By PETER SINCLAIR
Older readers may recall that last century, when the web was young, the internet was a grim wasteland of text accessible only by means of arcane rituals involving a C-prompt.
The aesthetics of this bleak industrial landscape were rudimentary. There were small utilities which could change the colour of
the text or the background and that was basically it.
Except for the screensaver ...
Before thicker phosphor coatings made monitors more or less impervious to screen burn-in, these surreal visions of bouncing balls, flying toasters and endlessly replicating geometries which whispered all night long on screens around the globe were the only way we could make our ugly new servants a little warmer, a bit fuzzier ...
Now, in an age which no longer needs it for any utilitarian purpose, the screensaver has at last attained the status of art.
Indeed, high art, for Stanford University is enshrining the form in a provoking online exhibition — Refresh: The Art of the Screensaver.
Its curator, James Buckhouse, has made the digital art of Refresh free and downloadable.
For those who decry it as a TVNZ-ish dumbing-down of the very Muses themselves, he invokes the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, claiming this digital art may prove in the future to be quite as significant as that artist's seminal La Mariee Mise a Nu Par Ses Celibataires ("The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors"), a work begun in 1912, declared "finally unfinished" in 1923, and damaged beyond repair in the early 30s.
The flying toaster itself, archetype of the genre, was I think (and I'm ready to be corrected here), created by the legendary screensaver house of After Dark, today home of the endearingly retro online game Roof Rats, among other vestigial activities.
Even today, when screensavers amount to little more than resource-hogs snuffling after kilobytes more properly reserved for the sober spreadsheet, Google will still conjure up about 212,000 screensaver webpages.
No matter how traditional your tastes (Virtual Aquarium), how kitsch (Dancing Baby), how unmediated (Lingerie Dreams) — somewhere there's a screensaver for you.
You might start your search at Freesavers, or UltimateSavers or any one of the dozens of websites which offer a welter of desktop themes and skins and wallpapers and assorted freeware. Just go to your favourite search-engine and type "screensaver."
My own choice is WebShots "where the world shares photos."
For the past year or so, Webshots has been the second most popular application on giant CNET's free download service after ICQ's hot instant messaging utility (now in version 2000b).
Where Napster was a file-sharer, WebShots is a photo-sharer and e-card centre with a wonderful sense of community and a faultless auto-install and daily updater. Amateur photographers may even feel like sharing their own most treasured snaps with other users.
But whatever you end up with on your screen, always insist — as the Simpsons caper grossly across it, or Pikachu and the other pocket monsters do cute and silly things to your desktop — that you are not wasting time.
Tell the boss you are enriching your senses, and his environment, with the art of the future.
Links:
Refresh: The Art of the Screensaver
Artmuseum.net
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors
AfterDark
Google
Virtual Aquarium
Dancing Baby
Lingerie Dreams
Freesavers
UltimateSavers
http://screensavers.anyskins.com
WebShots
ICQ
E-mail: petersinclair@email.com
<i>Peter Sinclair:</i> The art of the Screensaver
By PETER SINCLAIR
Older readers may recall that last century, when the web was young, the internet was a grim wasteland of text accessible only by means of arcane rituals involving a C-prompt.
The aesthetics of this bleak industrial landscape were rudimentary. There were small utilities which could change the colour of
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