Desktop Exhibition (2000)

Bradley Klee

Caitlin And Alea

Karl Kratz

Terrence J Kosick

Jon Mitchell

lls7

Oliver Nacinovic

C Augusto Valdez

Mia Flynn

Gara Gillentine

Alanna Scott

Lisa Gaye

Anne LaForet

Claire Hecko

Eryk Salvaggio

Mark Napier

Melinda Rackham

Josh Caffrey

Joe Kusterbeck

Allison Bogner

John Gates

Gareth Top

Eastpunk

Laura Swezey

John P Bergman

Socksy Lady

Ronald Wisse

Justin Berd

Sunmin Lee

Sumide

The Desktop Exhibition went online in early 2000, after an open call for people to scan the items on their desktops. This was the first batch of images which was found on an external hard drive in 2022.

For context, the WWW was a very different place in the year 2000. It was prior to the launch of social media platforms, and even blogging hadn’t really been mainstream yet. There was a lot of enthusiasm for a project that was about sharing little slices of our lives, but also seeing into the personal spaces behind the computers we were interacting with. I liked that the work played with the literal and skeuomorphic ideas of “desktop computing.”

Sadly this is only about half of the original desktops in the collection. I have a larger number of thumbnail images that are so small as to be useless.