Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith

Author:Kenneth Goldsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Floating in the middle of my screen is a series of vertical blocky gray images, one atop another, on a jet-black background: a birdhouse with two holes in it, a bell that tilts to the right, an envelope that has the stem of a speech bubble protruding from its bottom-left corner, a series of three vertical dots next to a series of three vertical lines, a head without a neck, and a magnifying glass tilted to the left. All are the same size and all are rendered in the identical style. Like a rebus, I could assemble them into some sort of a narrative or simply enjoy their playful visuality, their randomness, their absurdity. They hang in the space of my screen the way a moon and stars poetically dangle in a Joan Miró painting or how vaguely abstract figures hauntingly populate a desolate Yves Tanguy landscape. But there’s very little that’s artistic or poetic about it; it’s a description of the navigation bar on my Twitter app.

The icons in the dock that runs along the bottom of my screen are equally surreal. If I turn on the magnification function and enlarge them, I’m surprised at what I find. Several times a day I use my Preview app to view PDFs and images.* As an icon no larger than a cufflink, nestled in my dock with all my other icons, I think of it as “the blue one with a few lines through it.” I click on it, it does its job, and I never think about it again. But if I scale it up, a bizarre and rather incomprehensible series of images reveals itself. The icon consists of two photographs printed on “paper” with a white border, each skewed, laid atop one another. The photo on the bottom appears to be a picture of an old yellow stone wall and the photo on top, the most prominent image, is of a child standing on a beach, framed by a crisp blue sky. As the waves crash behind him, he’s got his hands clasped in what could be interpreted as a quasi-religious salutation, the kind of thing you always see the Dalai Lama doing. He’s got a sort of beatific half smile and his hair, in cowlicks, is soaked as if he just got out of the water. He’s clothed in a gray garment that is open at the chest, which could either be a raincoat (why would anyone wear a raincoat on the beach on a sunny day?) or a drenched gray karate gi (a gi is a strange choice for a beachwear). On top of the photos sits a magnifying loupe, the type used to examine photographs or media spreads while editing them. It strikes me as odd that the imagery in this icon refers to dead media: printed photographs and a loupe. After all, Preview examines only digital imagery and if you wanted to zoom in on what you’re looking at, you’d click a button, not gaze through a lens.

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