Interview with Cathy Davies

1. What artists have most influenced you?
I like portable art for multiple publics, like Jenny Holzer's Truisms. I am inspired by the whole field of public art, art that's free and has a whole life entirely seperated from institutions. That definitely includes things like graffiti and zines, as well as some net art. I have a DVD box set of the work of Stan Brakhage that a friend gave me, and I am constantly moved by the sincerity and humanity with which he made movies. I like to think of screensavers as a humanist medium. My number one influence is probably the comic book artist Chris Ware. I love the density of his work, and how his formal choices are inextricable from the stories he tells. He's also someone who produces artwork that people can buy for $12, yet he keeps it real. I think a lot of the art world believes you can't keep it real and make a consumer purchasable product, but that's a big mistake. My background in graphical interface design and interest in theorist Edward Tufte leads me to a strict philosophy of "clean" design & usage testing to create the most robust, confusion-free user experience.

2. What drew you to screensavers as a medium?
My most successfully distributed work, pre-screensavers, is a font (Good Girl) completed circa 1997. I made it quite casually and gave it out for free, no copyright, etc. A nice little utilitarian piece of software, a tool for designers, and a vessel for whatever message you might want to typeset with it. Well, today I see that font every time I go to Trader Joe's supermarkets - they use it on many many products. Around 2000, Blockbuster Video was using it on tv spots and on their plastic bags. I also see it in zines and comics, I never know where it will appear next. Screensavers are another utility. When i realized the distributive potential of software with utility value, plus the cinematic qualities of screensavers, I knew this was going to be a very interesting place to experiment.

3. It is fascinating how you are creating a new non linear narrative and filmic space in such a long static and stagnant tool such a screensaver...where do you see this work progressing in future projects?
You want to see stagnant - the lobby of the building where I work has a giant plasma monitor tuned to CNN. In the morning, there are usually some 30 to 50 people waiting for the elevators, all gazing at the monitor, which is muted. It totally kills conversation. So it's this kind of silent, mass intake of 1/8 second fast paced action cuts and title graphics. Screensavers release viewers from concentrated viewing. I call them "ambient cinema", in that they don't require or demand focused viewing, but rather are occasional and peripheral by nature. Screensavers are also "cinema of extreme duration", but it is this duration that lets a viewer locate subtlety, familiarity versus change. My next screensaver is an experiment with extreme duration and suspense. There's a narrative event that happens continually over about 8 hours of accumulated idle time (time when the user's computer is idle and the screensaver is playing).

4. what is the dynamic tension between your very beautiful images and the subtext of the work and of that in between space of being in flight?
From the Idle Time site: "Being a passenger confines your body to a very limited set of activities, yet you are observing the world, unmediated, from a god-like perspective." In Holding Pattern, there is a kind of constant - the perspectival passage of the aerial views, foregrounded by the interior of the plane. The interstitial moments, scenes that occur between changes of time of day and between scenes, upset that constant - so that's where I put altered safety instructional graphics. For example, there is an illustration of a plane seat submerged in water, and another of plane passengers sliding down the inflatable ramp into free fall. These graphics are the psychological revelations, the daydreams of the passenger.

5. Do you see more of a cinematic space broken into stills in terms of your images or of a space that moves stills by the re-emergence after the screensaver is off then flashes again into being?
The digital size of video pretty much eliminates my ability to use it in a screensaver (I need to keep downloads reasonably small) - so the motion that happens has to be created with animation and editing. In the case of Holding Pattern, this is literally perpectivally moving pictures. The order of playback of scenes is created on the fly by code - I call this "programmatic editing". There's a hidden framework of possible scenes that is filled in each time the screensaver plays. So I guess that when the screensaver plays multiple times, you could say it's the same "film" playing with different editing.

6. Can you go deeper into what you deem "user friendly propaganda" ?
I think "They Rule" by Future Farmers is a good example of user friendly propaganda. They are using interface design, specifically the metaphor/icon aspect of it, to give users an interesting set of actions to complete. The activity of arranging connections between corporate players is what convinces users of something, redefines their idea of a corporation. "User friendly propaganda" probably applies more correctly to some of my other projects besides Holding Pattern. However, if you think of Holding Pattern in the context of the workplace (or at the very least, the workstation), the metaphor of flight, and the peace of the aerial landscapes is a kind of escape from the task-oriented MS Office world of the Windows interface. My next Idle Time download is much more like user-friendly propaganda, but you'll have to wait and see...

7. What is a "gift economy" in relation to the screensaver download and data ?
"Gift economy" is a term that's used a lot to describe Net phenomena like open source software and even businesses like Yahoo. The basic concept is that if you give something away for free, you will reap some sort of benefit in return, be it reputation, exchanged ideas, etc. I think it's a really interesting idea to apply to art, in an age where fine art seems to be either dependent on the art market, or completely disenfranchised from it. "Holding Pattern" has had around 300,000 downloads so far. This is a really huge number of people who've enjoyed the "gift" - with future downloads, I want to experiment with how I can get some form of economic return, which will in turn support more free downloads.

8. How do you see the screensaver as medium in long duration viewing...of the work over long stretches of time in an evolution and resonances?
Holding Pattern was designed to have a viewing experience of about 4 months. Four months is about the point that I think people will really have seen everything the screensaver has to offer, including rare scenes and interstitial graphics. Every element is bound to recur - but the combination of elements in the formation of scenes, then groups of scenes next to each other, statistically this will never recur. There are two scenes within Holding Pattern that have a very low probability of occurance. These are a reward for longer viewing, because the longer you keep the software on, the more likelihood you have of seeing these scenes. A quick cheat sheet for these scenes: After the morning, there's a small possibility of seeing Antarctica. After night, there's a small possibility of seeing night again, with a transparent plane.

9. What drew you to working with new media tools ?
The digital medium makes so many things possible, and it's also inherently contemporary.