This is the first in a series of Holding Pattern secrets — in which I explain methods of screensaver construction, secret features, and easter eggs.

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Cylindrical Landscapes

People often mistake the moving aerial view in Holding Pattern for actual video footage. While using actual video footage shot from a plane would provide truly realistic motion, there are two reasons I could never use it:

– Bandwidth: Video is huge. No one wants to download a 2Gig screen saver!

– Resolution and image quality: video’s just not comparable to a photograph in terms of presenting detail and color. Yes, not even HD.

So each moving landscape in HP is not video at all, but rather a cleverly pieced, animated photograph. The photo animation has two interesting characteristics: perspectival motion (the foreground moves faster than the background) and edge-to-edge matching, which lets me use a single photograph very economically by looping it, even though it’s moving in perspective. All of this is nothing more than standard 3D animation practice.

Here’s an diagram of perspectival motion:

You can easily see where edge-to edge matching happens in the above, if you imagine side-by-side pieces moving in perspective across the field of view. The great thing about this is that the landscape is looping, but because the perspective skews so much during the animation, the loop isn’t very apparent.

The hardest and most interesting part of this process was creating landscapes that matched edge-to-edge, or as I came to call them, Cylindrical Landscapes, because one could imagine the landscape curled into a cylinder so that the edges meet (imagine a 60’s lampshade). As you can imagine, a great deal of photo retouching was involved.

Here’s a landscape before retouching:

Here’s the final retouched landscape, and the same landscape “rotated” so that the seam lands right in the middle. Cylindrical!

Here’s a whole gallery of landscapes used in HP1 and HP2 that I created on FlickR:

Link

Yes these landscapes are digital and clever, but I find them more interesting than that. Perhaps it is the intentionally straightened horizons and the evenness of value needed to make the loops - something about these landscapes represents an entirely strange, fictional Nature.

In the process of making HP, I found myself needing to go out and shoot more landscapes. Here’s a photo I shot some time after I had developed the cylindrical landscape technique:

Interesting how this photo needed almost no retouching at all!

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Screens are everywhere. Their increasing cheapness, portability and an evolutionary variety of sizes has spread them like a pandemic into our private and public environments. We poke at the tiny screens on our midget MP3 players and cell phones. We catch giant LED displays in our peripheral vision at major intersections. We view video loops of this season’s runway in fancy boutiques. We march in time facing a phalanx of screens at the gym. Commercials, streaming stock prices, muted soap operas and daytime talkshows: we can be momentarily hypnotized and relaxed by the banal flickering images, or we can train ourselves to ignore them.

Computer displays are part of this landscape of screens, and when not in use they are often occupied by screen savers. A screen saver is a piece of software that activates when a computer is idle. Like the human appendix, the screen saver’s original function, to prevent burned-in pixels, has been rendered unnecessary by the evolution of screen technology. Screen savers are a vestigial reminder of early computing whose utility has long since died out. Or has it?

Screen savers continue to thrive despite their apparent uselessness. The computer display is part of one’s unique, personal environment, and screen savers are an individual, decorative choice–a moment of differentiation for a generic machine and the person using it.

Screen savers can be defined as cinema in its broadest sense–pictures that move. As cinematic media, screen savers have formal qualities that distinguish them from film and video:

1. Peripheral vision
Viewers don’t sit down and concentrate on viewing a screen saver; instead it demands only intermittent attention.

2. Personal space
The “site” for a screen saver is a user’s individual computer at work or home.

3. Extreme duration
Viewer-ship can extend into weeks or months.

4. Programmatic editing
The computer can generate the order and content of the screen saver, based on a set of rules.

5. Internet connectivity
Content can be drawn in from outside of the computer.

Early experimental film makers explored cinema in ways that can be applied to screen savers. Many of Stan Brakhage’s abstract films could be equated with programmatic editing through a quality of controlled randomness. Structural films like “Arnulf Rainer” by Peter Kubelka resulted from setting up mathematical rules for editing. And several of Andy Warhol’s films involved extreme duration–most notably “Empire“–a single view of the Empire State building lasting eight hours.

The realization that screen savers are cinematic leads to exciting epiphanies:

Why not infect this small part of the pandemic of screens with something relevant, exciting, and new?

Why not counter the hypnotism of flashing, meaningless video content with images that connect to one another over time?

Why not use these inherent formal qualities to create poetic content for screen savers?

Why not redefine the utility of screen savers as software, so that they provide meaning and beauty?

Why not make screen savers worth watching?

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