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