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Making a proposal to a gallery or festival

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Making a proposal to a gallery or festival

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Festival Press Kit
When applying to festivals, many will require a ‘press kit’. This includes several stills from the animation, stills from the production of the animation, a short synopsis, a list of all those credited in the creation of the animation, an image of the director and short biographies of all those involved in the making of the animation.
A synopsis should sound like the paragraph on the back of the DVD or video jacket. The point of the synopsis is to make the reader want to see the movie.

Gallery proposal
A short document that sets out the nature of the work being proposed and practical aspects of installing it.
- description of the work itself
- content or concept
- scale and duration
- technical information or installation requirements
- proposed audience.

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Animate works at the intersection of film, art and animation. Led by Abigail Addison and Gary Thomas, since 2007 it presents high quality, innovative, experimental and engaging films, and for producing projects for exhibition across broadcast, cinema, festival, gallery, public, online and digital platforms.

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Animate Projects - Working at the intersection of art, film and animation

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Animate Projects - Working at the intersection of art, film and animation

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Animate works at the intersection of film, art and animation. Led by Abigail Addison and Gary Thomas since 2007, producing innovative, and engaging films.

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An independent contemporary art gallery in London.

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Nathaniel Mellors, 'Estate', 28 September - 18 December.

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LUXONLINE is a web resource for exploring British based artists’ film and video in-depth.

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LUXONLINE is a web resource for exploring British based artists' film and video in-depth.

Luxonline is the single most extensive publicly available resource devoted to British film and video artists. Streaming video clips, new writings, past articles and biographies provide a comprehensive contextual background to the artists featured on the site.

Browse Luxonline's unique content by artist, work title, or by exploring themes such as abstraction and installation. The site also features a historical timeline of key events in artists' film and video from 1900- present day, and virtual tours created by leading curators and writers.
LUXONLINE is a project of LUX, it was funded and developed between 2004-2009. It is currently not being updated. We hope to raise funds for further developments of this resource in the future but we hope it still remains a useful resource. For up to date information about LUX artists works see the LUX Collection section of the main LUX website.

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Luxonline - Educational Resource about British Film and Video Artists

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LUXONLINE is a web resource for exploring British based artists' film and video in-depth. Luxonline is the single most extensive publicly available resource devoted to British film and video artists. Streaming video clips, new writings, past articles and biographies provide a comprehensive contextual background to the artists featured on the site.

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Possessions-inc. is a video project by Richard Grayson for Matt’s Gallery. A new episode in the series was posted online once a month over 2016 and 2017. Members of the gallery’s mailing list were emailed each episode.

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Possessions_inc. is a video project by Richard Grayson for Matt's Gallery. A new episode in the series will be posted online once a month over 2016 - 2019.

A text by writer and curator Lars Bang Larsen To Be Spoken Like A Thing Possessed On Richard Grayson's Possessions_inc. explores and expands ideas and themes that animate the work. This is the first of two essays commissioned for the project. The second by Erik Davis will be published later in the year.

Possessions_inc. touches on ideas of value, the agency of objects, robotics, techno animism, ecstatic states, ventriloquism, the operations of the internet, money, codes, the art-market, secret knowledge and mytho-mania. It is part t.v. series, part blog and part extended essay.

Here is a recent tale that might have come from the imp of the posthuman perverse: In February 2019, Kim Kardashian posted an urgent warning about the 'Momo Challenge' on her Instagram feed. The story she passed on, and whose viral explosion she helped ensure, alerted parents that nefarious parties were using social media and YouTube Kid videos to coax children into self-harm, even suicide. While the rumour followed the loose script of earlier ALL CAPS panics over Tide Pods or the Blue Whale Challenge, the Momo meme was also wedded to an amygdala-hijacking image: a monstrous bird-lady, whose bug eyes and rictus Joker grin no doubt fanned the anxieties that spread the mind virus.

This image was not a digital concoction but a photograph of an actual piece of art. In 2016, Keisuke Aiso debuted his Mother Bird at Tokyo's Vanilla Gallery, an outré, decidedly non-vanilla salon specializing in the steamy grotesqueries the Japanese call 'ero-guru'. Aiso's sculpture was an example of a class of yokai (supernatural creatures) known as ubume-the ghosts of women who have died in childbirth. Neither Aiso nor the Gallery had anything to do with the fabrication of the Momo myth, and we can't know whether the engineers of the Momo meme knew the origins of the figure were found within a folklore of filiation and death. All we can say is that Momo emerged from the anonymous online collectives that produce creepypasta, the family of fabricated horror memes and hoaxes that included the notorious Slender Man. Momo became a moral panic because she was designed that way-as an uncanny exploit, an infectious vector of the weaponized weird.

