screensever
2025, video
(video on request)
Screensever begins with a familiar image: the default desktop wallpaper, humming quietly in the background of daily life. Originally photographs of Californian landscapes, these images undergo a strange transformation through global distribution — decontextualised from their origins, they become intimate yet collective sites of memory, present everywhere and truly nowhere.
To capture this liminality, photographic paper was pressed directly against a MacBook screen, creating lumen prints through the screen's own emitted light. The lumen print occupies an unusual material threshold: simultaneously a contact print and a form of projection, an imprint of physical touch and emitted light at once. Crucially, these prints remain unfixed — chemically unstable, continuing to shift and darken with every subsequent exposure to light. It is this instability that the work takes as its subject.
These prints were then repeatedly scanned over 20 minutes — the same duration as their original exposure — animating their ongoing deterioration in real time. Each pass of the scanner does not simply record the image; it participates in its destruction. The image is never truly captured, only caught in successive states of becoming and erasure, fading into a pink void before solarising entirely. What remains are the marks of the scanner itself — evidence of a process that sought the image and, in doing so, consumed it.
The accompanying sound extends a recording of the Mac startup tone across the full 20 minutes, stretched into a drone that mirrors the exposure time and resonates within the space. Light becomes sound; process becomes duration.
The work takes its title from the screensaver — an ambient format designed to prevent screenburn — while the image itself enacts precisely that destruction with every viewing. To see it is to erase it.
To capture this liminality, photographic paper was pressed directly against a MacBook screen, creating lumen prints through the screen's own emitted light. The lumen print occupies an unusual material threshold: simultaneously a contact print and a form of projection, an imprint of physical touch and emitted light at once. Crucially, these prints remain unfixed — chemically unstable, continuing to shift and darken with every subsequent exposure to light. It is this instability that the work takes as its subject.
These prints were then repeatedly scanned over 20 minutes — the same duration as their original exposure — animating their ongoing deterioration in real time. Each pass of the scanner does not simply record the image; it participates in its destruction. The image is never truly captured, only caught in successive states of becoming and erasure, fading into a pink void before solarising entirely. What remains are the marks of the scanner itself — evidence of a process that sought the image and, in doing so, consumed it.
The accompanying sound extends a recording of the Mac startup tone across the full 20 minutes, stretched into a drone that mirrors the exposure time and resonates within the space. Light becomes sound; process becomes duration.
The work takes its title from the screensaver — an ambient format designed to prevent screenburn — while the image itself enacts precisely that destruction with every viewing. To see it is to erase it.