Clearly Magic
On The Aesthetics of Transparent Tech
1: Seduction
Picture the following allusion: An angular assortment of glassy silicon plates of all sorts of regular and irregular geometries, shimmering with clashes of precisely cut metal, textured by the diagrammatic etchings of paths and nodes of some other language. Metallic wires connect the assortment in an inscrutable and singular configuration, the veins and tissue cohering every machinic organ into one synchronous rhythm—a harmony of motion, an ecosystem of metal and glass. The entire apparatus is suspended, carefully encapsulated in the silent stillness of some transparent substrate, a pulsing and twitching microcosm of some alien body, churning and humming away towards some indeterminacy.
This description might bring to mind images of some cosmic intelligence, both a biotic and synthetic organism at once: cyborgs, androids, the xenomorphs from the Alien vs. Predator franchise. But for all of its machinic awe, what the description was inspired by comes from something much less extraterrestrial. H.R. Giger’s biomechanical phantasms seem to have penetrated the cultural imagination in a rather banal, if perhaps unsurprising, domain: the design of mass consumer electronics. The integration of the human and the technological is, almost theatrically, the explicit guiding statement of electronics company Nothing, from which an advertisement for their Ear(2)—a pair of earphones that are distinctive for exactly one reason: that their casing is transparent, see-through—inspired this description. But really, this description might be a fitting portrayal of a number of things: the transparent CDJ-2000NXS2, a special edition keyboard by Pioneer DJ and Virgil Abloh encountered at MoMA’s exhibition dedicated to milestone contemporary design, Pirouette; The clear variant of the original Gameboy DMG-01 video game console which, at the time of this writing, is being sold for prices between $100 to $1,500; The Apple iMac G3, the icon lingering in the back of every person who’d grown up during the rise of the personal computer. The description could be gesturing, at least in their primary visual distinction, to any number of transparent consumer electronics that have accumulated throughout modern design history.
Today, The Verge has a whole page dedicated to aggregating every transparent electronic device on the market. Nothing, which has become famous for its “innovative” transparent electronics since its formation in 2017, has amassed 1.3 million followers on Instagram and counting, and over a billion in sales. Playstation, Beats, Audio-Technica, and more have all jumped on the clear tech bandwagon, prompting a surge, or resurgence, in transparent electronics as a formal and aesthetic quality. There is a deceptively simple question to be asked here: why, exactly, do people like transparent electronics as much as the market seems to indicate? Surely there is more to be said than that they are simply cool to look at.
2: The Field
If you try to look up what makes the transparency of clear gadgets so compelling, you’ll likely run into blog posts (perhaps not unlike this one, unless I can get it published fingers-crossed), which could be boiled down to two general arguments. First, that clear-ness is a form of aesthetic rebellion against the “same-ness” of recent tech design. Secondly, that clear electronics are a gesture of technological honesty: a method of revealing the workings of an otherwise opaque blob of code and circuitry. These arguments are insufficient to me.
The former argument invokes a historical interpretation of the original adoption of clear-ness in the consumer electronics market in the 90s, situating it in parallel to the state of tech design today. It follows two premises: first, that the original debut of clear electronics in the mass consumer market in the 90s and 2000s was an aesthetic response to the preceding wave of consumer electronics in the 80s; an almost punkish opposition characterized as unwieldy boxes of opaque plastic in every manner of beige, gray, white, and black, being overtaken by a new generation of transparent electronics that were quirkier, truer to the messier but more optimistic, more personable nature of technology at the time, not yet having been commercialized, or, to use the internet’s favorite critical term, “corporatized” by the ambitions of Big Tech. Such ambitions define the second premise of this argument: that in order to design consumer electronics for the public masses at scale, the corporations that would come to define the 2010s had to find a visual language that would universalize technology. The result of this search were forms that were designed to be, or perhaps tried to present themselves as, unadorned, unassertive, stripped of complexity in order to shift to general public perception of technology at the time: ultimately optimistic or at least curious, but notably bewildered by the relatively recent surge in technological development. One only needs to look at the early successes of the iPhone to understand that, by clarifying all the practical, simple ways a given technology could seamlessly integrate and enhance the ordinary lives of potential consumers, smoothing over all the bits and bops that make up the complexities of modern technology under a uniform case of plastic and metal was at least a useful, if not fundamental, strategy in the playbook of amending the alienation felt by the public masses and the aforementioned technologies. The result, according to the former argument, is a monotony that all too resembles the design of technology in the 80s, creating conditions that are ripe once more for another onslaught of transparent gadgets.