By the end of February, however, a more sober counter-narrative had emerged from the tech sector and the mainstream news media: Momo was a hoax, there was no evidence any kids had killed themselves because of the Challenge, and parents were actually causing harm by freaking their kids out with hysterical stories of bird demons that could reach their claws through the screen. The hoax-busters offered a sort of rationalist relief: Momo is nothing more than a wildly successful prank whose only danger is the gullibility of the credulous. But are things really so simple? As the Slender Man-inspired stabbings by two Wisconsin twelve-year-olds in 2014 should remind us, parents are not totally foolish to fear the wickedness of Internet memes. Moreover, if Peppa Pig videos did not actually contain Momo prompts, as some British parents reported, the Kid videos that YouTube's algorithms recommend alongside Peppa Pig do occasionally turn up similar-seeming fare that then erupts into blood sports and creepy sexualized images.

Though it cannily tracks hoaxes and online rumours and uncanny posthuman objects, Richard Grayson's Possessions_inc. does not offer much in the way of relief. Instead, it is a work of devilish ambiguity. Released on an art gallery website, but full of journalism and esoterica, assembled by an artist who is also a curator, the piece features an animated demon named Asmodeus who lip-syncs histories, dialogues, fictions, and samples of mainstream media. But while this collection of signs and symptoms feels like social criticism, it never gets down to the brass tacks of argument. So is this a video essay or a punk subversion of one? A commentary on art or an art made of commentary? I am not sure, but whatever it is, Possessions_inc. is the kind of WTF?-meta-thing required to limn the liminal objects and possibilities that are its concerns: conspiratorial meta-fictions, capitalist sorceries, art pranks, haunted dolls, animist robotics.

Which is not to say that the work's ambiguities and refusal of straight analysis simply leaves us suspended in an easy ironic distance from pop mythologies and other people's delusions. Instead, Possessions_inc. drives us forcefully to confront the spectral (and highly capitalized) business at hand: the actual mutations in social existence that compelled the work in the first place.

Like the plurality of voices in a séance, the audio in Grayson's work takes the form of an extended sonic collage of original and sampled material whose distorted filters, refrains, and sometimes abrupt jump-cuts refuse the soothing flow familiar from podcasts, while providing an equivalent dose of information and commentary. This is audio thought as juxtaposition: not the elaboration of theory or its middle-brow twin, opinion, but nor is it the jarring Dada bites of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-ups. Instead, it is something in-between: an assemblage of stories, conversations, and reported facts, whose clashing sparks provide all the light we get to find our way through the mess this magickal montage invokes-which is nothing less than the mess we're in.

Each episode of Possessions_inc. presents a rabbit hole or three, boring into a particular conundrum-Rembrandt forgeries, hacked sex toys, the great Dr. Who episode 'Blink'-until the patter splits and branches and we find ourselves in a larger and increasingly familiar maze. This maze is familiar not just because each episode returns us to it, from a different angle, but because the maze is also the uncanny ontological infrastructure of our lives-or at least of the consensus reality whose fractures now derange those lives. Within this maze, familiar distinctions still suggest a choice of direction or point of view: fiction or history, art or accounting, machines or minds, money or shit. But whichever fork we choose, the paths keep converging on the same dizzying place, as the distinctions turn out to be two sides of a single Möbius strip. Despite the wide variety of Possession_inc. 's sources, the work gives way to the realization that, in the words of Colossal Cave, the first computer adventure game, its 'twisty little passages' are 'all alike'. The garden of forking paths is really a one-way labyrinth, a plunge into a single conundrum that is swallowing us up.

At least the monster at the heart of the labyrinth is there before our eyes: Asmodeus, the carved devil who sat-until being chopped down by a fanatic-at the threshold of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the notoriously enigmatic French town of Rennes-le-Château. Asmodeus is at once the guide and the ventriloquist dummy who mouths the various mysteries of Possessions_inc., and particularly the codes and claptrap that have grown up around the secrets supposed encoded in the small strange church, where the nineteenth-century priest François-Bérenger Saunière, who special-ordered Asmodeus through a religious catalogue, was said to have discovered a very special treasure.

