12 6 09 Update.

Tom Carroll and I visited the Lao Buddhist Temple on 20th and Washington on Saturday, 12/5. The space is extremely visually rich, overflowing with color and pattern. It was a bit much to take in, but we were made very welcome and I spent most of the time just gazing at the altar and the paintings on the walls, some done locally.

I found that I'm not the first one to envision a giant mutoscope. An RIT student and friends built one in 2008. I have contacted them, but no reply as yet. I have a pretty good idea how to go about constructing such a unit and what the engineering problems are, but it would be nice to talk to someone who has been that route.

Why a "giant" unit? I want the rig to be very hands-on and the larger the drum and more spaced the cards are, I believe, the better it will run with fewer problems of sticking cards, etc. Also a large size will allow for large, vivid images that have lots of detail and texture. I think that's important.

Where my thinking is right now is that I want to bring something to the mutoscope reel or the unit itself that is different and reflective of what I've found in the neighborhood. I'm thinking about "an interrupted narrative." That is, there would be some kind of story line but from that, I would remove sections or draw/paint/overlay them with other images. I'm thinking too that a great project for Taggert might be to have the students make flip books and incorporate some of those sections into the reel. It's really a daunting formal problem, which is probably why I like it so much--the permutations are virtually endless and full of possibility. Another possibility is to have two or more reels with different sequencing for people to view--sort of a them and variation or even have that within the one reel, having the same narrative repeat, but also change. I'm hooked.

Don't ask me why I thought of this, but a long time I had an idea for a conceptual piece that was a filming at foot level of the joining where building meets sidewalk of a full city block. Maybe something like that could serve as an anchor.

I'm going to need to make a small mutoscope soon, preferably one where the cards can be changed. I saw one online called a Retroscope. It's probably harder to build than it looks, but I think it would be a good starting point.