Three years ago, multimedia art house Antenna Tool & Die was hawking floppy disks of its screensaver art from a booth on the sidewalk of Manhattan's Soho district. Next week, its Kickstand CD-ROM - featuring Jenny Holzer's signature aphorism art - will migrate to the shelves of the Guggenheim Museum Soho's gift shop to become the first commercial screensaver artwork.
The Kickstand disc is the latest example in the larger migration from computer-as-venue to computer-as-medium. Unlike online gallery sites exhibiting Web-specific art or digital work wired up in galleries, Kickstand pushes Holzer's meta-proclamations right onto your desktop. Collage artist Stephen Kroninger, whose own Kickstand disc is due this fall, says this is where the great work will be done over the next few decades. "If Picasso were born today, would he be picking up a paintbrush in 20 years?" he asks. "No way - he's going to be using computers."
Jenny Holzer's Kickstand, which will retail for US$22 when it's shipped next week, stays faithful to the style of her previous work. Nine meta-proclamations spill across the screen. The phrases - like "Spit all over someone with a mouthful of milk if you want to find out something about his personality fast" and "The beginning of the war will be secret" - move in random patterns, dragging a luminous trail.
The program can run in either a full-screen format or within a 1.5-inch window. Antenna co-founder Peter Semmelhack says the application was built in 1995, but they waited until now so that "computers would be fast enough to run Kickstand and not annoy people." Gift shops at the Museum of Modern Art in LA and the Walker gallery in Minneapolis have already requested shipments.
Semmelhack points to the introduction and experimentation with the synthesizer as the model for screensaver art. "In the '60s and '70s, people just started making beeping and honking noises at first, but now they make great music," he describes. "You'll start seeing [that development] here. This is not just painting - it's time-based."
Kickstand isn't alone in the field, but its work may be the most accessible. Last year, Sandra Gering Gallery produced five limited-edition screensavers of performance artist Cheryl Donegan's work, but at $500 a pop, the gallery couldn�t sell them all. What makes Kickstand interesting is that it's a commercial product, says Andrea Scott, spokeswoman for online gallery adaweb. Adaweb, which produced a Web-based Holzer exhibit last year, designed its own screensaver for World Aids Awareness Day last December, but it was free. "I believe that there is a market for this work," Scott adds.
Semmelhack sees Kickstand as only the start of a looming convergence of artists, technology, and commerce. On Friday, Kickstand will be unveiled at the Gramercy International Art Fair, and the group wants to use a 42-inch TV screen to project Kickstand at regular exhibitions.
With the rise of push technology, Semmelhack also hopes to implement a kind of PointCast-like system that delivers artwork to the desktop where "galleries would have subscriber services where people could look at the art and then go to the site to buy it." "When the screen isn't in use, we're going to use it," he says.
Adaweb's Scott, however, criticizes the passivity of screensaver art in relation to the "participatory" nature of Web-based art. "What is exciting for us is the interactive nature of [this art]," she contends. "We're not into push."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
