Is the function of the Pop icon any different from that of religious icons? When Warhol painted his famous portraits of "Liz" and "Marilyn," was he painting a kind of Hollywood hagiography? Or, a more contemporary question, don't we worship or invest with transcendence the icons and logos of today's technoculture: the rainbow-striped Apple apple, the devil-face symbol of the Napster corporation, the minor but ubiquitous icons of our computer screens? Certainly, religious iconography and pop or commercial iconography ask to be read in different ways, for different reasons, with different knowledges. The former assumes a kind of reading that is encompassing, moral, selfless, and prostrate-religious icons glorify meaning (God) and are typically allegorical. The latter kind of reading assumes nearly the opposite. The reader of pop iconography is guided by personal pleasure, financial increase, or cultural connoisseurship. Pop icons exist for the spectator, the audience, and typically deflect depth reading in favor of the flatness of the signifier. Barthes writes that, "However much Pop Art has depersonalized the world, platitudinized objects, dehumanized images, replaced traditional craftsmanship of the canvas by machinery, some "subject" remains. What subject? The one who looks, in the absence of the one who makes."

Art's practice of the meanings of religious iconography has diminished to the point of anomaly. We no longer make and read symbols, we make and read images. In this way, the saturation of everyday life by logos, brands, and New Economy self-imaging has left us, as consumers and as users of culture, in a state of constant non-interpretation. We've become reading-machines of the secular culture of business, but the significance we find in this culture is never beyond ourselves. Our contemporary icons are built to be reflections of our own desires and feelings as consumers. The rise and pervasiveness of "branding"-the quasi-science of constructing images meant to motivate consumption and lend desirability to products-only reflects the increasingly baroque and pliable self-identifications we adopt in the face of commercial visual culture.

Zanni's recent paintings of computer icons and logos-the green Napster face, for instanace, or the red hat image used by a popular Linux software-hold a mirror to the status of secular iconography in the digital age. Placed against flat, often monochromatic backgrounds (a nod to the computer screen), Zanni's singular, compact images are not meant to be read in the traditional, exegetical way we read icons, by going "into" them and deciphering. You don't interpret computer icons; you click on them, drag them, view them, or arrange them. Computer icons are simple visual marks or pictures that stand for-usually in the non-representational language of branding-more complex functions, programs, or code. They are second order signifiers: not the code itself, which looks like alphanumeric gibberish, and certainly not the meaning of the code (what the code does). Rather, icons are a kind of graphic short-hand, cues for recognition.

Zanni's practice may be considered an extension of Warhol's Pop portraiture, but with a twist. Zanni considers himself a landscape painter. "The window I see through is my laptop," he writes. "The desktop is the landscape and the cursor is the horizon." Zanni's statement points to an historical shift in pop (and Pop) media. Warhol took his icons from the realm of Hollywood, television, and tabloid photography, all media devoted primarily to the circulation of products in the form of celebrity. When Warhol painted his movie stars and president's wives, he was also in a way painting the media that carried them, the abstractions that are television, cinema, and photography. Pop culture does not see technology unless it has this quality we call "face."

"Face" (another way of saying iconicity) changes with the times, just as technology changes. Every moment in the history of technology has its particular face, its dominant look or type of self-image. In the post-War period, mass media was most tangible in the guise of the celebrity portrait. In the digital age, technology and media represent themselves with logos and graphical icons. Humans replaced by computer abstractions: less sexy or spectacular perhaps, less available for popular desire, but far more amenable to quick-cycle media capitalism. We now speak of technology "enveloping" us, of the "mediaverse." Digital technology can be carried by anyone, anywhere, anytime in the form of cell phones and laptops. It is only fitting that the images we create and accept to represent this technology be as mutable, hyper-constructed, and mobile. It is equally fitting that they be held up to scrutiny, frozen in all their high-speed importance, and mirrored, like the obsoleted Pop icons of yesterday.

Bennett Simpson is a writer and curator based in New York. He is a frequent contributor to Frieze, Art/text, FEED, and Purple, where he is associate editor. Bennett Simpson is Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) University of Pennsylvania.