But the notion that history repeats itself is not, in itself, a convincing argument, or at least not a complete one. This argument does not directly answer the reason as to why transparent devices are compelling in their own right. Rather, it argues that their allure is a matter of sheer aesthetic contrast, a relativistic argument that relies on an oversimplified dichotomy of visual design, that it is simply a pendulum of serious vs. playful, cold vs. warm, human vs. machine, etc. Furthermore, even if it were simply a matter of aesthetic contrast, then surely, there would be more visual forms that counter the homogeny of any given visual paradigm: every aspect of visual design (color, shape, scale, etc.) would all be equally effective grounds for disrupting the monoliths of opaque, neutrally colored computer boxes. The question remains: why clear-ness?
The latter argument takes over where the former falls short by making a direct argument about the aesthetic aspects of clear gadgets themselves. It premises that the masses have become alienated from technology and its inner workings; we no longer know how the gadgets we use in our ordinary everyday work. It then assumes that this is an issue in need of remedy, an issue which is only further reified by the seamlessness, uniformity, and opacity of contemporary tech design. It argues that, by leaving the physical hardware of a piece of technology apparent, it’s both a literal and symbolic exposure of the black box underneath. Clearness, in this view, is an ethical gesture of honesty, one that positions itself against the obscurity of opacity with the aim that by doing so, it can begin to close the rift of our technological alienation. This is a generous interpretation of clearness, and one that I agree with in spirit. I agree that there is an alienation between us, the general public, and the technology we use everyday. However, I want to examine the assumption that, if we can see the inner workings of a subject, we will, as if by some instant osmotic process, become less alienated by it.
Consider, for example, the vitreledonella richardi, or more colloquially, the glass octopus, a rare species of cephalopod that is known by its strikingly unusual transparent body. And yet, despite being able to see all of its organs: the eyes, the optic nerve, the digestive tract, it remains one of marine biology’s least studied cephalopods, a literal transparent enigma living some 3,000 feet below sea level.
Not unlike the glass octopus, clear electronics might similarly be understood as a literally clear and yet indecipherable body. It should be suspect to think that one, or more broadly, anyone, can simply look at an assemblage of organ or machinery or anything in between and nod to themselves: yes, I see, I understand what is happening now. There is a faulty, if perhaps overstated, assumption here: that sight automatically equates to comprehension, or that exposure automatically entails legibility. Even if this assumption were true, as in the case of a true expert, I find it incredibly difficult to believe, with the exception of being gifted some divine, Einsteinian capacity for knowledge and comprehension, that an eight year old is captivated by their transparent Game-Boy device because they are thoroughly analyzing the network of circuitry underneath its plastic casing. If familiarity is the antithesis of alienation, then legibility and comprehension would be the essential antidotes. In an ironic twist, transparency, in this case, does not offer clarity but rather it makes the obscure apparent in its obscurity.
3: Obscurity
Consider the notion that obscurity itself is enchanting. This would not be anything new. It is conventional knowledge that humankind has had a long history of being awed by things we did not understand, but which were the subject of countless speculation and myth. Thunder was attributed to gods, tsunamis were attributed to gods, sickness was attributed to gods, really, human history could be understood as a continuum of people attributing any number of incomprehensible things to divine forces. It could be argued that, even today, the obscurity of modern technology occupies something of a similar relation to mythical forces, albeit secularized ones. Just ask your neighbors if they can tell you how the urban electrical grid works, or the internet, or bluetooth. Most might be able to tell you some basic phenomena: electricity travels through a medium; our iPhones operate on batteries that need to be charged through the outlets of our walls; that waves carry information which devices can receive, interpret, and translate for us in a format we understand. Most understand, in essence, the abstraction that some components are interacting with other components, which in turn produces some kind of effect. But as to what those exact systems entail likely eludes us as they scale. At some point, what we know about a system’s operations is so removed from its totality that, in both practice and perception, they might as well be the workings of some unknowable magic.
