In all areas where technology is applied, communication has the most benefit. Look around and you’ll see. The fanciest designs with the coolest features are those gadgets that either send messages across (on TV sets, lappies, ipods, etc) to us or those we use to send our messages across to others. That would be the ubiquitous cell phone and, well, all the others, too.

To say that humans cannot live without communicating with another human being is an understatement. That is the very reason languages were invented! That humans cannot live without a gadget or two strapped somewhere in his backpack nowadays so his message can be sent across to someone and vice versa is obviously already a means to get on with one’s daily survival or ritual.

And we know that communication is not always the interactive type as there are other forms when one merely listens, digests, and processes everything heard, like songs, music, a preaching, listening to the news over the radio. Or when one merely looks on, as on a billboard ad or simply reading a magazine, a book, or a newspaper. Almost everything communicates.

The recent local elections had been a bombardment of messages coming from a vast number of candidates and through many means. Seemingly, face-to-face communication today is a tedious task when distances and even absences can be covered by merely clicking ‘SEND’ on any gadget.

The greatest advertising guy, Leo Burnett, said: Visual eloquence, was far more persuasive, more poignant, than labored narratives, verbose logic or empty promises. Visuals appeal to the “basic emotions and primitive instincts” of consumers.

Er, do screensavers communicate, too?

In journalism, a photograph tells the story better.

The arts gets in this picture, likewise. To a poet, a blank page communicates. To a painter, an empty canvas. To a sculptor, either a big chunk of stone or yet a slab of leftover log. How then does technology get into this scene? Interestingly, technology has crept in rather progressively.

A year ago, at the Laforet Museum in Tokyo (a friend emailed me this), something new was born. Really can’t say if it’s in the art scene or in the pop music scene, but it merges both disciplines. Called 77 Million Paintings, the museum’s walls were lined with a hundred or so flat screens. Slowly dissolving to another painting, 77 million in all, the collection is complemented with soft music that is so unique for this artistic anthology. If you don’t hear the audio, try it in YouTube. The Epson company in Japan provided the monitors used on the museum’s walls.

Brian Eno, the guy behind this new movement, calls it “an experience with light”. That instead of gazing on a blank wall, a screen on the wall with his 77 million paintings will do the magic. Truly amazing. Seventy-seven million communication points, with no duplications, there you have it. Every change on the screen is a journey to a different piece or a different scene with all the subliminals you can muster. Get immersed!

From what I have seen and heard, experienced, as you may say, the stained glass effects communicate on the religious plane. I don’t know how what you saw and what you heard meant.

Eno sells his awesome 77 million feat in limited edition DVD form. ‘Limited’ only means it won’t reach our shores, so we can only experience a number of what’s in the collection from what we had already seen and heard. He just had this collection exhibited a second time at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco this 29 June to 1 July with Obscura Digital providing the video canvases on the wall.

“Technology allows us to stitch together images, words, songs and footage like so much modified DNA. At first, sampling was radical and controversial. But these days, artists can download unprecedented volumes of source materials, from anywhere in the world, or any time in history. Technology is in the hands of the people, creating a DIY explosion and more thought-provoking combinations of symbols, texts, pictures, traditions — you name it — than ever before”. Well said; these words are etched on the museum’s interface. See the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts yourself.

Creating new means of communicating a message, with all the technology available, apparently becomes so simple. You just need to really have the heart for it. Yeah, and the market for it, too, if you plan to make bucks.

And back to that question: do screensavers communicate, too? Some screensavers tell stories. Have you seen American Greetings? They so do, even wallpapers! And pictures, remember? Why don’t you make them communicate for you?