Two desktops

The word “desktop” has been an important term in the software industry for decades. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made their breakthrough with icons on a Mac screen, it was a reflection of Jobs experience with calligraphy—how the strokes of an ink-filled brush on white paper were significant, beautiful, and iconic all at the same time. Not only that, but one man I met said in the art of calligraphy it is an instance of maker, making and made concomitantly. In other words, the calligrapher is one with his art. Another wise man observed that an artist shapes a work and then the work shapes him or her.

Then there was the axiomatic, “A computer on every desktop,” which guided Bill Gates and Paul Allen in their development of Microsoft—soon to employ the iconic approach to user interface design. The word itself, icon, is timeless; the word desktop, not so much, but it is the common expression now for another kind of icon; that is, it is the computer screen where a computer user might spread an array of icons which represent “quick-start” shortcuts to open applications or folders.

Today I was obsessing over the relationship between two forms of desktops—my real desktop, on which there is an array of objects you might say have an iconic aspect, and my desktop on my computer screen – shown below.

Then I looked around at my REAL desktop and thought about the objects sitting around on it at the moment. It’s a very cluttered desktop, but I thought about what the things meant. I also can’t help but think about their worth. Anyone coming to the Mini Art Gallery would not know what the objects are, certainly, and they certainly wouldn’t know if they were worth anything at all.

But, they are worth a lot to me. It is partly because I spent a lot of time on the objects on my desktop that I made myself. Someone who designs video games told me that regardless of the fact that things people make in the virtual world—all digital images and therefore having no existence in the physical world—take the makers a long time. Therefore, they are valuable to these people.

It is the same for video game players who live a “SecondLife,” and people who congregate a tribe or team, quest or campaign in a video game. Even though the relationships are held together only by strings of code and managed by algorithms, they are just a valued as the actual objects the people own in their homes and at work or parked in their garage.

I took a snapshot of my desktop—actually the corner of the Mini Art Gallery where my desktop sits—and I think about the value of each of the things I could isolate in the photo:

I can’t help but include the pictures on the wall along with the desktop.

An interesting thing happened when I was saving the files—a typo that made the name come out “desctop” in the spelling. I added it to my dictionary. Then I looked up the word—Yahoo’s Flikr has a group call by this name.

If I had time, I would make a page out of this image and load it with hotspots so people could identify the things and see their worth.

Maybe I could auction them off and pay for my new CNC Router!