In his essay The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, the anthropologist Alfred Gell articulates a form of enchantment that awes us not out of sheer, simple ignorance, but of an ignorance born of an impression that something can be simultaneously legible and yet utterly inaccessible to us. Gell uses the example of canoe prow-boards from the Trobriand Islands that were designed by the Trobrianders in order to gain a trade advantage over their overseas Kula exchange partners. Set against the drab surroundings of the world the average Melanesian was accustomed to, the patterns drawn on the Trobriand prow-boards became a kind of psychological weapon, dazzling the exchange partners not simply through visual illusions but, as Gell argues, as a physical token of inordinate artistic prowess that was so impressive, or more precisely, so beyond what the partners themselves could muster, that they had no choice but the conclude that it was the result of some extraordinary power possessed by the Trobrianders.
Gell deepens his argument with an example of a matchstick model of the Salisbury Cathedral, a spectacle which, to the eyes of eleven year old Gell, then novice matchstick model architect himself, was so far beyond his understanding of what was both practically and theoretically possible that he thought the only thing he could have felt then was sheer awe, one that danced between his understanding of the basic principles of building matchstick models and, at the same time, having witnessed an instance of which far surpassed any formulation he could have conceptualized at the time. There is a tension between knowing how the fundamental principles of something works and witnessing a configuration of those principles to such a degree of complexity, that the result gives the impression of legibility while simultaneously evading it; an enchantment that emerges from familiar principles scaled to the point of obscurity.
4: Transparency
Gell’s notion of enchantment is one that I could recognize in my own life, which has been littered with periodic obsessions with things that would let me peer into them but evaded my understanding. I’d amuse myself by looking inside clear mechanical pencils in class, imagining how they’d advance graphite. I’d gaze upon my Perplexus puzzle toy, mesmerized by what I felt was an impossible plastic labyrinth construction suspended in a transparent orb. I’d examine the Shure SE-215 or the VE Monk earphones and admire all the tiny metal components, sitting still in their transparent casing and wonder how they emitted sound. I didn’t find any answers then but it wouldn’t matter, eventually, my curiosity would be outpaced by my awe and the less I understood about the apparent complexities of these transparent objects, the more I was able to see them as perfect little things, crystalline and alien, humming with some unknowable intelligence.
Of such memories, however, I can recall that awe was not always my primary reaction. One of the more memorable of these instances was on the occasion of a birthday party during my early childhood. A friend gifted me a couple of strange objects: a Hexbug Nano, and a Kikkerland Awika, two curious toys that, upon a simple trigger, would be stirred to kinetic life, an event that captivated me then.
The Awika was a mechanical toy, and it certainly looked the part. Free from the boundaries of any sort of encasement, the toy was without body; less object and more an odd configuration of metal and plastic hardware, evoking images of tinkering with spare nuts and bolts and all the other mysterious things my father kept in the garage. The fact that the Awika’s inside was exposed was curious to me. Though I never did this exactly, I thought that if my eyes and my fingers traced the components of the Awika, I could understand the how the Awika, at least in an essential sense, worked in a series of causes and effects; how the tensions of a twisted knob would make its way through the gears of the toy and crank the Awika into locomotion. As fascinating as this motion was, however, I disliked the Awika. Its lack of enclosure, of body, made me both afraid of and for it. I worried that if I twisted the knob too hard, the coil of metal tape would snap and fling at me. I worried that if I dropped it, the entire apparatus would simply shatter, all the components—gears, pins, screws—would scatter apart in a dramatic burst. To me, the Awika was a fragile contraption before it was, as curious as it had been, a toy.