As Asmodeus informs us, that documents forged half a century ago by a reactionary mystificator (Pierre Plantard) and a fringe surrealist (Philippe de Chérisey), and then tucked into the Bibliothèque Nationale, reproduced this nugget of lore and launched a phantasmagoric hoax that still holds sway. Over the decades, as the charismatic conundrum grew, heterogeneous materials-ancestral bloodlines, secret societies, UFO landing pads, crappy potboilers-became glued together in patterns that both point to and refuse a central secret whose very absence motivates the continual churn of fresh material. Over time, a variety of second-rate actors, New-Age geomancers, and feverish bestselling hermeneuts minted a counter-history that, though built like a Lovecraftian collective fiction, gained enough density and attention to become a kind of parallel world-a hybrid of art forgery, invented tradition, and postmodern prank.

As any number of parallel mutations included in Possessions_inc. suggest, this blurring of fiction and reality is an increasingly familiar leitmotif of contemporary reality. More to the point, it is becoming the very form that power takes in an attention economy defined by the technological management of belief, desire, and fantasy through media misdirection, simulacral politics, and the algorithmic exploits of human nervous tissue by nascent artificial intelligence. As the recommended links on YouTube remind us, paranoia and insincere secrets sell. Conspiracy thinking has not only become a major part of the cultural and political landscape-even an instrument of statecraft-but now stands as the necessary allegory for the feeling and fact that our lives as digitally-embedded humans are, to an unknowable degree, possessed.

But possessed by what exactly? Capital, neural programming, fictions, demons, memes, dogmas, AIs, systems of social subjectification? Grayson evokes the many objects and forces that interpolate the subject today without claiming to have discovered, like the Rennes mysterians, the key. In fact, while critical analysis, historical study, and knowledge of contemporary developments in social science and technology help clear some of the fog- Possessions_inc. is in no ways wilfully perverse-this sort of research in some ways just makes everything worse. Anyone paying attention to developments in behavioural sciences, psy-ops, predictive profiling, data tracking, and surveillance capitalism cannot help but experience the shudders of agency panic, Timothy Melley's sharp diagnosis of an affect that both inspires so much conspiracy-theorizing, and explains the defensive absolutism of so many of its practitioners.

At times, I suspect, we all fear that we-or, more often than not, other people (who are in the end not so dissimilar from us)-have been infected by external controls and engineered scripts. Now we all talk in talking points. To make matters more confusing, our possessions too are becoming possessed. As the sometimes-paranoid Philip K. Dick pointed out, even as humans become subtly more thing-like, more seemingly programmed and prodded by external triggers, the objects around us are growing more spunky.

Here Asmodeus offers another clue, simply by gesturing to his own animated appearance (especially that mysterious right knee). Today various forces are coming together to enliven the objects in our lives, as contemporary developments in robotics and artificial intelligence dovetail with our primate imaginations and the uncanny valleys of haunted folklore to stir up a new weird animism. We return, with a posthuman twist, to the ancestral perception of an environment stuffed with non-human agents and sacred tricksters. But now those ancient alliances with beast and raincloud are crowded out by data-slurping sex bots and smart surveillance drones and the combative toasters and coffee machines of Dick's predictive fictions. As an art(-damaged) thinker, Grayson also reminds that these uncanny transformations are directly linked to the forgeries, warehoused cast-offs, and insane overvaluations of the art market, where the force that animates the brilliant and beautiful objects of human craft is nothing less than capital itself.

Again, for all its insights and sharp ironies, Possessions_inc. is not itself a piece of criticism or social analysis. Instead, without shedding its realism or commitment to material history, Possessions_inc. body-snatches the more infectious form of the conspiracies and webs of occult correspondences it traces: a nonlinear network of resonating concepts, images, words, and similitudes that point to a dark totality that remains obscured, behind the veil, just over the horizon. As viewers, we are set loose like wanderers in this thorny forest of symbols, our recourse to scepticism and knowledge and analysis at once affirmed and submitted to the phantasmagoric undertow, this slipstream of apocalyptic foreshocks and daemonic dread.

