02 14 10 Coney Island Museum

I was able to meet up with Lee Deigaard, the artist who created the memorial to Topsy the Elephant mutoscope and Aaron Beebe, who is the curator of the Coney Island Museum. Lee used a vintage mechanism that she rebuilt and then fitted a new reel that she made. It was great to see things in action and how it was fitted together. The reel mechanism is pretty much what I had envisioned, but I was not aware of how the spring-loaded "thumb," the piece that holds back the cards comes into play (the topology is somewhat complex) and that there is also a catcher of sorts (the inclined metal plate below the bulb) that is angled so that the cards get slightly wedged after they flip; prevents backlash.

Overall, I think it will be do-able, the most complex part of the Topsy mutoscope is the coin operation mechanism, which the one I plan to build will not have. I like how history and concept integrated in this piece. It's both fascinating, heart-rending and poetic.

01 01 10 First Experimental Clip

Above: A five second clip at six frames per second, about the lower limit of human persistance of vision. I should be able to compose the video collage in Adobe Premiere and then export a sequence of .tif files at six or ten frames a second. For a minute of watching that will be about 360-600 cards. A good size for the cards should be approximately 3" x 4" for the images, or possibly somewhat larger.

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.

11/18/09 A New Direction!

It was one of those "Aha!" moments. I love the idea of the magic lantern show (in fact I am still doing one on my own that I hope to tour with next year), but as the questions of public art started to be examined last week in our meetings, my thinking started to change. Returning to video work this week, via interviews I taped at Stiffel, planted some ideas in my head as well.

In 2005-2006 I spent a year making a twelve minute video collage: Earth, Water, Fire. The "Fire" section is on You Tube (Click here!) Shortly after, I got heavily involved with the Polaroid photography and the work that eventually led to Tsirkus. Many of the same aesthetic elements of my photography are also in the video: juxtapositions of imagery, bending of the medium, serendipitous visual intersections, things that connect old to new, and ambiguous narrative.

Somehow the idea of the old-style "flip-movie" machine got back into my head. These machines (called Mutoscopes) survived in old, dusty Bodegas in my old neighbourhood in Manhattan according to my older sister. I missed them by a few years, but was always fascinated by the romantic notion of low-tech, essentially hand-made moving images, something run just off a hand-crank that allowed you to glimpse into another, perhaps poetic world. OK. Truth be told, these machines were mainly about parting a quarter dollar from the patron and were often much less than artful, pornographic.

Using lantern slides, I had thought about multiple projectors to get a kind of collage effect, but that's complicated, expensive and temporal and not particularly public; it has to exist in a special space and requires a "performance." Also, I was somewhat concerned with overlap with Kate's idea to project video. Why not a Mutoscope kiosk that can be moved from neighborhood to neighborhood? It can eventually "live" somewhere permanently too, even if it has to be trimmed down, such as just keeping the essential optical-mechanical insides and the documentation?

A set of the flip-cards could fan out and become part of a mural or an installation. I think it will take about 300-600 cards to run a minute, it might be fascinating to see all the cards up on a wall somewhere or as a kind of funky, articulated banner/mythic animal before they become a moving image. The technology of making a Mutoscope is do-able, in some ways simpler and more straight forward than a high-powered lantern projector.

Bullet points:

-Allows collage-ing of video snippets, text, and images. I can even deconstruct an image, making it look progressively older.

-Endless loop of images with no beginning or end wherein there are layers and pieces that emerge and submerge, could be seen as a kind of metaphor. The hand-cranked image can be slowed, lingered over, and revisited.

-Creates a new, experimental medium that other artists might want to explore; possibly gives the project a continued life beyond this funded year.

-Brings the 7th St. Corridor to other neighborhoods since it can "tour."

-Will act as a magnet to attract visitors to the neighborhood during business hours.

-Allows for a detailed and complex images to be viewed, much like the magic lantern.

-Can be appreciated on many levels: aesthetic, conceptual, mechanical/technical.

-Participatory, but not totally passive.

-Quick! Something someone can check even if have a minute or two.

-Will encourage dialogue on the street.

-Design and construction of the kiosk casework would involve local artists like Phat Long (Cambodian sculptor) , Ricky Tenaglia (painter), and John Tenaglia (woodworker).

-Fits in well, I think, with the works planned by the other project artists.

-Connects old to new both technologically and visually.

-Links with the history of popular entertainment in the neighborhood. As far as I can tell, other than pool, movies were the prime entertainment outside of the home.

-Requires a "looking in," essentially a discovering of what lies inside, much like the way I have found things in my own explorations. What you see is NOT what you get--it's way more.

-Needs no power source, just sunlight.

I look forward to hearing what other people think about this idea!