Get Onboard the Coding Train to Screensaverville!
We’ve been through a lot since my last post, including the conclusion of the poetry projects and the complete glitch gallery projects, which are soon going to be featured on the Hurley Converge Center’s Media Wall, so now it’s time to turn our attention to something else.
Even though I had a lot of fun making the videos for the first three projects, it’s time to turn over the reigns of Youtube-based instruction to someone who is far, far better at it than I am. Daniel Shiffman, with his “Coding Train” channel offers instruction in all kinds of creative coding, but he’s most especially fond of and good at explaining P5.js, which is what we’ll be using to make screensavers of some sort in the next project for this class.
Back in the oldentimes (the late-1900s), a screensaver was a piece of novelty software that you could download, install, and let your computer run for the hours you weren’t actively using it. Nowadays, you might have a simple quote or a slideshow from a photo album, but with the surreal and psychadelic imagery of many screensavers of the 80s and 90s, it was easy to imagine these looping animations as the dreams of your computer while you weren’t using it. The technical function was to save energy, but the cultural function was to imagine the computer as a playful window into a realm of somniferous transcedence.
For a time, third-party screensavers like After Dark thrived, and it was common for users to download promotional screensavers from their favorite movies.
Even though screensavers as such are no longer as visible or well-known on their own terms as distinct content, they persist as a cultural form or reference that, in our case, provide some focus to our current project of creating an interesting, looping animation for the HCC media wall.
It’s an ambitious project, but I’m sure we can get there with the help of the Coding Train!