Pointing

 

Pointing is such an effective way of communicating the inner universe of our thoughts that we master it before we are able to speak. Even animals like dogs understand it when they spend enough time around humans. It's not hard to imagine natural selection rewarding the animal species whose individuals are, for example, able to warn each other about danger over others species that aren't. When we point, or when we look in the direction that someone else is pointing towards, we acknowledge that there's another mind that works roughly like our own, but which is also different enough to busy itself with other issues. Pointing implies both the realization of a gap between two individuals and the intention of bridging it. That's why pointing is almost irresistible, from both the position of the person doing the pointing and the person doing the looking. It's so effectively revealing of our thoughts that we have collectively created ways of refraining from doing it. Overtly pointing or looking at what or who is being pointed at is considered impolite when performed outside the confines of intimacy.

Pointer Pointer is a very simple website. When your mouse cursor stops moving, the page is programmed to search a gallery of photos of people performing the action of pointing and displays the one that most closely makes it seem like the people in the picture are pointing at our cursor. When we move the mouse it repeats the process and displays a new picture. The less compelling touchscreen version works similarly for the last place on our screen where we tapped. That's it, that's what happens at Pointer Pointer. And yet, it's compelling enough to retain one's attention for a number of turns that will always be too many to confess. Pointer Pointer's photos uniformly depict people in emotional states that range from content to euphoric, generally in social gatherings. Happy people point at something and it's us - via that iteration of ourselves that is the mouse cursor, that is - and everyone's glad they found us. And we are glad to be found. Smiling human faces, pointing, group acceptance and peek-a-boo are just too potent in their combined regressive appeal for us to think about what's going on until we deplete the repetition of its pleasure.

The history of the cursor as a means of interacting with a computer starts in 1946, but it's likely that regular people wouldn't be aware of it until 1983, when Microsoft's MS-DOS started supporting the two-button mouse. From the trackball to the modern touchscreen, most people take for granted that interaction with a machine happens via the operation of a physical object in a two-dimensional plain that corresponds to the two-dimensional image of a screen. How quickly this correspondence sinks into the deepest levels of our conscience only reveals just how good the design of this device is. The dissemination of IBM personal computers running Microsoft Windows turned it into something of a law of nature, like gravity, making it increasingly harder to abstract that the machine itself has to be purposefully programmed in order to be operated by a mouse-type device. Actually, the computer creates both the visual notion of a space where our movement happens and the notion of the movement itself. It does that with no other goal than to facilitate our interaction with it and would arguably perform its actions more effectively if it didn't also have to employ some its resources for that purpose. The sole purpose of this two-dimensional universe we inhabit is to create a fiction of our will.

Pointer Pointer is always the computer pointing at itself, not at us. At best, it points at itself through us. It uses pictures of people, it uses communication cues that people are particularly sensitive to and it requires one person's mouse movements, but behind all these entities that we are so tempted to assign humanity to there's only one mechanism that will repeat the same process forever in the exact same way. The genius of this website is that, unlike almost all other algorithms that we interact with, this one makes its mechanism so self-evident that we become aware of how dehumanizing it ultimately is. We loose interest when we realize that our part as agents that set off the whole image search-and-display process is also as mechanical as the process itself. Pointer Pointer is very transparent in how its engagement is conditional on our becoming mouse-moving machines. If this website has a purpose is to show us how simple the technology of our entrapment is required to be.