Screen Savers are Cinema (a manifesto)
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?
This manifesto is a revolution. I must have been blind before because now all I see are screens… and they all need saving! Thank you Idle Time for making my computer dream.
I like these ideas a lot….
One of the reasons that I like Holding Pattern so much is that travel - especially air travel - represents a process of enforced calm. You’re sitting there, in the metal tube, and there’s nothing you can do to hurry things up, so you may as well relax, lean back, and just go with the flow. Watch the world - or the clouds - drift by. Meditate. Doze.
When Holding Pattern kicks in on my Mac, I find myself relaxing “by association”, as it were. It induces the peaceful state that I drift into while I’m flying, and this is good.
Where would I like to take it? Well, two things come to mind. First, I fly on United all the time, because I’m a “Channel 9″ junky: I love to listen to the radio chatter between the pilots and controllers. I’d love a channel 9-style soundtrack option.
Secondly, travel is about places. I wish there were some way of sharing out-of-the-window shots with other Holding Pattern users around the world.- things like this sequence, for instance.
Anyway, congratulations on Holding Pattern.
HP1 has been my favorite screen saver for quite a while now and the new Holding pattern is just amazing! Both give me the opprtunity to spend some time actively day dreaming and that makes my day so much better. Thank you for the great app and I’m very excited to see what other gems you come up with.