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Proto-Cinema Blog: Praxinoscope no. 3
Daisy-eye praxinoscope. 33rpm, 12 inch, 12 frames
I’m having so much fun making these, love watching them. This one is really pleasing to see how the speed seems to shift with the music, though it is constant. Also the 12 inch disk has a much smother animation than the 6 inch disks I made previously.
Proto-Cinema Blog Post, Praxinoscope disks
Red 80s joystick (specially cut for pop out effect)
Praxinoscope, mirror, shown with Miles Davis, Bitch’s Brew album cover
Red 80s joystick with cord
I made these to play at the same time as a 12 inch 45 rpm single, they play to My Red Joystick by Lou Reed (1984). The the joystick bends and bops to the music.
When I first saw phenakisticope on Richard Balzer I thought that if the image spun you could see the disk animate, not realizing that the gifs on the site are filmed under a strobe light. Thinking this I was perplexed as to why no vinyl records have phenakisticopes printed on them or as picture disks, so I intended to propose this to some friends and acquaintances involved in the indie music scene in Auckland, NZ. I suppose this is still feasible as a praxinoscope but no one really makes 45s and it would have to include a mirror devise which could be made of mirrored mylar.
I plan to make praxinoscopes and animation disks for DJ mates in Auckland to play at gigs for those that like to hang out at the booth, should be fun. Maybe it will lead somewhere.
PS, there are some people actually looking at this blog these days. I know these devises have been around since the mid1800s but THIS IS MY IDEA -Thanks, K Rutecki
Proto-Cinema Blog Post, Chronophotography
Hang the washing: bedsheets
Proto-cinema: Magic-Lantern Proformance
Grumbley: He Eats Birds
Narrated by me
Featuring FJ
Story by FJ, age 4
Magic-lantern and slides by me
Proto-cinema Blog Post #5 Panorama: Total Immersion
Proto-Cinematic Production: Explorations from Still to Moving Images.
In response to the readings on panorama:
In lecture I was wondering to myself about the length of time it would take to produce one of these panorama paintings, I was astounded to read that the Burning of the House of Parliament was made in only a week. Also thinking of total emersion battle scenes; I went to Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand in January and Weta Workshop’s ‘Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War’ which depicts eight New Zealanders involved in in the Battle of Gallipoli. The installations had a profound effect emotionally and physically (I was overcome by nausea whilst viewing the soldier depicted eating his tinned meat, I swear I could smell it though there are no olfactory effects). Madame Trussaud’s wax works came about around the same time as panoramas, in contrast the Gallipoli exhibit was an emersion experience with the figures 2.4 times life size.
http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/WhatsOn/exhibitions/Pages/GallipoliTheScaleofOurWar.aspx
Panorama Proposal Idea:
Silo Park is part of the re-development of Auckland City Waterfront. Formally silos used to store cement, they are now part of a council park which hosts markets, outdoor cinema, and both permanent and temporary artworks. I would propose using Silo Seven (a stand alone silo) for a temporary art installation of a total emersion video piece using a wrap around projection and sound to fill the interior of the silo. Last semester I created a short video entitled Love (Sunshine) to evoke the warm sunny feeling of love or a sense of peace and oneness. The video is of horsetail fluff in the wind, catching the sunlight, the light has a fiber optic effect on the fluff that is reminiscent of an ultrasound, the wind at the end creating a whooshing sound which is womb-like. The video could be manipulated to wrap around the walls from a central projector. My hope is that the viewer would feel totally immersed in the experience of sunshine.
http://www.silopark.co.nz/silo-park/home/
https://vimeo.com/142103734
Proto-Cinematic Production: Explorations from Still to Moving Images.
Kitchen collection at former home, New Zealand
Bedroom shelf, Illinois
Child’s collection, Illinois
Refrigerator collection, Illinois
Proto-cinema Blog Post #3 Cabinets of Curiosity:Bits of Bone and Broken Glass
Proto-Cinematic Production: Explorations from Still to Moving Images.
