Views From My Desktop

As the title suggests, this ongoing project explores the views from my desktop. Following Anna Friedberg’s notion of the graphical user interface as an Albertian window onto the world, the computer desktop becomes an ever-changing landscape, either through system updates, personal choice or OS malfunction. Dan Hays’ fascinating Screen As Landscape formed part of the inspiration for starting to develop responses to these landscapes in watercolour, but for me the key motivation is the twin realisation that a) these are our most familiar environments, and b) as Fred Ritchin notes in After Photography, computer companies such as Apple routinely draw on landscape metaphors to naturalise our experience of technology.