Italian version
.art
13.02.04 PublicDesktop, desktop as communication tool.
Exploiting the interface for social ends is one of the biggest opportunities for independent artists and developers, as it makes possible to take back the right to use personal and new modes for building meanings and communication protocols out of the market laws of big software corporations. Jonah Brucker-Cohen, a prolific american artist, now a researcher at the MIT Media Lab Europe, has made yet another application software which makes possible to break free from the limits imposed by the operating system. He designed a simple and effective infrastructure to activate a new level of communication. After his past projects (Desktop Subversibles, StreamingMedia, Wi-Fi Hog and BumpList), the artist has released PublicDesktop, which turns the Mac OS X desktop into a common space which displays the text sent via an online form. Included in the recent 'Bang The Machine' exhibition, PublicDesktop corrodes the desktop metaphor of an organized private space, contaminating it with a sociability which goes in the exactly opposite direction, weakening the personal control and opening the doors of one's own familiar screen to other people.