see tabs: "navigator," "history" and "layers" and behind the tabs we see a kind of navigation, we glimpse a bit of the history of this computer-user, and we see this all among layers upon layers. The image itself literally is a conspiracy of whimsy: it's insane and complicated and colorful and hilarious but infinitely unfinished--there are facebook notifications to be read! files to be opened! windows to be closed! and essays to be printed! There's portable infrared heaters to be researched and bought. There are blog comments to read and folders to organize. The image is also highly stylized; some things we can see for a reason. It is an once spontaneous and contrived, accidental and purposeful. It demonstrates the amount of specific character a lifeless computer can radiate.
The image can perplex the viewer at first; the desktop is traditionally a means of navigation, a way to open up different possibilities. The viewer can make certain selections and use that to bring forth different images, texts, etc. Images, by contrast, are often thought of as static, as being composed of particular, unyielding sets of images. However, just as a desktop can be navigated, so too can images be explored. The viewer, in looking at an image, chooses to elicit certain possibilities, and perhaps not others, privileging certain aspects of it. Hence, the image of the desktop can be taken up in a different ways, just as a desktop can.
ReplyDeleteWhat can you really learn from an image? Is this an image of Professor Coffeen? While this desktop image seems to reveal the work (and possible life) of a man, it is only an image, and separated from that man, it is an image of itself not of him. The image is multilayered, no one layer taking precedence over another. Parts of it are visible while parts of it are not. Countless frames, a desktop as a giant frame. These frames offer no real focus and thus no real central understanding of what is going on. All the viewer gets is tid-bits—no narrative is offered, yet no narrative is rejected. The viewer can make sense of this photo, yet is not told how to do so. By choosing to focus on a different layer and a different frame a different narrative can be achieved. The narrative exists within the imagination of the viewer and within the multiple interpretive capacities offered up by the image.
ReplyDeleteThe image pushes the viewer away, both with its extreme lack of a central theme and with a sense of inappropriateness. Seemingly unrelated windows and pieces of images collide and overlap. They vie for attention. There is no center to the image, and seemingly nothing tying them together. There are images within images, each framed within their own window. Within the windows or images are more images that make up those images. The titles of the windows are a descriptive title of the contents within the window, but the title itself is merely an image within a title bar that is also an image within a larger image. The viewer is immediately disoriented and uncertain of where to start to look. Beneath the collision of infinitesimal images and images of images lies a sense of intrusion into the privacy of another person. The image is reflective of the activities and preferences of its creator, but provides a more direct view into the persona of the creator than merely an artistic creation of the creator. The image is a snapshot of the creator's activities and a snapshot of his life. The sense of unease at the inappropriateness of intruding into someone's life furthers the image's power of pushing the viewer away.
ReplyDeleteThere is a sense in which this desktop image is more desktop than Cezanne’s apple is apple, but this cannot be true; Cezanne never intended to actually put his apple in the fruit bowl with other apples. There is a sense in which the desktop image requires the push and pull of mediated fingers to be a desktop. I view this desktop on my desktop and discover that the fullness of the desktop image requires its functionality. I’m confronted by the fact that layers of text and information are haptic concepts, notwithstanding the mediation, with a particular give. But what do I mean by mediation? Is the skin not of the avocado? There is a particular suppleness to the digital dimples that allow the instant privileging of one arbitrary vessel of information over another. (A certain scrolliness to digital text, a certain friction on the surfaces of digital photos). Absent this suppleness, the desktop image is less than desktop image. This desktop image is, perhaps, one way in which desktop images can go, but only because I view it on a desktop, where the dimples are supple and I am in control.
ReplyDeleteThis image is not just a screen shot of Coffeen's Mac, it is the site and sight of image-making. This image transports the viewer to the moment of its conception: 7:39 on Thursday night. Intermixed with Coffeen's facebook profile, "A Conspiracy of Whimsy", and this blog are the Photoshop tools used in the creation of this image. The process of image-making exists within the image itself. This image creates itself at the moment of it being seen: this is seeing creating.
