05 02 10: Experiemental Prototype

The next logical step seemed to be to build a small zoetrope. I wanted to get my "hands dirty" and see what the issues and pitfalls might be. I knew from looking online that the slits needed to be 1/8" to 1/4", and that a traditional zoetrope apparently has thirteen images. Perhaps this is why, zoetropes were sometimes called "Wheels-of-the-Devil." I made mine with sixteen images since if you bisect a circle and keep on bisecting the parts, this works out easily. I dragged out my old drafting tools I hadn't used since the early 1980's when I was an undergraduate. I made the unit from one solid piece of poster board. I had not intended such an elegant solution, (this unit folds flat for easy transport) but it just worked out that way, developing in two dimensions what would fold and link together into three.

The public kiosk is going to to be most likely run on a 20" diameter drum. This one is exactly 1/2 scale at 10", which is perfect for running on a small phonograph turntable. A musty hand-cranked portable is optional, but at about 40 rpm, the spring motor runs an very long time.

Does it work? Yes! My animation skills are not that wonderful, but it will be more than fine for demonstrations purposes tomorrow at Taggart. Way better than just showing a video grabbed off of Youtube.

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.