Praxinoscope | Reynaud 1877
The pre-cinema history encompasses a myriad of toys and optical devices that all strive to create an illusion of ‘moving’ images by exploiting the persistence of vision effect.
The Praxinoscope creates this illusion of movement by turning an outer cylinder, containing a series of images, round an inner cylinder with a series of rectangular mirrors. The viewer perceives the series of images reflected in the mirrors as if they were moving.
The image series usually depict very simple actions that permit repetition and offer the possibility of perpetual continuation of movement in endless loops.
These optical contraptions are not (yet) aimed at narrative uses of media. They are pre-cinema & pre-narrative, and focus solely on the enchantment with the illusion of the moving image.
And exactly this is interesting to me. I will of course also be working with the persistance of vision effect, as this is fundamental to the working of video, but that is not the object of my research. I will instead focus on different ways to evoke/invoke ‘enchantment’, ‘wonder’.
In DIORAMATIZED #01 the wonderment is linked to the deconstruction of something which is normally perceived in a multilayered composited form (as in empirical reality), and secondly to the use of mirrors. But here the goal of using mirrors is not to enhance the persistence of vision effect, but to limit the perspective for each mirrored image.
The cylindrical construction will house the display(s), and the viewer/listerer explores the ‘spectacle’ from inside the cylinder.
By adopting this cylindrical form DIORAMATIZED #01 might also lure the viewer/listener into the world of wonders of optical devices of the past.
For more information on pre-cinema tradition:
- http://www.precinemahistory.net/index.html
and:
- Devices of Wonder: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/devices/
- Early visual media archeology: http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants/
- The Bill Douglas Centre: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/bdc/virtual.shtml
etc…
design sketch No 1
In a previous post, I mentioned that DIORAMATIZED #01 is a miniature design exporation.
Everything is relative I guess: DIORAMATIZED #01 may have a size of about 2.00 (diameter) x 3.00 (height) metres. But in comparison to what we aim at with the full-scale installation(s), I can still call it a miniature or a scale model.
The top part of the cylinder will house the ‘machinery’: the projector, computer, etc…
The lower third of the cylinder is reserved for the viewing/listening experience. The viewer/listener can interact with the multiple layers of the audiovisual projection by exploring the inside of the cylindrical installation, a design that harks back to the pre-cinema tradition of expecially the praxinoscope, both because of the cylindrical form and because of the use of mirrors as central element in the visual concept of DIORAMATIZED #01: each mirror with its own perspective.
DIORAMATIZED #01 is the first of a series of experimental design explorations that we are setting up in the framework of the practice-based research project MULTIPLE voice/vision. I coined the word DIORAMATIZED because on the one hand it refers to the 19th century phenomenon of dioramas, and on the other hand it carries (some of) the meaning of the word ‘dramatized’. And this second meaning is also fundamental in DIORAMATIZED #01 as it transposes the 19th century concept of a diorama to a contemporary interactive media formula in a miniature dramatized setting.
The technical as well as the aesthetic approach of DIORAMATIZED #01 is a deconstruction of the multi-layered musical texture into its constituant parts, ‘rendering’ each individual layer with a limited perspective, both aurally and visually.
the 5 musicians: no perspectival limitations yet
The next months I will start using these multiple auditory and visual materials as input for computergenerated acousto-optical and perspectival constructions.
In fact DIORAMATIZED #01 thus will become a subversion of the traditional diorama concept, as it will also be a deconstruction of the use of the traditional single viewpoint of the 19th century diorama into a multiperspective experience that challenges the curiosity of the viewer/listener and invites him/her to explore these multiple perspectives.