ReplyDeleteI did not know that an image (or images?) could go that way. There is nothing to center on. On the contrary, there is too much to center on. The image is becoming. Too many thoughts consist in these images, which present the viewer with an emerging form of being and becoming. The banality of this image completely counters itself because it presents the simple as “too much.”
ReplyDeleteOne snapshot of a desktop opens layers upon layers upon layers of images. This image is sensory overload as a proliferation of images expound within this one frame: multiple tabs are open within one internet browser, another browser on Facebook, a window containing the local disks, some folders, Photoshop is open and running, along with an essay entitled "A Conspiracy of Whimsy." Does this title explain the essay or does it explain this image with its multiplicity of layers. All these layers of images are always already happening and yet it is just happening right before my eyes as I view it.
ReplyDeleteThis one fleeting moment, now an image, an event of so many happenings. So many frames, so many sites of seeing, so many things that are seeing, so many things to see. I see what Coffeen saw on his computer screen for this one moment on Thursday, 7:39 PM. I see the world from his perspective, and I don’t see the world from his perspective. I see the same things differently since I am my own seeing, and he his.
ReplyDeleteAll these separate, minimize-able, click-and-drag-able, closeable windows on the desktop are flattened out when they become a singular image in Photoshop—one background layer, one image. And there is another flattening, another perspective of seeing, with the screenshot of the screenshot of the desktop within the Photoshop frame. But this flattening, however, is not a suppression or suffocation of these various frames. Quite the contrary! This image has so much depth: seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing, on and on and on.
I'm seeing what Coffeen is seeing after it's already been cut up and then uploaded to another place, copied yet again for me on the blog.
ReplyDeleteAn infinite type of seeing a reproduction far from the original. It is full but also lacking.
A type of voyeurism is attached with this privilege of seeing and gives a type of scopophilic eroticism knowing what Coffeen looks at while sitting alone at his computer...
The image is a clutter of boxes, excessive amounts of visual information cascade over the frame. Here we see the limits of the visual conceptual space offered by the computer. These boxes designate the areas /spaces for information. But the space is limited and for that reason the boxes give into one another by overlapping. When that happens it forces concept on top of concept, words are cut and finished by different boxes. The structure meant to designate and isolate fails under the limit of space.
ReplyDeletethe desktop as an image, an argument for it's existence as an image.
ReplyDeleteIt's in photoshop, ready to be cut, rearranged and re-composed to something new.
(I have the strangest urge to use the photoshop buttons)
It's interesting, that it's not that I can't interact with this piece the way I can with a desktop, (these window's are fixed, I can't actually use the icons), but instead, I can interact with it on a more affective level.
Here is something I usually rearrange standing still, arranging me.
*also, it's locked in as background, but really, this whole image is foreground to me. A busy, hectic multiplicity of a foreground
At first, this image seems to capture the whole computer screen. But then, the image of the photoshop breaks the line of capturing and creating. It is no longer capturing and copying but it is a repetition of the image being reformed and reshaped. Each windows and text seems to be placed randomly but with closer readings they are carefully placed to take up the new shape. Each image is identifiable. Yet, each image along with all the other images recovers and recreate. It doesn’t resemble anything.
ReplyDeleteIn this desktop image its functionality becomes performative because it will not perform. Merleau-Ponty contrasts Cezanne's seeing with that of ordinary folks: "We live in the midst of man-made objects... and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use" (16). Cezanne "suspends these habits of thought" by painting a seeing that is conspicuously strange, but Coffeen and his computer seem to suspend habit in the opposite way. The desktop does not look strange; it looks rather familiar. Of course, Coffeen's desktop is much different from my own, but it's undeniable that it almost looks like it could be used like anything else in the frame of my computer--and that is what makes it seems strange. It looks familiar until one realizes it cannot be touched in the same way. The image which is commonly understood to be functionally performative in its responsiveness to human interaction becomes aesthetically performative in its lack of such.
ReplyDeleteIn this use of palpable vison perhaps it is not so unlike Cezanne's painting after all, but instead of presenting an odd (yet supposedly common to all--primordial) haptic vision of the painter's, we are confronted with the conspicuous lack of a thoroughly familiar haptic vision of our own.
