Don't touch that mouse!

"Refresh - The Art of the Screensaver" is the first exhibiton that you have to download in order to see it

By Tilman Baumgärtel

If you want to see art, you have to look at it. If you have an screensaver running on your computer, you normally don't look at it. But if you want to see the digital art that is on display on the internet and at the californian Stanford university, you should look at the monitor of your computer, even when you are not working on it. Because the exhibition "Refresh" shows 22 screensavers by arts. And they only run, if you don't work on your computer. So don't touch that mouse!

"Refresh - The Art of the Screensaver" might very well be the first art exhibtion that you have to download, before you are able to view it, since all pieces can be grabbed from the website of the Intel-sponsored "artmuseum.net" (www.artmuseum.net) and installed on your computer. And all of a sudden you are the proud owner of original pieces by - among others - well know artists such as Peter Halley and Jenny Holzer. At the museum of Stanford University they are shown on monitors that are hanging on the wall.

"Refresh" has a surprising approach and deals with a subject that is integrated into most computer systems, but which so far has rarely been adresses as a topic for digital art. That is odd, because screen savers are due to their nature very similar to multiples that have been produced by artists since the 60ies to distribute small pieces of art to a large number of people. Due to their nature screensavers are also related to the video loops, that artists have experimented heavily within the last couple of years, and it would have interesting to see what video artist like Klaus vom Bruch (http://www.kvb.com/) or Daniel Pflumm (http://www.pupsi.com/), who have specialized in loops, would have done with this particular format.

"What makes the loop of screen savers different from the loop of single channel video", says James Buckhouse, artist and curator of "Refresh", "is the possibility for variance in the expression of that loop. A computer-generated loop has the ability to explore the algorithmic possibilities of a theme with variations. Some of the screen savers in this show specifically address this idea. Others derive their poignancy through exact repetition." He adds: "All the work in this particaul show really tries to challenge and question and celebrate the space of the screen."

Most pieces that are in the "Refresh" exhibiton have been commissioned for the show, with a few notable exceptions "SoftSub" (http://www.c5corp.com/softsub/index.shtml) by the art collective C3 scans your harddisk and makes ideosyncratic "snapshots" of your computer - one of the best pieces in "Refresh". "Emptiness is Form" by Scott Snibbe looks almost like a "real" screen saver: only when spending a long time in front of your PC, you see the shape of a person in the Lotus position emerging from a black background.

Some of the pieces deal with topics that the artist have been concerned with in the past: Jenny Holzer has adapted her shocking piece "Lustmord" for the screensaver. Peter Halley has animated one of his colourful painting of network nodes into a flickering something; Glenn Ligon shows closeups of one of his oil paintings.

But the better pieces in this show deal directly with the computer and the internet: "The Thief" by Francis Alys shows a ghost-like figure that climbs again and again out of a window, as if he was trying to leave the Windows-Interface - or is he trying to break into our desktop? "EveryImage" by Alex Galloway downloads continuously images and texts form the data bank of the net art site "Rhizome" (www.rhizome.org), on our computer.

"Refresh" touches on an interesting subject, and hopefully this is not the last attempt to deal with this form of artistic software. One the other hand it remains an interesting question if some of the commercial screensavers of the past have approached this topic in a more radiacal way - and therefore were better art works than the pieces in "Refresh" - the lawn moaner man, that used to moan away the old black and white Mac-Desktop, or the pre-installed screensavers on my PC that take the interface apart like a puzzle challenge their subject matter in a more thourough way than most art screen savers that are on display at artmuseum.net.

Tilman Baumgaertel