Ways of Looking
A question no-one really asks is what happened to transparent casings for computerized objects. I recall as a child peering with fascination at chips and motherboards inside old VCRs and PCs, bewildered by how impossible it seemed that an abstract world of unnatural green and sharp solderings could make the tapes spin, CD’s play, or Doom beasts explode. What the original manufacturers had in mind is anyone’s guess, having had what seems a very brief lifespan somewhere in the late eighties and early nineties, yet subsequently falling into ‘failed design gimmick’ obscurity thereafter. Some techno-acculturated minds might procure the image of the first Apple computers that tried their hand at the ‘transparency’ quip on a commercial scale, disappointingly doing it only in a referent way that manufactured semi-transparent blue and orange cases and keyboards which in sum, never amounted sadly to much other than curvy but dirty looking fish tanks. And though it might surface here or there every now and again, its modern manifestations are predominantly squeezed out along a miserable production line of a vastly inferior objects, failing usually to poke its existence above the mere gimmicks and other ‘retro’ inanities like plastic vomit, Furbies, Tamagotchis and heart-shaped frying pans. Even today it seems astonishing that there hasn’t been one mobile phone range with this particular quality incorporated in its design, a commodity as protean as it comes. There’s something strange going on when the ‘transparency’ of objects are largely absent from the present but wholly part of some of our speculative futures, making notable cameos namely in the literature of cyberpunk (it’s heyday -by no accident- being in the eighties). But its realized relics remain few; all I have salvaged from this fuzzy phase of product design is a bedside lamp and an old Gameboy, things which –looking simultaneously at and through them now- casts once again the power of wonder over the inner child, offering the hidden interior life of an electrical good up to the eyes in a way that emulates the most basic unit of advertising; the shop display.
The World As A Shop Display
For practical reasons no-one asks why glass wasn’t used -though as a thought experiment computers glazed in glass doesn’t seem completely inconceivable-, however on the surface of it, the temperament of transparency (or its lack) would seem rather at odds with much of what today is perceived to be embedded in ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, in a era where we have great hopes for transparency. It for one it enjoys regular outings in political rhetoric, used as reprimands in expense scandals, birthing initiatives such as the Publish what You Pay Campaign, designed for mining and oil companies in the third world (a mention should go to Gordon Brown’s voluntary ‘Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’, a less successful programme with an eye on the same aim) and institutions as far ranging (or near, as the case me be) as police and newspapers/journalism. But as on the side of the built world too, these are things relate more specifically to a balance of power; its no accident that glass is today one of the most loved materials in city architecture -most notably it follows financial or business districts, where towering glass houses exude a symbolic transparency of an ideological ‘all seeing’ office community-. In fact in the context of global capital, it’s truly a material for the future. Some of these buildings do the exact opposite and play with their own invisibility (employing mirrored or one way glass for example as an alternative), deflecting the would-be gazes of pedestrians into a hall of mirrors tour of themselves, dipping as if in and out of dreams in front of shop displays1. But big transparent glassy offices operate differently by operating paradoxically; despite offering the entire interior visually to us, the spectacle is there not to be truly looked in but at. It may sound like a confusing window, but the principle is familiar to any cinemagoer perennially exposed to the illusory visual experience of fusing the flat moving image with depth, mistaking the screen for a world. These ways of seeing in visual shorthand’s are probably inherited from the usual suspects (many adding cynically that the world is becoming one big advert) and have become practically second nature to the well-initiated city dweller who, walking through the city in the late afternoon, somehow intuitively catches the mysterious broadcast left by the intentioned architects; that work needs to be visualised. Whether this process is anxiety driven, symptomatic of a specific ideology, or simply a third wave unimaginative response to a more generalizable trend is an open question. However what can be accounted for is that the expression of work in this way has meant turning our physical trajectories through such buildings into virtual narratives and allegorical energy flows, things which in Tati’s ‘Playtime’ (perhaps the most instructive exemplar to date) describes the design of the modern office as the ultimate panopticon; and which much more radically also proposes that for the ‘civilized’ worker/inhabitant of these spaces, that they are actors on an penultimate stage2.