There are two areas that I see as “most-framed,” and in that sense, as having particular structural importance to the overall image. They are balanced in the top right and top left corners of the image.
ReplyDeleteOn the right, the mini-window within Photoshop with the tab labeled “Navigator” is framed almost in the way that you are, in perpetuity, when you stand between two mirrors. The borders of the image as a whole, and the exterior surfaces of internal frames (windows) frame the Navigator window. It then frames itself, first with the bars at top and bottom, then with the Navigator tab, then within that tab by an image pairing, then further still, by a box which draw attention to photographs framed within the pared images. The movement that this frame within framing all but requires is a movement into the image, which can only ever be a movement into the viewer’s experience of the image.
On the left, the space that counts as “most-framed,” in my view, is the portion of the desktop itself that remains visible within the boundaries established by Photoshop’s toolbars, a Finder window, and a Firefox window. And what’s contained within this frame? Folders for Neosporin, Rhet140_F_08, and Writing. The presence of so many reminders of this class within the image as a whole gives the slight elevation of the Rhet140_F_08 folder a little more significant than it might otherwise have. If this space in this corner is indeed privileged in that it is “most-framed,” it’s groovy that Rhet140_F_08 is a little bit above writing. Of course, the two must be inextricably woven together. After all, my syllabus has as more pieces written by Coffeen than anyone else. On the other hand, the writing and teaching that seem to register so high on the list of “things-that-Coffen-gets-excited-about” are sharing their privileged space with Neosporin. But why shouldn’t this be the case? When are bliss and banality really separated by more than a moment?
Nobody now looking at this image can separate their seeing of it from their knowledge of its origins. Its structure and movement are as much things built and directed by the viewer’s ideas of Daniel Coffeen and Rhetoric 140 Fall ’08 as they are things in, of, and unto themselves. That being the case, it seems necessary to read more than just this image, to include the milieu that’s made up of what I think I know about Coffee, what I think I know about Rhet140_F_08, and what I think I know about seeing seeing.
I know Coffeen made the image, and that the image simultaneously made Coffeen. But the latter is more difficult to talk about.
This is an image of a flat canvas proliferated in multiple dimensions, multiple frames, both folding in on themselves, over each other, and folding out infinitely, yet within a certain limit. And the limit of each frame is contingent upon its relationship to other frames. When one frame is shrunk or stretched, it directly affects the limit of all other frames it touches. The outer shape of one frame defines the inner shape of another. They set and define each others limits, as well as their own, and merge together to set a new limit, a new frame encompassing infinite frames proliferating over, in, and through each other. Squares intermingling with squares reproduce more squares and not squares at all.
ReplyDeleteAll aspects of this image are in equal focus. From the Facebook messages to the folder entitled “Neosporin”, this screen-shot image suggests no privileged event, no focal point. Rather, this image is the totality of its parts. Indeed, the imagery upon imagery creates one image, this image.
ReplyDeleteThese images are a congolmeration of Coffeen going in the world. It is an extension of Coffeen qua technology. There is no difference between the screen shot and the multifarious happenings on the screen, they are all one and the same: image.
ReplyDeleteThis image is always already on the blog. The section from the blog shows a posting from a week ago, yet it is right here in the moment of seeing the image. It is the proliferation of seeing. The blog is an image while at the same time is the place where the viewer goes to see the seeing of this image. It is a constant refolding of the world upon itself.
This image is hillarious. It is the image of the photoshop-ing of the image of the screen, which is itself constituted by images, and images of images. And this photoshop-ing shows us yet another image of the image of the screen, the red lines indicating which portion of it we have access to. My brain does not adequately compute. There are images of files, which are perhaps images of concepts. Everything is so strangely folded onto and into itself; conceptually, then, it exists in a inconceivable many-dimensional space. That is, I can imagine that it must exist in such a space, but I can't understand the geometry of that space. Concept and percept are intermingled and intertwined very explicitly -- the images of the people on facebook and their names. The image of the folders and their names. What spaghetti we have here.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find particularly frustrating about this image is my inability to move its component pieces of it around within the frame. I figure this feeling has to do with the paradigm in which this sight existed to me before I considered it as a static image. Still, all the right angles seem to demand my immediate attention, though the composition does not easily allow me to focus on any one box. They are layered over each other with no apparent functional reason—photoshop over firefox over word over finder. I want to check the facebook notifications, minimize the word document, put things in order. As it stands, its just ornament, different combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, doing nothing in particular other than taunting my inability to wield any influence on them.
