“Screensavers are like a moving painting,” Rozendaal told me in a Skype call from Utrech in the Netherlands. “It’s almost as if they were made for a museum. They’re purely digital images, so they’re designed to show what a computer will do. They don’t overdo it, they have very simple parameters. They aren’t storytelling.”
Rozendaal is curating a gallery of 27 screensavers in a way they’ve never been seen or appreciated before. The show is called Sleep Mode. Four of the oldest screen savers will be on their native machines, for context, but most will be blown up along the large space provided by Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut (New Institute). Rozendaal has also put together an audio tour and an online collection of interviews with the people who created the screensavers etched into the back of your brain.
One thing those programmers emphasized, according to Rozendaal, is that these screensavers are not films or animations, but procedurally generated design pieces, a living mobius strip created for the simple purpose of stopping your monitor from burning its own image into itself.
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