The banner is the first thing you see, and it is almost aggressively ordinary: a white rounded rectangle, a small bell icon at the left, and the words There is motion at your front door set in the flat, helpful typeface of a phone notification. It is the sort of sentence that arrives while you are halfway up the stairs with a basket of washing, or standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to click off. It is not a sentence that expects to be looked at. It expects to be obeyed.
Below the banner, inside a circular frame, is the reason for the alert. A green-tinted view, the colour of a night-vision camera or a badly white-balanced porch light, shows an orange tabby cat pressed absurdly close to the lens. The cat’s eyes are wide. The porch siding runs away behind it in horizontal lines, and there are lights, or the suggestion of lights, at the edge of the frame. The whole image has the slightly fisheye, slightly smeared quality of a doorbell camera doing its best. The cat is not doing anything. The cat is simply there, enormous and startled, like a suspect caught in a security mirror.
This is the entire design. A notification and its cause. And what makes it worth an essay — what makes it, I think, a small piece of comic anthropology rather than just a novelty print — is the gap between the two halves. The banner speaks in the language of security, of property, of the monitored threshold. The image speaks in the language of a cat who has no idea what a threshold is and would like to come in, or possibly go out, or possibly just sit on the mat and think about it.
The sentence that answers the door
Doorbell cameras have given us a new genre of sentence. There is motion at your front door. Someone is at your door. A package has been delivered. These are not sentences written by a person. They are generated, templated, stripped of tone. They are the voice of the house itself, speaking in the third person, reporting on the world outside. And because they are so flat, they are peculiarly easy to parody. The joke of the shirt is not that a cat is at the door. The joke is that the machine has noticed, and the machine has reported it, and the machine has used exactly the same words it would use for a delivery driver or a fox or a man with a clipboard.
There is a long tradition of this kind of humour in British life — the comedy of official language applied to trivial events. The council notice about a wheelie bin. The train announcement apologising for the late running of a service that has not yet arrived. The automated voice that tells you your call is important while you listen to a woodwind arrangement of a song you hated in 1997. We are a nation that has learned to find the absurd in the bureaucratic, and the doorbell notification is simply the latest dialect of that language. It is the voice of a system that cannot tell the difference between a burglar and a cat, and has decided to report both with the same calm urgency.
The shirt takes that voice and puts it above a photograph — or a drawing so photographic in its framing that it might as well be one — of the least threatening intruder imaginable. The cat is not a threat. The cat is barely a cat. It is a pair of eyes and a nose and a quantity of orange fur, compressed by the lens into something closer to a cartoon than an animal. The green tint makes it look like footage from a nature documentary about creatures that live at the bottom of the sea. And yet the banner above it is entirely serious. There is motion. Yes. There is. The motion is a cat. The cat would like a biscuit.
What the camera cannot see
The more I look at the design, the more I think it is about the limits of the camera rather than the cat. A doorbell camera sees a slice of the world: a circle, a fisheye, a few feet of porch. It does not see the hallway behind the door, the coat rack, the pile of shoes, the person who is not answering because they are in the bath. It does not see the cat’s history, its motives, its long-standing feud with the neighbour’s tabby. It sees motion, and it reports motion, and it leaves the meaning of the motion entirely to you.
That is true of most of the systems we live inside, I think. They report. They do not interpret. The thermostat tells you the house is cold; it does not tell you that the reason the house is cold is that someone left the back door open while bringing in the shopping. The calendar tells you that you have a meeting; it does not tell you that you will spend the first ten minutes of it wondering why you agreed to it. The doorbell camera tells you there is motion at your front door, and you look at your phone, and you see a cat, and you think: well, that’s the most interesting thing that’s happened all morning.
The shirt is funny because it admits this. It takes the language of surveillance and domesticates it. It says: yes, the machine is watching, and what the machine has seen is a cat. It is a small act of deflation, a way of taking the slightly sinister apparatus of the smart home and reminding it that the world it is monitoring is mostly made of animals and weather and people who have forgotten their keys. The cat is not a security breach. The cat is the whole point.
