WK10 Reading

The mouse means a potent prosthetic. When placed in front of our desktop we do not even have to think consciously about reaching for it. Unseen and unfelt, the mouse has to disappear in order to work. The transformative power of the mouse is tied to the simple logic of the generic graphic user interface, the set of icons on the screen that suggest that bodily movements on the desktop are actually movements in a virtual desktop, with its documents, folders and trash cans manipulated by bodily gestures of cutting, pasting, dragging and dropping. This first mimetic step from the horizontal desktop in your room to the vertical desktop in your computer supports the wider multidimensional ability to move through other rooms, cities, social networks and data sets. Indeed, the ultimate effect of the mouse is that the mouse itself can become redundant. The idea of the computer as a discrete object with a mysterious interior now gives way to massively distributed systems accessed through the lightest possible local interfaces. A history of 20th-century prosthetics can be written in terms of the ever smaller movements of the fingers that have ever greater effects over ever larger domains. This trajectory towards increasingly powerful micro movements is also a story of domestication. To reach out to the world is simultaneously to pull the world inside. As the mouse gives way to the touchscreen, the architectual metaphor of the desktop remains. Indeed, it becomes ever more detailed, with increasingly precise textures, shadows, colours, reflections, animations and sounds. The role of the mouse is first and foremost architectural. Indeed, the contemporary experience of space is unthinkable outside an object that is designed to be overlooked. The spaces we occupy and the way we occupy them turn on an inconspicuous prosthetic whose own disappearance, losing its wheel, then its ball and then its umbilical wire before slipping away, is the final proof of its transformative effect. As the mouse starts to leave the room wiht the successful completion of its almost half century campaign to quietly re-engineer our species, we can re-examine the prosthetic logic in architecture.