The Window Comes Alive

looking & finding, I suppose

[Image: At the beginning of a Zoom lecture with an author, she asks the 80-or-so-person class to name their favorite kinds of pens. Link them in the chat, she says, and everyone does so: Le pen! / Pilot G-5 / Pilot V5 / Pilot g2 / muji / Sharpie pen 0.7 / regular old bic / pilot G2 0.38 / Uniball eye! / +1 le pen / sakura micron / Muji! / Uniball Vision Elite / papermate flair / pilot g2 but it has to be the .38 / Snowhite roller pen pvr 155? / Love a cheugy pen / Pentel "energel” / Different pens for different moments! / The super fine sharpie sometimes does it / ugly pen supremacy. The author discusses her own favorites and reads a few of the audience responses aloud. She walks us through the agenda of the session, Feel free to sound off in the chat throughout, she offers before beginning her official “talk.” I’m just going to minimize the chat window for myself so I’m not too distracted. The chat window silences. For twenty minutes no one sends a single message, because they know that she won’t read it. While she’s speaking, I look at my own face in the grid, and pin myself so that my window expands. I take two screenshots. In one, I lean my cheek against the knuckles of my fist; in the other, I rest my chin on the heel of my palm, my open hand cradling my face. Late afternoon light filters through my narrow bamboo blinds into thin stripes falling over me. I’m hunched slightly towards my screen. And then the author adjusts her laptop camera, tipping it downward to show the class her dog, wearing a shearling puppy sweater, curled into an oval in her lap. The chat window comes alive. Hi pickle! / Great name / I've heard a lot about Pickle on the podcast, thrilled to see him in the flesh. Later, as we return from our three minute break, the author turns her camera back on. More cameras come on as people trickle back onto the Zoom. You know what’s a nice pen? The Papermate Flair. The author raises a black pen up towards the camera so that we can read the brand name across the side. Oh, you know what else I’m getting into lately? The sharpie pen. Pens are so personal.]

[Image: A slideshow on TikTok. (1) A photo of a scarf. Its color calls to mind the green castelvetrano olives which have suddenly become popular online by name—or perhaps which I’ve only suddenly become aware of—with a white font stretched lengthwise across, appearing slightly pixelated when translated through the stitches of the yarn. At the top of the screen, it reads: I knit a scarf inspired by CAPTCHA text. The next slide shows a screenshot of her CAPTCHA window, its wobbly black font crossed out: following finding; the open box below it prompting type the text. (2) Another image of the scarf, where this time only the word following is visible, where it stretches downward from the other half, which has been wrapped into a small-but-open circle. I’ve started collecting some of my favorite accidental CAPTCHA poems, reads her caption. Maybe the best proof that we aren’t robots is the persistent hope that we’ll find poetry within the test itself. Ask ChatGPT to create a found-text poem and knit it into something you can wear, something that sits close to your body, filled with the scent of your perfume so that when you wrap it over your face on a cold and windy day, the smell of smoke and amber and vanilla makes you feel doubly warm. I’m certain that someday soon it will be able to. But will it still be on the lookout when there’s no one making the request? (3) A mirror selfie of the knitter wearing the scarf over an all-black outfit: a boxy leather jacket, long skirt, opaque tights, and flat boots with thick lug soles. The edges of her clothing blend together so that she is just a silhouette, with one hand hung beside her body on the right side, the other cut off at the top of her reflection where the mirror stops, at the wrist, which holds her phone in front of where her face would be.]

[Image: It’s obviously surrealist. chuckled one teenager to her two friends at the Met Breuer. Then all three burst out laughing.]

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