Screen.saver
- David Reinfurt -
Three minutes of doing nothing…then everything goes black. In 1983, John Socha wrote the first screensaver software. Named SCRNSAVE, his simple program turned computer screens to black after three minutes of inactivity (the time delay could be adjusted only by recompiling the program). Personal computers were then becoming affordable and popular, but their high-contrast/green phosphor cathode-ray screens were subject to burn-in, where light intensity in one part of the screen left behind a permanent mark. Socha‘s program was designed to eliminate these ghost images and preserve the screen, thus both coining a term and introducing a new software genre, one that would grow ever more complex, eventually occupying negative time—the space between events in which nothing seems to happen—with complex yet random visual interludes.
An abbreviated, asynchronous and admittedly free-associative prehistory of the screensaver, however, might reasonably begin with Marcel Duchamp. Starting in 1918, Duchamp began to pursue Precision Optics, a project that involved a series of machines, films and assemblages. Rotating Glass Plates (Precision Optics) was comprised of four Plexiglas wings with black-painted stripes spaced along a rotating shaft. While the machine was engaged, the fins worked together to create a fleeting image of concentric rotating circles. Disks Bearing Spirals (1923), Rotative Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1924) and Disks Inscribed with Puns (1925–26) demonstrate a developing interest in building more involved structures that created complex effects automatically. In each of these works, Duchamp combined a simple graphic motif with an elaborate machine to produce moving images that never seemed to be the same twice.
By 1926, with the film Anémic Cinéma, Duchamp employed his Rotative Demisphere machine with alternating spiral and disks to maximum effect. The film shifts seamlessly between spirals and puns, suggesting an infinitely rearrangeable composition, like the film’s anagrammatic title. As a proto-screensaver, it is a simple graphic and an elaborate mechanism that created an image constantly shifting into and out of phase and sequence. Even Duchamp’s themes—animated (nonsense) messages and abstract geometry—prefigure the screensaver (remember “Your Message Here” and “Mystify,” the floating trapezoids?). By 1935, Duchamp attempted to commercialize upon this simple idea, introducing his Rotoreliefs at an annual inventors’ fair in Paris. His abstract concentric graphics became animated compositions when spun on an ordinary record player, but the attempt to sell this idea to the general public proved fruitless.
The next stop in our prehistory is the tiny green phosphor screen of the cathode-ray oscilloscope. The oscilloscope is a piece of electronic test equipment that allows signal voltages to be viewed as a two-dimensional graph of potential differences, plotted as a function of time. When testing an electronic system, the phase differences between the two signals form two sinous curves, connected, constantly drawing and redrawing themselves as a horizontal figure eight. These familiar shapes are now known as Lissajous curves (after Jules Antoine Lissajous, 1822–1880) and manifest as a two-variable parametric equation that calculates and recalculates itself over time in perpetual infinity, both figuratively and literally. (Watch out for ghost images!)
The Lissajous figure returns in the title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Perhaps you recall simple line graphics spiraling out from the human eye in the first few minutes of the film? These graphics are the work of John and James Whitney. Familiar with their short, abstract graphic films, title designer Saul Bass asked the Whitney brothers to develop a visual sequence of two systems falling in and out of phase. In Yantra (1950–57),1 completed just before Vertigo, the Whitney brothers used a stack of punched cards to create optical effects, much like a computer of that time used punchcards to load programs. Layering these cards and projecting light while moving, they were able to use a simple graphic system and a complex mechanism to produce compelling moving images of systems and interference.
