The first-person dash through the maze of thick, red brick walls. The tangle of pipes in space, forever growing and folding. Those flying toasters. The screensavers of the 1990s are strangely memorable, though I guess it makes sense when you consider that the 1990s were the peak of the CRT era, a time when screens actually needed saving. Today's LCDs, impervious to burn-in, don't really need the things, and when you do actually see them, they're often just the defaults--anodyne abstract art, maybe, or rainforest scenes.
Idle Screenings, a free app for Mac and Windows, brings back some of that good old After Dark weirdness. Every month, it will beam a strange new video artwork to your unused screen.
"We were interested in using a screensaver for this purpose because it seemed that this was a kind of maligned and shelved technology," says Mitch Trale, the app's co-creator. "We thought it would be good to animate this disused space, and to present an alternative to the shareware relics available today." After all, if we have to live in a world full with screens, why not live in a world full of screens showing art?
>A screen saver is an energy waster. For Trale, that only heightens the stakes of the project.
Because of electricity, that's why. A screen saver is, in effect, an energy waster. But for Trale, that only heightens the stakes of the project. How valuable is a daily dose of art, in light of our world's precarious energy situation? And how does pure aesthetic delight stack up against all the other things we let our devices do all day and all night? The app, Trale says, "calls attention to computers as these always-on, greedy appliances. Consumer technology leeches electricity from the walls for our constant convenience. DVRs are busy at home while we are at work. And what about bandwidth? My torrents run upstream all night long. Is this wasteful? What else should I be doing with that pipe?"
Resource consumption aside, the app is a clever little way to disseminate art. "There is this cacophony of visual work available online, and our experience with that work is often very elective," Trale explains. When you're on Tumblr or Facebook, you're seeing things you're predisposed to liking, either because you've liked them in the past or because your friends think you'll like them. When you're searching Google to find more of an artists work, you're essentially getting art on demand. Idle Screenings is just the opposite--you don't get to see the goods until you're away from your computer, or doing something else. "I think this runs counter to the classic value structures of our attention economy, which is interesting to us," Trale explains.
Ultimately, Idle Screenings made my MacBook run a little too hot and a little too loud for me to stick with it. For the few weeks I did use it, though, I loved it--coming back to my computer to see Kim Laughton's insane revolving orrery of foliage, disembodied heads and Coke cans was always a treat. And though it might've used some extra juice, it's hard to put a price on reminding people that, even in 2013, long after the last copy of After Dark had been installed, we can still use our screens for introducing some weird flying stuff into the world.