Sunday Drivers
Yet despite its shortcomings, transparency -limited to objects- seems entirely plausible as a fixture in our modern world, operating if it must, like buildings, on an almost secondary level of looking. Perhaps its because most of us have become (to use a stubborn term of George Friedmann’s) Sunday Drivers. Whilst Friedmann meant it as a way of describing people who have never opened their car bonnets (this was the fifties after all) and who had no idea of what was under their hoods, contemporaneously the notion spreads to entire swathes of our technologically governed lives. As gadgetry and technical machinery have proliferated, the mythologies and morphology that mask and conceal the inner lives and function have moved correspondingly, like complimentary steps in a dance. This in a sense constitutes the beginning of a fashion. The very existence of such forms necessarily hinge on the need for obscuring the integral mechanisms or components at the very point when it has become apparent that our language and vocabulary for describing the multiplicity of objects and their minute components have stagnated. Furthermore, language has been left behind by the sheer velocity of competitive markets perpetually driven by nuanced innovations, outstripping the ability to name and comprehend items truly fast enough.3
Anxious Luddites, the Cyberpunks Are Waiting…
The cyberpunks for example, know what to call that-thing-that-does-that-thing, everyone who doesn’t is either vulnerable or extinct. The protagonists in these novels are nearly always the antithesis of Sunday Drivers (implying nearly always in them that those who don’t are extremely rich and live sheltered lives -usually in high orbit-, or dead) when it comes to computerized technology, knowing how to hack, physically make, manipulate, and customize from scrap, ensures better survival; the old order of automated machinery and technology implies ignorance. Not only that, it would seem futuristically, it implies a weak disposition; for the smooth casings that made early Mac laptops the white gold, are they say, for the benefit of the psychological comfort of those who can’t bear ugly inner truth; structures are violent. Perhaps it means that transparency will never make a true comeback until earthly conditions get more apocalyptic, and our relationships to our objects are determined less by the manufacturers, who always have a consumer in mind. Maybe the eighties was a blip on the radar of time for transparency, but fictionally its heart seems closer to the Cold War. Some popular dystopian visions stem precisely from allowing the luddite’s classic anxieties to have authority over the landscape, who looking at much of our alarm clocks, TVs, microwaves and vacuum cleaners know that apart from their immediate use value, each is a terrifying testimony to a void of knowledge. It is perhaps this mild ambience of precariousness that in daily living disturbs, and which to add to the anxiety, implies we no longer know how to even fix things. The things that are now taking over more and more space in the house, the garage, the bottom of the wardrobes, sometimes kept there for years, some noisy (so we have to work round it, never putting it on before bed) some always solidly but silently at work, have in many cases become like a familiar and bizarre cast of sitcom characters with no or limited life insurance. The modern day user is like an imbecilic doctor in relation to them, not knowing how to diagnose, and when it comes to surgery, will lose patient after patient. Here is where our inner luddite feels them crushing him with their ontological weight. So for now we’re content with enamel white elliptical laptops, silver fridges and things that look ready for space travel, their forms always steeped in the formal mystiques of our present time (forgetting hubristically that we are living in fashions, and that they too, when the structure of production alters, will look –or be resurrected- again and again with a new body). For functioning is not merely the function of things, but also their mystery.
Notes
1 Around a recent roundtable discussion concerning urban planning, it became clear that there was real ambivalence towards the modern phenomenon of seeing oneself multiplied into the surrounding architecture, the positive attitude akin almost to a ‘modern take’ on the Narcissus’s myth, the other akin to the fabled tribesmen who upon smiling to a camera and seeing Polaroid’s of themselves, thought that a their souls were being stolen.
2One of the most haunting signifiers of this relationship between work, transparency, and the built world exists in the quintessentially modern phenomenon of lights being left on in office blocks, even when the normal working day has quite clearly ended. Putting aside the fact that our working hours have stretched into a disorientated global rhythm, from a pious (and sensible) perspective, it’s a waste of electricity, one which the offending companies should be taken to task for. Simultaneously however its symbolic function feels like a solemn visual hymn, or a chord that drones from the aggregate of each individual lit office culminating into a sheer symphony of the city. It somehow seems indispensible (paranormal even, considering how collectively well co-ordinated the entire affair has been between buildings and employees who have never met each other). From a psychoanalytical perspective, perhaps it expresses or enounces the modern anxiety of being alone in a place where we are never able to be alone (much like the functional by-product of muzak), or perhaps it’s a grand conspiracy to communicate with objects, donning materiality with spirituality. Either way, we let the messenger live.
3 Oddly enough this seems like a reversal or parable of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, who must have had several very frustrating episodes trying to invent new names for things; not least having been later expelled from the garden and forced to start again in the fallows. Regardless, in studying our own use of language in relation to increasingly more computerized technologies, it has become evident objects for us today are less ‘natural’ in essence but more biological than ever; the supreme examples being the systems theory inspired automated environments and regulatory ecosystems that both HAL and GERTY preside over.
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