Perception and Playthings

John Leung’s Magic Carp-pet (2010)

Meredith — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:13:14 +0000

Winner of RedDot design award, John Leung’s Magic Carp-pet is a moire pattern printed half on a rug and half on a glass-topped coffee table that animates a school of carp swimming as you walk around the table. Basically, it’s a novel large-scale scanimation piece. The videos below show both the mock-up and the actual demo version. I wonder how it would look in a regular domestic setting.
More info available at John Leung’s website.

Yellowstone, Daniel Henderson, 2009.

Meredith — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:10:22 +0000

Yellowstone 2009.
Black Belgian marble, glass lenses, nickel-plated brass, powder-coated aluminum, LCD screens, 32 x 36 x 28 in., 1350 lbs.
Painted steel base, 51 x 36 x 23 in.,

There are several giant View-Masters and reels out there (notably at Disney Orlando and at Dollywood), but Daniel Henderson’s 750 pound sculpture entitled Yellowstone (at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey), is certainly the most elegant.
Photo via the artist’s website.

Happy 2012!

“Christmill” Zoetrope Christmas Tree at The Mill NY

Meredith — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:47:32 +0000

A three-tiered Christmas tree zoetrope adorns the office of The Mill NY this holiday season. I really like the way it’s lit; it looks like it creates a warm, inviting ambiance like a traditional Christmas tree. It would be interesting to see some video or more details depicting the three animated sequences, but for now, this festive photo documentation will have to suffice. Read more about the project and process over at the Mill blog. Happy Holidays!

Review: Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era

Meredith — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:03:06 +0000

My review for Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era is now available in the current issue of Screening the Past.

Katy Beveridge Bicycle Wheel Zoetrope

Meredith — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:54:37 +0000

Katy Beveridge’s stunning bicycle wheel animation is making the internet rounds this week. Beveridge is a student working on a project related to early animation, and her video documentation of the bicycle wheel zoetrope in action is pretty amazing. It’s perhaps more accurate to call the piece a phenakistoscope, as it’s essentially a rotating disc rather than a band of images, but it’s interesting that the zoetrope, as one of the more popular and recognizable optical devices from the nineteenth century, often becomes a central reference point for contemporary artists. I really like the gear motifs Beveridge chose to use. It apparently took a lot of trials to accurately match the camera’s frame rate to the rotation of the wheel (I suspect that since the wheel was rotating at an inconsistent rate, some work in post may have been done). What’s really interesting is how a lot of posts about the piece (like this one) suggest that the animation is only visible through a camera. That’s not entirely true. While the animation can’t be seen with the unaided eye, it would most certainly work with the addition of a slotted disc (like the original phenakistoscope). Perhaps the fact that the camera is considered the best mediating mechanism to render the movements visible (versus, say, a slotted disc or strobe light) suggests that the emphasis for these kinds of works might not be their liveness or the performativity, but their ability to be recorded, captured, and circulated online.
Here’s the boingboing post about the animation.
For more bicycle-related animations, read all about Tim Wheatley’s wonderfully-recorded cyclotrope.

Pieterjan Grandry’s GIF Player

Meredith — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:45:15 +0000

Artist Pieterjan Grandry created a great phenakistoscope-like device for showcasing animated GIFs. Grandry writes “…after some research on Plateau’s original design, I succeeded to build a device capable of playing animated gifs, incorporating led lights, microchips and magnetic sensors. The Gif player is a wooden box, much like a turntable, with a dimmer to adjust the speed of the animation and a small looking hole in the front.”
I really like the player’s design: a plain wooden box with a small circular hole for viewing the animation. It’s always interesting when contemporary artists take delight in recreating or reimagining pre-cinematic optical technologies, and given the popularity of the animated GIF (itself a relatively low-tech enterprise), it’s great to see it placed in an even more comprehensive historical context. It’s also fun to imagine what kinds of capabilities these physical devices might offer for experiencing familiar online content in new ways. One article, for example, proposed that ” Now with a few million of these things, we could recreate the entirety of Tumblr, sans Internet.” What a marvelous exhibition that would be.
For more on the GIF Player, visit Grandry’s project page (images from there).

For a similar project, check out Physical GIF.

Kristiina Lahde, Kelidescope

Meredith — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:59:50 +0000

Nice newspaper collages in kaleidoscopic patterns.

More on Kristiina’s work here.
Via Turning Pages.

The Alphabet 2 – A Horn Book Video Experiment

Meredith — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:10:12 +0000

“Behind the scenes” picture from n9ve’s blog.
Alessandro Novelli and Andrea Gendusa’s The Alphabet 2 “is a developmental spelling video where each character visually represents the meaning of the word itself. Playing with different techniques and materials into little and big spaces, but always focusing on Helvetica font’s proportions. A collection of words in a delightful spelling-video.”

Naturally, I was thrilled to see that “A” in the video stands for “Anamorphosis.”
The project’s comparison to a horn book was what initially attracted my attention (and the stellar animation, of course). Horn books, which have been around since the fifteenth century, are two-sided wooden, metal, or leather paddles usually with the alphabet and a few religious verses inscribed on them. They generally have handles and sometimes a strap that could be tied to a child’s belt. The text is typically protected by a thin layer or animal horn (hence the name).
Neither the original horn book nor the video are “books” in the traditional sense, but their appropriation of book-like attributes (at least in name) is really interesting.

This helpful site offers a brief history of horn books and provides a few great images, both of the books themselves as well as their appearance in illustrations. (Images below taken from the site).

The handle seemed to aid in the horn book’s portability, and also enabled it to function as a battledore or racquet for playing with a shuttlecock, as the below image from Andrew White Tuer’s History of the Horn Book (1897) suggests. The second image indicates the object’s potential as a disciplinary tool, as well.

More on Novelli’s work and n9Ve design studio here. They’re based in Turin; I wish I’d known about this work when I was there last fall!

“16 Forms,” Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi

Meredith — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:28:54 +0000

Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi’s 16 Forms is a series of 3D forms mounted on a turntable and animated with a stroboscopic light, much like many other stroboscopic zoetropes. This one, however, uniquely features a dynamic light source attached the to moving robotic arm (programmed by Ishibashi). The effect is difficult to see in the video linked below, but I imagine that the animated sequence and the moving light source (which probably sends shadows all over the place) is very striking. I like the old (zoetropic) meets new (robotic arm) combination, and moving the source of the flickering light seems like a technique with a lot of potential.

Here’s a video of the piece.
Spotted at Spoon & Tamago (photos from there, also). The project’s site is here. Designtide Tokyo site here.

Bena Currin’s Pumpkin Zoetrope

Meredith — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 04:35:48 +0000

Happy Halloween!

Behold, Bena Currin’s pumpkin zoetrope (featuring a Little Green Man from Toy Story).

The above animated gif by Jason Hull shows the zoetrope in action really well. I love the uneven quality of the pumpkin’s surface, and the fact that it’s illuminated from the inside.