ReplyDeleteThe image offers a “hard-drive” and a “network” icon with equal importance (or unimportance). The two icons cannot possibly represent a distinction between the particular (HD) and the collective (network). Instead the viewer (with a sense of stupidity) approaches a concept, newly scrambled from the familiar representations of the functions of programs and icons. The windows arise from somewhere, the tool bars were called forth for a purpose, but we cannot possibly be confident with any attempts to answer these questions. Mysterious multiplication and propagation confront the viewer, what do you do next? Assemble! Just as Coffeen contrived this image he created and is knowledgeable of the relationships, origins and functions for the information/tools present in the image. But for the viewer, this methodology is invisible and only the finished product is left. Like Coffeen, the viewer must assemble and build relationships amidst this sea of information and colors to derive a stable conception of the image. All of the programs, tools, information is represented by icons (representations) but in order to properly work with a computer the viewer/Coffeen must derive new connections and relationships between these representations to continually remake them and add to their index of self-definition. But as the viewer/Coffen embarks on this process they are simultaneously remaking image and themselves.
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought this was just a screenshot of a desktop. Then, I thought it was a screenshot of a screenshot being edited in Photoshop - I have to admit I felt kind of cool when I figured that out (and kind of stupid at the same time that I didn't catch that immediately).
ReplyDeleteBut then I looked at the Photoshop navigator, and I realized that the image being edited on Photoshop is not the same as the image I'm viewing. And now, I'm just confused. But in a funny kind of way. The image is just a bit overwhelming. A bit as in a lot. These strange instances of seeing seeing are uncanny in the sense that the website in the photo is the website I am currently viewing to view the photo of the website - and so there is an autopoiesis right now as this image becomes right before my very eyes. And then there are other uncanny moments as some words seem to relate to the picture, like "whimsy," and "autopoiesis," and then with "neosporin" you kinda have to create a narrative - "oh maybe coffeen is working on some design or other for them," and then "portable infrared heater" just kinda punches you in the face and knocks the narrative right out of you. Aaahahhahahaha. I am laughing right now. Seriously. Seriously laughing. Hahahaha. I surrender to the whimsy of this image.
The image is an image of a scattered desktop, the result of coffeen's preoccupation with facebook, his blog, and photoshop. What is a rather uninteresting screenshot of one man's desktop can be anything the student viewer wants it to be and will surely result in some interesting interpretations. Which is the point. It is another image that is entirely open to speculation depending on the viewer and his/her experiences.
ReplyDeleteThe image strikes the viewer because it is not a single image, it is frames and image within image. What would the focal point of this image be how could you classify it. But that classification doesn't matter, what is more important is the chaos the juxtaposition of imagres crates and the dificult a viewer has making any sort of percise sense out of it.
ReplyDeleteThe image has so many layers. Within the windows are bits of more image and information. Each click pulls back an image while revealing more and more.
ReplyDeleteBut in another sense its a splattering of images, or a pile of spaghetti as someone else has noted. Each window is its image itself, not the inference of what lies beneath other tabs and windows. Again mosaic comes to mind.
Even more interesting are the thin slices of "desktop background." This is supposedly the base, core or end of the layers. But this assumption of a hierarchy is challenged in the still frame desktop. Ug
This image is the spontaneous self-creation of the world. It does not not seek to capture Coffeen's desktop; rather, in the exact moment of looking at the screen shot, the view becomes witness to the sublime organization of Coffeen's life and being at that exact moment. The information explodes in a scattered, overlapping manner, which, when looked at all at once, becomes a sort of ordered chaos. The shot has a limit- the computer in which we choose to view it, the screen in which it was framed; but the limit only frames a seamless mass of inflected bits of information. The concept of voyeurism infuses the image with a certain flavor, but it is the merging of this concept with the scattered windows that allows the entire image to constantly move. The stakes of this are that the viewer must re-constitute what it means to "create" an image, and in doing so cannot help but become enmeshed in the event of Coffeen snapping this shot.
