As I look out my window, the vibrant hues of the setting sun paint a dynamic background on my digital horizon, with no clouds in this virtual expanse of my Retina Screen. The sunset in my window reminds me about how much time has passed and keeps me located in a natural environment. As I move in digital space, the perception of time changes - the distance my body travel no longer reflects how much time has passed. Instead, the setting sun on my dynamic desk background serves as a poignant reminder when temporal awareness wavers. A bridge between the digital and the physical, utilizes technology to reflect on its influence in shaping how I experience the world. My view is a window filled with slowly moving pixels from blue to orange. Where sunlight scatters in the unseen particles of the air and reflects blue light on my face. My eyes are heavy, I get tired, my window turns black and I see myself in the mirror.
A window is not just a limiting frame, it is rather the space that opens.A hole is the absence of something certain and nothing, for a void. The positive effect of the negative space results from filling the void with substance. The window functions as a changing image that spans the areas of positive and negative space. The created, limiting absence is filled with an idea. Metaphors have always served as a means of illustrating the incomprehensible with tangible concepts. The window is closely linked to the emergence of central perspective and consequently a more distanced, scientific view of the world. The metaphor reflects the desire for a visually tangible organization of the environment. Why is the first point of interaction between a user and the World Wide Web called a "window"? It could also have been called a frame, plane or a sheet. A frame typically encloses a painting or image, while a window helps to ignore the interface and focus on the text or data within. Unlike a frame, which rigidly defines what is displayed, a window strives for transparency. The effectiveness of the computer window lies in its ability to create transparency. Digital designers must grasp this concept by working within and through cultural assumptions. Like Magicians, they present an illusion that conforms to preconceived notions. The windowed user interface has shaped our interaction with computers, but in a time before computers and media, people simply existed in the world without pixels, aliasing, or the need for web-safe colors. Objects could be perceived directly; light rays reflected from objects reached the eyes without distortion by any intermediate medium other than the air. Today, an effective computer interface attempts to reproduce this original experience. The designer's task is to make the interface transparent to the data and bring the user as close as possible to reality. However, transparency is not the only strategy available to designers. The mirrored interface uses a contrasting strategy: Instead of looking through it, it forces the user to look at the interface or the design object itself. In contrast to transparency, a mirror is opaque, with a richly textured surface that confronts the viewer with itself. Digital art speaks to digital design and emphasizes that an interface can be both a window but also a mirror, reflecting its user & what she or he is inclined to believe. (Jay David Bolter, Diane Gromala: Windows and Mirrors)
The smaller the distance between my thumb and index finger when I touch my phone's touchscreen, the more memories crowd into my view. Years, months, days - the distance between my fingers sets the pace. Even though my old Phone hasn't been around for a long time, the moments it captured in my life are archived and saved, and the further I zoom out, the less I can recognize which moment it is. I can barely tell the difference between day and night, public and home, screenshot and sky. It looks like a huge mosaic filled with individual fragments of my life. Streaks run through the grid, individual paths of images run into each other merge, like they were trying to be part of the same moment. Like small waves, they ripple through the pattern of the photo stream, emerge and flatten, multiply in their unfiltered mass until they then flow into the cloud. As I look out my window, the vibrant hues of the setting sun paint a dynamic background on my digital horizon, with no clouds in this virtual expanse of my Retina Screen. But where do our memories wander when they choose not to ascend into the sky? Yet, in my mind's eye, I had envisioned memories taking flight, transforming into ethereal wisps resembling feathery clouds. My gaze turns downwards to the ground trying to follow the traces of my digital footprints. When I follow the path of my digital footprints I can find out, the IP address is over a server is running, its coordinates lead to an intersection surrounded by residential buildings in San Francisco. When I examine the IP address, I see many other domains hosted. Located underneath a Thai hormone dealer, the largest online biometric passport photo Generator based in Poland and one Asian porn site.According to Wikipedia, data uploaded to the Cloud is stored on external storage services encrypted using the AES-128 algorithm, while the keys and metadata are stored how the file name or access rights are stored in data centers. At this point, their trail is lost and they become part of a huge noise of encrypted data. In the sand of the desert, between the hills of Arizona, Millions of gigabytes of our memory are constantly moving in big scale data centers. I look up in the sky, my digital horizon remains blue, a boundless sky - infinite and cloudless. Somewhere between the sand hills of Arizona, in a facility that looks like a cowshed in the middle of a grid of green fields in Denmark or covered by a thick layer of snow under the northern lights on the edge of Finland, they seem like aliens and become one with their environment in the same breath. The Arizonian desert which adapted flora and fauna have existed for about 8 million years, the server farm lifespan is limited to 25 years. While the exterior of server farms is surrounded by a environment where so little changes that time seems to stand still, inside, the data sets of our continuously produced memories, move at the speed of light, faster than anything else that exists in nature. I am wondering how far the binary codes of my memories go - how many pixels I am occupying right now.