‘Net art’ production puts the world on pause

Screen Saver

GENRE: Net Art DURATION: 10 min LANGUAGE: English AGES: PG AVAILABLE FROM: June 25

Time. There are moments when it seems to stand still and others when it seems to pass us by too quickly and too harshly.

Watching Screen Saver feels like this. It feels like being inside the limitless reaches of time, but also like realising, with a menacing dread, how little time you have.

Screen Saver is a net art creation by artists Leila Anderson and Stan Wannet who have previously collaborated on projects locally, and in the Netherlands and China.

Anderson holds an MA from Das Theatre in the Netherlands while Wannet has degrees in electronic engineering and art.

Together, the two have become known for their immersive, physical and interactive installations, but Screen Saver is the pair’s first fully digital collaboration.

The term “net art” describes a piece of art which uses the internet as its main medium.

In other words, art that cannot be experienced in any other way but via the internet.

Net art was popular from 1993 through to the 2000s.

Screen Saver is described as a “love poem” to the screen saver and an ode to an old technology.

As the title suggests, the piece essentially functions as a screen saver would, “wasting” time or “filling the gap” as our screens go to “sleep”.

Just like time itself, audiences cannot pause, fast-forward or rewind the piece.

Screen Saver begins with the words “tick” and “tock” moving across your screen — slowly at first and then faster like increasingly agitated objects.

Each word bounces back across the screen when it hits the edges — reminiscent of the bouncing DVD logo screen saver many millennials can remember from childhood — the days when DVDs were still a “thing”.

It moves on, continuing in this abstract, surreal sort of way and takes audiences into an empty home.

The viewer sees a changing cityscape, a beating heart, a bee and a blinking eye while words form sentences along the bottom of the screen.

Viewers are then thrust into the woods until the familiar and repetitive “tick, tock” slides across the screen again.

Throughout the piece a poem is recited visually. The poem uses a text extract from an unknown aboriginal poet from Giordano Nanni’s book Colonisation of Time.

The 10-minute sequence continues to repeat itself in this manner, sometimes letting us get lost in the concept of a timeless world, and at others jarring us “awake” in the realisation that time “makes [us] wait and makes [us] run”, the realisation that time controls our daily grind.

In the same breath, the piece asks what would happen to us if time no longer dictated our lives.