ReplyDeleteThe image is hectic. The eye is drawn, not to the "bulk" or "focus" of the image, and definitely not towards the center, but instead, the eye is drawn to the sidelines, the little gray corner in the top. It's "lack" of information allows the viewer respite from the busyness, squishedness, and overall stressfulness of the rest of the image. I say stressful in that the image offers a plethora of information, full of text and inner images, yet none of it is complete.
ReplyDeleteWe should strive to see this image without the existence of Coffeen, Photoshop, screenshots, etc. in mind. To do so would be seeing an image of an image of a program editing an image of someone's desktop, where we ought to look at the image flatly, as an image in and of itself.
By pointing to its own production, the image effaces the distinction between camera and image; interestingly, the desktop screenshot is at once camera and image. This particular kind of image, the desktop screenshot, can only be apprehended by means of the same device that initially produced it: the computer. Hence, by deploying itself via its original medium of production, the image engenders a sense of intimacy between itself and the viewer. That the image appears before the viewer on her own desktop occasions a personal encounter with the image.
ReplyDeleteI can't help but to be overtly anecdotal and self-referential in regard to this image. It felt like it stole my idea. Haha, the humor in that egoism. Age old epiphany: ideas are not owned nor one's own. Especially ideas spawning from proximal environments.
ReplyDeletePoint is being: I had created an image of my computer screen as well for my project, only it had in its forefront a picture of a dicephalic newborn with Craniopagus parasitic and on the side of the monitor the two-headed infant at a different angle in which the parasitic head was looking at the viewer and not the real head. Not quite so subtle in my personal metaphor of the camera and the internet as a technological rhizome of annexed heads, faces, perceptions, but it does a similar trick in this now repetitive logos of images of themselves, art as looking inward instead of outward.
But what does this proximity in ideas mean?
It felt personally that the images were fashionable, innovative, and the moves became trite in having already been made (of a sort of fixed sentimentality, though, I admit, subliminal plagiarism is also in play at my part much as it seems to be on this message board). The language of the image seems too unilateral, too collective. I could go on in the comment about how the internet is itself a screen of anamorphic infinity; that it is a world embedded with manifold frames and screens that can fold, minimize, maximize, scroll, draw, overlap, write, record, and be manipulated by my touch on its appendage of keys. OR that the image gives the myriad frames of the idea world in a multi-task, in which all are sprawled out, some latent, and hidden beneath, some larger, some moved to the corner, but all areas, zones, spaces of variation.
And this argumentation is just another move. But banal when made profound or becomes art becomes banal again, creation is constantly dying to be reborn.
This very mode of thinking is already a dying breed, and I am getting anxious for a new framework.
This one overarching frame presents images on top of images, partly exposed and partly hidden. It is convoluted to the point that it is difficult to work out exactly what is going on in the image. What is the frame of a window and what is the frame within a window? Where does that window end and the next begin? It is simply an overwhelming cornucopia of colors, words, and frames. It reworks the notion of space. As one's eyes travel across the screen the depth of each frame appears to be constantly changing as the relative depth of each, constantly in flux, makes a mockery of the concepts of background and foreground. Background and foreground are are folded over and coiled around each other to the point that they lack sense. This convolution transforms the image. It lacks sense as a representation of a functional computer screen. It is not devoid of sense; that sense is merely of a different nature. The death of the functional fertilizes the birth of the aesthetic.
ReplyDeleteThis image is free. It's random, out of linear order yet in its own order with its own linear consistencies. Even though it's two dimensional, it takes on depth because of the multiple layers overlapping one another. Each box almost appears to be floating horizontally, framed by the top nav and tool box. This image brings the viewer, for a brief moment, into the chaos of a working desktop.
ReplyDelete