Other filmmakers built on what the Whitneys started. Notably, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Douglas Trumbull created an abstract fantasy of timing and light to a soundtrack by Gyorgi Ligeti. The resulting scene, titled “Beyond the Infinite,” looks remarkably like the current Macintosh OS X default screensaver “Flurry.” Meanwhile, also in 1968, a physicist from Ann Arbor invented a system for drawing constantly reconfiguring pictures of phase and sequence—again, the Lissajous figure. Lloyd G. Cross invented “Sonovision,” a simple laser light show that could be used to project “a visual display of sound.”2 His device consisted of a loudspeaker with a reflective membrane. A helium-neon laser pointed at the reflective surface produced patterns on a wall or screen in time to music fed into a loudspeaker. A self-contained, two-megawatt version in a futuristic-looking molded case was offered commercially for $1,095. The Sonovision’s operation is described best by an early fan:
When there is no sound input to the device, the beam gives only a pinpoint of light. When one simple sound or musical note is introduced into the device, the dot moves in an ellipse at the frequency of the sound supplied. The size of the ellipse is related directly to the loudness of the note and can be adjusted by turning a knob on the control panel. When the note is changed to another one, a different ellipse with a new orientation is formed. When two notes are introduced simultaneously, the laser beam produces a combination of the two ellipses, similar to the Lissajous patterns obtained from cathode-ray tubes. Thus a symphony of notes will result in a symphony of ellipse interference patterns on the display screen.
Laser light shows were almost immediately combined with live performance, first in a production of Faust in Finland, famously by Pink Floyd and infamously by Blue Oyster Cult, who in 1976 recklessly pointed the lasers at the audience, causing minor injuries and considerable concern. Well-known light-show technicians of the time include Mark Boyle and Joan Hills (London), The Joshua Light Show (New York) and Single Bird Turquoise Wing (Los Angeles). Each began with a simple abstract graphic device and system, where constant rearrangements created fleeting images of a system falling into and out of coordination. Boyle and Hills used corrosive chemicals on an overhead display, The Joshua Light Show combined moving lights and simple shapes, while Single Bird Turquoise Wing used multiple media. These psychedelic light shows sought to create a visual composition that, although recognizable in part, never performed itself the same way twice, thus mimicking and presupposing the fundamental logic of the modern screensaver.
Early television and video art are also worth reviewing while considering the screensaver. Stan VanDerBeek, after studying film and graphics at Cooper Union and Black Mountain College, began early investigations into using computer software to create video and television works. In Image After Image (1966), created while a fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, VanDerBeek worked together with computer programmer Ken Knowlton to create “mental movies,” abstract processions of graphics and programmatic imperatives that could only be realized in real time. In 1965, Nam June Paik made Magnet TV, attaching a heavy-grade magnet to a normal television set, which constantly and unpredictably altered cathode rays and produced abstract, changing patterns. Later, Steina and Woody Vasulka created Noisefields (1974), consisting of a circle keyed on a background of electronic snow. The circle appears and disappears, articulating a full range of possible colors and patterns of interference with the artifacts of reproduction. It seems more than a coincidence that the primary journal collecting this emerging televisual work was called Radical Software.
No stranger to light shows, software or oscilloscopes, Brian Eno also made a body of work that privileges ambient spaces, times and sounds, filling the space between events when nothing seems to happen. Working as a musician, producer and artist, Eno has made this marginal space spectacularly productive. In the liner notes for Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Eno lays out his strategy for ambient music. He recounts being laid up in bed with a broken leg. A visitor left a new piece of music for him to enjoy, but, unfortunately, she left with the volume of the stereo much too low, causing the music to merge with all of the other sounds in the room. After a little while, Eno realized the effect was quite nice. Music could be made as a serious background—a carefully considered backdrop, largely meant to be ignored.
Ten years later, in an interview with PC Magazine, Eno picked up this thread. To his interviewer’s dismay, he claimed that the only useful quality of computers is their potential as semiautomated compositional systems. He confronted the interviewer, stating that “the only interesting thing about computers is Screensaver software.” Software used to move large chunks of data around (such as video editing, page layout or even word processing) were useless. The transformative power of computers and software was their ability to create realtime models that automatically generate endless variations—a soft assembly that is always becoming something else, a simple graphic and a complex algorithm.
As computer display technology rapidly improved, lower-contrast displays and graphical interfaces appeared, and screensaver programs became increasingly redundant. No longer required to preserve the image quality of the screen, they were reemployed for entertainment and marketing purposes, leading to increasingly tedious and frivolous software such as those released by After Dark for the then-new Apple Macintosh. The screensaver function was not built into the operating system, so After Dark provided third-party software with modules for different effects, including “Starry Night” (a point-by-point pixelated animation of a city skyline at night), stained glass and, of course, “Flying Toasters”—the animated sequence of retro-styled toasters with wings moving across a deep black background in lockstep with Wagner.
