Evolving Forms:

I'm 99% sure this is going to be the technical basis for the final piece I do. A zoetrope, sometimes called a wheel-of-life, is the precursor to the modern movie.

It creates a short moving image effect in a loop.

The kinetoscope had a a number of drawbacks. The biggest was the problem of 16mm film that could easily rip. The other was, an important part of a public art piece is that it be able to run, over and over again without interruption. The kinetoscope required the film to either run in an endless loop (difficult and complex) or be rewound (also involved).

I should be able to build a maquette that will run on a phonograph platter. Instead of a simple drum, I plan to make a tall cylinder and the images can run in a helix. I can't wait to see what the effect will be, but one advantage of doing this is allows a much longer chain of images to be used and it will surely lead to some serendipitous overlaps/juxtapositions as well. The viewer will have to view from the bottom up--with the imagery in the zoetrope perhaps going from old to new, tracing a kind of archaeology.

The large drum can be made out of fairly light weight materials. The most difficult part will be the platter to spin it. I'm going to start making inquiries to see if there might be a machine shop around that could fabricate this--essentially something like a potter's kick wheel, except pushed by turning a crank and running on a freewheel like a bike wheel, which might form the basis for the mechanism.

04 26 10 Another Image.

Portrait of retired jeweler Harry Azoff playing a very large harmonica that was my grandfather's. This probably wraps it up as far as working with the Stiffel photographs, which is not a bad percentage--three effective images out of a shoot of nineteen total captured.

04 23 10 Another Image and Some Commentary

Just a germ of an idea but I see a parallel between the often invisible layers of the 7th street neighborhood and the hidden forces in the portraits I'm creating there. One has to perhaps look and look again, fill in the missing pieces, maybe even reverse one's conventional thinking, labor and dig, and then an image, an unexpected portrait, emerges.

The layering up of the image in Photoshop could definitely be pulled into a video, showing a similar dynamic process.

The image on the right is what was started with (reversed tonally for a better comparison).

04 19 10 Update: Stiffel Workshop

The Stiffel workshop went very well. Four people brought items and we were able to improvise, from what was at Stiffel and from what I brought, to connect another four. The center-goers at Stiffel were very enthusiastic about the vintage black and white images.

I spent Saturday scanning the fragile paper negatives and importing the video Ian Duffy took during the shoot.

The shot posted here (reconstructed from the "remains") is closest to the kind of imagery I was hoping to get. There are a few more from the shoot that are also pretty strong and will require more time to finalize. This was really a whole new thing for me--a very different population and not costumed, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect, or sure of what I wanted. It will be interesting to see what happens with the other groups I'm lining up.

04/09/10 Update: "Objects of Memory"

Photo: Participants in the pre-workshop session for next Friday's shoot, "Objects of Memory." As you can see, a very nice turn out.

I showed images from previous shoots and talked about the mobile studio as well as showing photos of Kinetoscopes and a sample of the video montage work I've done.

We also talked about what kind of items people should bring. One woman, who lives across the street is bringing a small snare drum! I believe each person took home a reminder to post on their refrigerator, so they don't forget to bring an object to next week's shoot. There will be more reminders as the shoot date approaches as well.

Since I'm not versed in Powerpoint, I did all the work via a generic DVD program. It worked fine and seemed a lot less anxiety prone from what I know of the program people usually use for slideshow-type presentations. Actually my preference is 35mm slides.

Special thanks to Lynne and Susan for spreading the word and rounding up people.

04 04 10 Update

I've pretty much finished the preparations for Friday's preliminary meeting at Stiffel, including a sheet that each person will take home to hang on the refrigerator to remind them what to bring on April 16.

Since we finally had a decent Monday, the day I keep free to work on Journeys South, I was able to hit the neighborhood and do some videotaping. I want to have a lot of clips I pull from.

I always forget how static cities really are. Apart from cars and humans, not a lot moves. The 7th street area is ever more still. I focused primarily on architecture and spaces doing pans over cornices and house-fronts. I'm always fascinated by remnants and reminders of things that somehow stick around despite progress's best efforts to obliterate them.

The photos are video stills that I extracted.