Reading “Cabinets of Wonders: On Creating and Collecting” by Jan Svankmajer, I was taken by description of why he chose objects that he did: “’Live’ objects, full of substances, memories, and emotions, which have gone through a ritual. And although they are usually old things, which already have the essential part of life behind them, with me, it’s not an antiquarian interest.” (Svankmajer) This statement got me thinking of women’s domestic alters or shrines, so I began looking in to them with the idea that cabinets of curiosities and wunderkammer collections of the renaissance and beyond where created by men to show off their magnificence and well-roundedness, their interest in the world. Women have always collected things of personal significance as a manner of ritual, collections for personal and familiar spiritual benefit. In ancient, pre-patriarchal cultures times these shrines, altars to goddesses were at the hearth. (Ricciardi) Come to think of it, I make a collection of things at my kitchen window in front of the sink, in past homes they have even included wishbones; a friend in New Zealand has a shine to Beyoncé on his refrigerator. Refrigerators are often used to make collections of important reminders, family photos, kids drawings, etc.… Women commonly make shrine-like collections on top of their dressers; I recall my grandmother had a collection of religious bric-a-brac, family portraits, greeting cards and dried silver-dollars. I have less things now but in my house I have a shelf above my bed where I keep small special things, my daughter likes to look at them and ask about each object and she and I have done the same on top of the shelf in her room (in her house in New Zealand it’s a ledge on the stairway going up to her room).
I also wanted to look into wunderkammer and see if there were women who kept them, or rather were documented as having done so –I suspect that many women have done so but are not attributed to them. I found one article that lists Beatrix Potter, Lady Charlotte Guest (some of her collection is in the V&A), and Ida Laura Pfieffer (lady explorer!)
Jan Švankmajer. “Cabinets of Wonders: on Creating and Collecting”. The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 11.2 (2011): 103–105. Web...
Ricciardi, Gabriella. “Telling Stories, Building Altars: Mexican American Women's Altars in Oregon”. Oregon Historical Quarterly 107.4 (2006): 536–552. Web...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/55324/11-wonderful-wunderkammer-or-curiosity-cabinets
Proto-cinema Blog Post #2 Written language: Squares and Rectangles
Proto-Cinematic Production: Explorations from Still to Moving Images.
This week we’ve been talking about hieroglyphs, logo-graphic, pictographic, alphabetic, cuneiform, and the likes; written language. What I found interesting about the readings is all the guess work involved in researching these ancient written languages. Could cuneiform be written into wax as well as clay, sure, was there a rule? We’ve defined it now as a wedge shaped marks on a clay tablet but who is to say that it wasn’t done into wax as well? Writing is writing is cuneiform, writing is hieroglyph or drawing but drawing is never cuneiform. Squares and rectangles.
I’ve begun pleasure reading Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson, which is more so about spoken language but it has this interesting fact: Icelandic written language has not changed much, people literate in Icelandic can quite easily read sagas written a thousand years ago. That is incredible when comparing Icelandic to English where modern spelling is really very new.
The assignment this week is to create a written language (hieroglyph, pictogram, etc.) and use that language to write a passage. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my invented written language might look like; what reasons would I have for making the characters a certain way. In my own work I’ve been doing some writing and distorting the script. I have also been looking at artists who have made work using symbols and symbol like drawings such as Paul Klee and Charles E Burchfield. Klee used hieroglyphs and symbols and his works often looked like a system of writing but were rarely specific where as Burchfield invented musical symbols to make his paintings more genuine to the environment. Burchfield spent most of his career in Bufflao, NY where I grew up and his work has always resonated with me, he gives such a strong sense of place, a place I know so well. In 1961 Burchfield wrote: “An artist must paint, not what is there. To do so he must invent symbols which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him. He does not try to by-pass Nature; his work is superior to Nature; surface appearances, but not to it’s basic laws.” For instance, in “Cicada’s Song” Burchfield included in the painting a tree which morphed into a zig-zag –an explosion of the cicada’s sound.
I’m interested in these constructions and organically formed symbols and also I have been thinking of Chinese Calligraphy and our visiting artist last semester Lampo Leong who demonstrated for us. I did an ink drawing over break, whilst drawing it I thought of traditional brush calligraphy even though I was not drawing a character but a bird, I approached drawing it as a Calligrapher might, thinking of the form of the bird I wanted to draw and executing it free hand in a bold manner. I could create a pictographic language based on the forms of birds in flight.
https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/exhibitions/exhibition:03-13-2015-06-28-2015-charles-e-burchfield-audio-graphics/
Readings:
Keimer, Ludwig. “A Note on the Hieroglyphs [unknown] and [unknown]”. The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 43.3 (1927): 226–231. Web…
Waal, Willemijn. “They Wrote on Wood. The Case for a Hieroglyphic Scribal Tradition on Wooden Writing Boards in Hittite Anatolia”. Anatolian Studies 61 (2011): 21–34. Web…
Also, on the sound tangent, this site is really cool:
http://savethesounds.info