A more recent screensaver actually does something. SETI @ Home is a distributed computing project from University of California Berkeley that operates as a screensaver. SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Life) uses spare processing time on a group of networked computers, each running the same screensaver software, to process radio telescope signals from the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico. (Distributed or grid computing harnesses extra processing power by parsing out a job among a group of computers networked together to act as one.) In this case, the Arecibo radio telescope is constantly sending and receiving radio signals into deep space in an unending search for extraterrestrial life. The data is recorded on magnetic computer tape and then flown by U.S. Post to Berkeley (there is no broadband connection at the observatory.) In Berkeley, the massive task of parsing the signals to identify possible patterns is broken up into pieces, and the jobs are sent to participating computers, each with the SETI @ Home screensaver installed. When a particular computer is not being used, the screensaver is engaged and the search for extraterrestrial life resumes.
Grid computing, however, is not isolated to the search for extraterrestrial life. World Community Grid is currently using spare processing cycles on idle computers to study protein folding and AIDS diagnosis patterns. Perhaps this distributed logic is somehow germane to the screensaver form. (It may or may not be surprising that the two programmers credited with the Flying Toasters screensaver from After Dark went on to form Moveon.org, the political-action facility with an active mailing list and an even more active website.)
A recent op-ed piece from the New York Times eulogized the political death of what had been derisively called “Al Gore’s Screensaver.” Since his Vice-Presidency, Gore advocated the Trius Project: a satellite to be put into orbit around the Earth on a geo-synchronous path, which would allow it to send back live images of the whole Earth and a complete image of the sun. The project was intended to feed a series of real-time displays installed on computers in public schools. Apparently Gore woke up one morning wondering if it would be possible to beam a continuous image of the Earth back from space to inspire in people the need to care for our planet, just as the fragile beauty of the 1972 portrait of the Earth taken from the Moon inspired millions. Development began in 1998 at a cost of $100 million (1/1000 the cost of the International Space Station.) This live image, while showing nothing specific at any one moment, over time might both educate and garner support for alternative policies to reverse the course of global warming. Opponents in the Bush administration and in Congress were able to kill the project and belittle the idea—it was only a fancy screensaver, doing nothing.
Compare Al Gore’s screensaver to the recent “killer application” Google Earth and fundamental software ideologies become clear. Google Earth is a shockingly comprehensive global-mapping program that synthesizes satellite images, maps and user commentary into a complete soft model of the Earth. Synthetically floating before you in the deep space of the computer screen, Google Earth (as opposed to Gore’s rather more tedious actual Earth) promises transportation to any place in the world virtually—instantly. A user types in Dayton, Zagreb or Seoul and is immediately propelled in a computer animated and admittedly exhilarating flight towards the selected destination. On arrival, the user may further zoom, turn off the roads, add comments or find the closest 7-Eleven. This software is an instrument meant to be used, written to bring you the whole world at your disposal inside the soft silicon comfort of your home computer…Where do you want to go today?™
Given the most commonly used criteria of utility for software, it is not surprising that the screensaver is a debased form. It does nothing, it says nothing and it takes you nowhere. Instead, it provides a quiet, even ambient portrait of a system—a simple image, a complex algorithm and an ever-changing picture of their interaction. Still, as Al Gore’s screensaver suggests, there might just be something to doing nothing. The computer, Alan Turing’s universal machine, tirelessly capable of emulating the behavior of any other tool, is finally given a bit of rest. After three minutes of doing nothing, the screensaver kicks in and the software produces the silent, constantly reconfiguring image of a system falling into and out of phase, automatically generating a fleeting picture of interference and coordination. Perhaps there is something left to save.
August 25, 2006
1. Yantra means “implement” or “machine” in Sanskrit
2. U.S. Patent No. 779,510,27 – November 1968