This documentary shares a behind-the-scenes look as husband and wife Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker demonstrate the pinboard techniqu
You know pinscreens, right? A box of tightly packed pins or nails blocked off with a piece of glass or transparent plastic on one side, moving freely back and forth on the other. You press an object into the sharp end of the pins, and a creepy 3-D impression appears on the other side. If you're brave, you can press it against your face. They come with plastic, colourful pins nowadays.
While the pinscreen as a novelty office toy appeared in the 80s, the pinscreen as a canvas for art was invented in the 30s, in larger scale, by American artist Claire Parker and her Russian husband Alexandre Alexieieff.
Parker was an engineer as well as an animator. If society insists on pitting liberal arts and sciences against each other, then Parker and Alexieieff's work is a wonderful marriage of the two: impressionist art created via a precisely engineered mechanism.
Their pinscreens ranged from small 'baby screens' to huge vertically-mounted grids which could contain as many as a million sliding metal rods. To obtain an image, you used it much like you would the office toy- you pushed the pins in or pulled them out.
In this animation technique, 3-D imprints are not the goal in themselves, just the method by which Parker and Alexieieff obtained different patterns and strokes in their pin painting. On their board, he pins are black, and the surface they are placed in white. As they are pushed in or pulled out, the shadow they cast changes, creating different images of unexpected nuance.
The effect and method are somewhat similar to pixel art, mosaic, or cross stitching, or any method where the artist painstakingly adjusts the smallest possible element on a grid in order to create the nuances of a larger image.
Claire Parker collaborated with her husband Alexandre Alexieieff on six animated films made with her pinscreens. Only six films in 50 years- because the pinscreen technique is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. The screens themselves are complicated to make, expensive, and heavy.
Night on Bald Mountain, 1933
An image from the static prologue to The Trial directed by Orson Welles, made by Parker and Alexieieff on the pinscreen.