Unlike the Awika, the Hexbug Nano was a bug-shaped creature with a body of transparent plastic that encased an inscrutable configuration of circuitry: a mysterious motor, a mysterious battery, a mysterious network of wires connecting everything together. If I toggled a small switch on the outside, the toy would begin to vibrate and, through an unknown combination of physics and form, these buzzing vibrations would make the Hexbug scuttle across the floor. This mesmerized me as a child—the unknowable logic of the Hexbug made it feel foreign to me, the product of some transcendent entity.
My fascination with both of these toys were, in a basic sense, the same. But they represented two different modes of transparency. As interesting as it was to see the mechanical system that moved the Awika, it was a naked and fragile contraption before it was a toy, which swayed me away from it. The Hexbug offered the same sense of curiosity as the Awika, it preserved the wonder that its motion was the result of some intricate machine beyond my comprehension, but it did so underneath the containment of clear plastic.
This encasement, I think, is exactly the awe of transparent electronics. By simultaneously containing and revealing complexity in plain sight, transparent electronics both domesticate and mystify the unknowability of complexity. If the awe of the Awika’s complexity was muddled by the anxiety of having to confront the naked realities of that same complexity—to grapple with its quirks, vulnerabilities, perhaps even its threats; then the Hexbug Nano, so clearly encapsulated, domesticated that same complexity without reducing or hiding its appearance. Clear electronics offer a way to hold the impressiveness and the obscurity of complexity without the labor of having to understand it—the mysterious and powerful object is rendered safe to behold.
5: Clarity
Here, one might be tempted to ask: and what of this enchantment? So what if we are enchanted by objects that domesticate and mystify their complexity?
For Gell, this form of enchantment was also a technology in itself, one that functioned by mystifying its apparent obscurity. In the eyes of the their Kula exchange partners, the prow boards were but a proxy for the Trobrianders, which meant that the perceived magical status of the prow board’s complex designs were merely a spell cast by the divinely bewitching forces of the Trobrianders, a perception that they exploited to gain advantages in trade.
But clear electronics, to the extent that I can reason, do not have any direct beneficiary, no singular entity conniving behind curtains to exploit this particular enchantment of obscurity outside of selling more products. Perhaps it is that simple. But even then, clear electronics, like most if not everything, express and embody ethical principles simply by being. As social and cultural objects, clear electronics ask the question: do we even care to understand the operations of our technology? Should we? I certainly did not care enough about the workings of the Hexbug Nano or the Awika to probe into either. Quite the opposite in fact. The two toys felt more alive to me and my imagination as a child precisely because I could not deduce their operations.
If the awe of transparent electronics is an aestheticization of a domesticated and simultaneously mystified complexity, then as a consumer product, they appease a desire to claim—to literally own—an embodiment of that obscurity without the cost of having to master it. This is an ethical position. It is saying that we should not need nor want to know how our technology works, save only that we own them. Given the circumstances of the culture’s technological alienation, is this really such a virtuous notion?
What might it look like for an object to be designed in direct opposition to this enchantment of transparent electronics? I reckon one vision might be something not unlike the Awika toy. Unlike the Hexbug, there is a quiet generosity to how pedagogical the Awika is, the mechanical logic of which, by nature, is visible to ordinary eyes. If one paid attention, the Awika would show them how it worked, gradually; how its charmingly clumsy motion was the collective effect of observable causes: tensions, gears, offset feet jerking it forward. What might consumer technology today look like if it adopted a similarly pedagogical approach? How could it foster comprehension of its complexity rather than hide, obscure, reduce, or mystify it? If transparency today is enchanting because it flatters our incomprehension and our ignorance, how might transparency enchant us towards expanding our curiosity instead?
Notes
Gell, Alfred. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” Anthropology Art and Aesthetics, September 24, 1992, 40–63. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198277330.003.0003.