Daemon Saver is a video work commissioned by Hidden Edges and presented at the Elektra Digital Art Biennial in 2024.
In computing terminology, a daemon refers to a process that operates continuously in the background, beyond the direct control or even awareness of the user. A screensaver, conversely, is a program that activates when a system becomes inactive, historically developed to protect early monitors from burn-in effects. These two notions—background processing and idle-time visual activation—form the conceptual and structural foundation of the work.

The piece is composed from visual material sourced from Idleplus.com (Idle Project, 2021), a platform that gathered spontaneous, user-generated contributions consisting mainly of blurred photographs and short videos of people. Daemon Saver merges these ephemeral contributions into a collection of fading, ambiguous moving images that become the “screensaver” of the main sculptural element: an LED structure built with two anamorphic points of view. Through this dual perspective, the distorted images are reconstructed and made readable in space.

The project interrogates the aesthetics and politics of digital residue—visual echoes of human presence that persist in the margins of the internet. The work reflects on how digital infrastructures capture, archive, and repurpose traces of everyday life, suggesting that what appears idle or inconsequential may nonetheless possess a latent agency. It becomes a suspended choreography between human intention and machine inertia, revealing the shifting role of the human image within contemporary technological environments.