“But for Alice the visible world does not run up against the screen of the mirror; the reflection is not a limit but a point of passage.” Paul Virilio
I checked out the new Mac Leopard OS and see that the dock is redisgned in order to have that mirror effect that is so popular these days, and it has also incorporated a new feature, “spaces.” Like all design trends, this will surely be dated in the near future, but I think it’s worth noting the siginificance of this aesthetic for the now. Three points:
1) It is a step closer to making the desktop look like a three dimensional space that you enter. Screens, as many great scholars have noted, are aready portals into a new space. The common term is cyberspace, but Foucault coined one that I find more useful: heterotopia (I wrote the wikipedia entry that this links to, yet I dsicovered that some idiot moved my entry and then deleted it in the “utopia” section- damn that user generated content!). “Hetero” means “other” and “topia” is place, hence other place, the electronic space we enter our disembodied selves into, such as the space of a phone call. Where is it taking place? Here or there? As Sprint once stated in its marketing campaign: “be there now.” That says it all. The mirror effect of Web 2.0 graphics is an aesthetic reminder that we are entering a new space.
2)Remediation. As Jay David Bolter an Richard Grusin have documented so well in their book, “Remediation,” new technologies don’t obliterate old ones, but compost them (my term). Hence, the Rennaisance never went away. The mirror effect on the new Dock has an exagereated sense of perspective space. In other words, a receding site line into infinite space. Again, this creates the illusion of 3-D space, but also implies a limitless horizon point, which is a perfect description of the Web. It never ends, and if you can tell where it does, I have a pot of gold waiting for you there.
3) Finally, this is further evidence that we have been invaded by the mirror lords. Calling it The Book of Imaginary Beings, in the1960s Jorge Luis Borges assembled an album of mythical beasts from world history in which he recounts an ancient Chinese tale about a time when people could move in and out of mirrors. “In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other.” The specular and human realms lived harmoniously until one day the mirror people invaded, but the Yellow Emperor’s magic arts prevailed. The mirror people were banished to their world and forced, as in a “kind of dream,” to mimic our behaviors. Someday, the fable goes, the spell will wear off. Little by little their movements will no longer imitate ours. And in the distance through the mirrors, we will hear the clatter of weapons. When this day comes, the barrier of reflection will be broken, and the mirror people will return.
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