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.