Anders Clausen
I am reassured in this vague feeling when I read of Clausen’s own interest in “contemporary obsessions with real and computer viruses, preserving cleanliness, and promoting speed”.
Usually the computer is a means to an end, a tool, or a portal coaxing the user to come inside, but Clausen declines the offer – he has already found the magic on the outside: those scroll bars with their seductively glossy 3-D effect! Those files, so neatly stacked... Such order! Such logic! This is a language worth studying, thinks Clausen, a syntax of “everyday objects and graphics and interfaces… a pure new language made up of the noise and clutter of consumer/information society”.
Text by William A Ewing
I can’t help but think of drugs every time I look at Anders Clausen’s screenshot pictures. The appearance of those glossy little plastic capsules we swallow at regular intervals of our lives, the clean, spare, authoritative packaging that suggests speedy recovery… There is a language being spoken here which relates closely to the language ‘spoken’ by computers and their seductive screens – “eerily friendly, overfamiliar and mega-strange,” as critic Dominic Eichler says.