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Resurrecting Atari's Slyly Subversive TwiLight Screensavers as Digital Art Prehistory

TwiLight was in development from 1991 to 1997 for the Atari TOS (The Operating System operating system), which existed for the old (1985 to 1993) Atari ST home computer. Just this week, one of the screen-saver collection's creators, Dragan Espenschied...
Michael Byrne

TwiLight was in development from 1991 to 1997 for the Atari TOS (The Operating System operating system), which existed for the old (1985 to 1993) Atari ST home computer. Just this week, one of the screen-saver collection’s creators, Dragan Espenschied, entered the piece of software into Rhizome’s awesome Artbase digital art archive, where it can now be downloaded for free to run on TOS (or TOS emulations), or just to enjoy in your browser window. Which you should, because at the very least it probably counts as some of the earliest digital art around. (At the very least, it’s the oldest in Rhizome’s archive.)

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“The year 2000 seemed like the distant future back then … Obviously, this was a parody of the famous After Dark® Aquarium. After Dark used to be the ruling screen saver application for Macintosh and Windows 3.11 at the time, but it was technically a joke. TwiLight was much better!”

First off, someone needs to GIF these things at once. Second, whatever happened to screen-savers anyway? In any case, find the browser ports here.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Tagged:Twilightthe-finer-artsatari tosscreen saverTechMotherboard
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