The Lumia, screensavers

I went to LACMA yesterday to see Thomas Wilfred's Luccata Opus 162 drawn by Chris Meyer's discussion of it in his provideocoalition blog. The title says it all; this machine-driven light piece comes from that 20th century 'let's use music as a  metaphor for visual abstraction' school of thought. The piece is a disappointment only because you can't see the machinery—the light is rear projected in an enclosed box. I was surprised to see how precise the mechanical motion was. I was expecting to see the subtle shaking you get from dolly tracks—analog interference that occurs despite the gears. But the only thing that wasn't smooth was the 'stepping' that accompanied the fading images, almost as if Wilfred was using cheap potentiometers.

I've been wondering why I find these abstract light machines so compelling when I find screensavers, which produce a very similar effect, so uninteresting.