The cat as a public figure
There is also something to be said about the cat itself — the orange tabby, wide-eyed, close to the lens. Cats have been the unofficial mascots of the internet for as long as there has been an internet, and the doorbell-camera cat is a particular kind of internet cat: the cat who has accidentally become a public figure. It did not choose to be filmed. It did not consent to being uploaded. It was simply walking across a porch, or sitting on a step, or investigating a hedge, and a small plastic box on the wall decided that this was content.
I am not going to make any grand claims about the history of the meme, or about what the algorithm promotes, or about where this particular image first appeared. I do not know, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. What I can say is that the design uses the visual grammar of the doorbell camera — the circle, the green tint, the notification banner — with enough precision that it reads immediately as a joke about surveillance rather than a joke about cats. The cat is the punchline, but the camera is the setup. Without the banner, it is a picture of a cat. With the banner, it is a picture of a cat that has been detected.
And detection, it turns out, is a funny thing to do to a cat. We are used to cats detecting things — mice, movement, the sound of a tin being opened two rooms away. We are not used to being detected by them, or to having their presence reported to us in the same tone of voice used for a parcel. The shirt reverses the usual order of things. The cat is not watching the house. The house is watching the cat. And the house is slightly alarmed.
The threshold as a comic stage
The front door is a strange place in British life. It is the boundary between the private and the public, the inside and the outside, the place where you are expected to be dressed and the place where you are allowed to be in your dressing gown. It is where you receive guests and where you receive cold callers. It is where the milk used to be left and where the parcel now gets thrown over the hedge. It is a stage for small comedies: the neighbour who catches you in your pyjamas, the delivery driver who leaves a card saying you were out when you were in, the cat who has decided that your porch is its porch now.
The doorbell camera sits right on that boundary, and the shirt puts the boundary on your chest. It is a design that invites a second look, because the first look tells you it is a notification and the second look tells you it is a cat. That delay — the half-second in which your brain reads the words before it reads the image — is where the joke lives. It is the same half-second in which you check your phone and find that the motion at your front door is not a burglar but a fox, or a leaf, or the postman, or nothing at all. The camera is always slightly wrong about what matters. The shirt knows this.
I like it for that reason. It is not a loud design. It does not shout. It sits there, a white banner and a green circle, and it waits for someone to notice that the most ordinary sentence in the smart home has been given a face. The face is orange and wide-eyed and slightly out of focus. The face is a cat. The cat is at your front door. There is motion. You had better go and see.
The shirt itself is available from Quirky Cotton Collective, and the design is what it is: a notification, a cat, a joke about the gap between what a machine reports and what a person understands. I am not going to tell you that it will change your life, or that it will make you a better person, or that it will cure anything. It is a t-shirt with a cat on it. But it is a t-shirt with a cat on it that has thought carefully about the words above the cat, and that is more than most t-shirts manage.
What I keep coming back to is the bell. That small icon in the corner of the banner, the one that tells you the notification is a doorbell and not a text message or an email or a reminder to put the bins out. It is a tiny piece of visual grammar, and it does an enormous amount of work. Without the bell, the sentence could be anything. With the bell, it is specifically the front door. It is specifically your house. It is specifically the place where you live, being watched by a machine, and the machine has something to tell you. The something is a cat. The cat is not sorry.
There is a kind of comfort in that, I think. The world is full of systems that report on us, and most of them report things we would rather not hear. The doorbell camera is one of the few that can be relied upon, occasionally, to report something ridiculous. A cat. A fox. A spider building a web across the lens. The shirt takes that moment — the moment when the alert turns out to be nothing — and makes it the whole design. It is a small monument to the anticlimax. It is a notification that says: there is motion at your front door, and the motion is a cat, and the cat is fine.
Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.