Indeed, the most poignant moment in the series is an invented dialogue in which Philippe de Chérisey admits to his melancholy after planting his hoax time-bombs in the library. Though he believes his concocted counter-histories will come to 'erode the real', his exultation in this surrealist intervention is tempered by sadness and resignation. 'We are fucked,' he concedes. 'By setting a trail and a tale that will allow our fictions to shape and to determine the real, we are inevitably going to set things in motion that, though marvellous, will undermine some of the things that I still hold dear.' De Chérisey is learning the same lesson that is making so many queasy today, from postmodern relativists to anarchist pranksters, from media technologists to-who knows?-maybe even alt.right fake newscasters. A grimoire protocol from Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward says it best: 'doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe'.

- Witold Gombrowicz about his novel Possessed, serialised in 1939 under Smuggling the most up-to-the-minute contraband in antiquated charabancs - that's what I like doing.

pseudonym and claimed by the author shortly before his death.

In his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly Philip K. Dick has his protagonist state that going crazy is 'a lost art'.[i] It is hard to overlook that this insight was offered by an exquisite speed freak - Dick, not his narrator - who cultivated paranoia with his every unhinged fibre, and, on top of that, later loses his head in Richard Grayson's Possessions_inc. Needless to say, Dick was on to something. That he foresaw madness disappear from the horizon of aesthetic achievement already in the 70s, must be down to an extraordinary cultural sensibility that enabled him to pick up murmurs of distant future events. If you thought madness was likely to never go out of style - a symbolic default position of civilised woman and man - Dick suggests another scenario.

What we may not immediately realise is how the consequences of the loss of madness are quite dizzying, certainly in the field of art. Madness can be aptly characterised as 'a lost art' because it in a foundational way has shadowed the development of the art concept, as an influential supplement to the official tenets of aesthetic philosophy. It has in this way been one of art's dialectical tropes of otherness to cultural reason, incarnated the radical subjectivity of the mad genius, and mediated artistic insights. It was one of the things that culture was not (supposed to be) - and that therefore art (and counterculture) could be, or of which it was supposed to possess an element. However it is not the only trope that contemporary art has lost. Other powerful tropes that have waned, turning altmodisch and grey, include the former harbingers of a historically redeemed human co-existence, play and childhood. This you could put down to a symptom of the brutality of our times, yet to have madness disappear without any fanfare is puzzling, considering that it - to the point of mainstream cliché - was such a motor of 19th- and 20th-century art. (I am guessing it went quietly at some point in the 1980s, seeing that the 90s were the decade that gave modernism Prozac and forgot it was part of the 20th century.)

Hermann Hesse reassured the readers of his bestselling Steppenwolf (1927) - 'madmen only' - that the fee to be paid for entering his magic theatre wasn't about literally losing it, but opening your mind so that the theatre can exist within it.[ii] As Jamie Cohen-Cole has shown, the intellectual and political history of the notion of 'keeping an open mind' interwove Cold War era educational policies, cognitive science, and later, the struggle for political legitimacy between the neoconservatives, feminists and the New Left in the US in the 1970s.[iii] That the two latter camps succeeded in redefining openness as a characteristic of left-wing politics is unsurprising seen in the light of how artistic avant gardes earlier in the 20th century détourned and deliberately wrecked a Cartesian reason into a revolutionary, eroticised ' Soy loco ' - as Salvador Dalí might have said - 'therefore I am.' If keeping an open mind marked progressivity, why make do with a little mental ventilation if you can blow it completely and play the cuckoo card in the face of bourgeois self-control, as a life-affirming affront to the distinction between fiction and truth?

If it is true that 'no one is afraid of going crazy anymore,' as my veteran artist friend noted about his colleagues (now all very nice, their occupational hazards veering instead towards overwork and depression at most, which is hardly very colourful) left-wing politics shows a similar reserve with regard to keeping an open mind.[iv] There is a pattern, you may say paranoically, a pattern that is part of a larger, cognitive map that Grayson draws up in Possessions_inc.

Based in conspiracy theory - the poor man's cognitive mapping - replete with a web of mystery and hypotheses concerning hidden treasures, secret societies, occluded bloodlines, mystic geographies and geometries, the serial connects to many tropes associated with the unreasonable in its more delirious, ornate, and undeniably contemporary forms. Grayson shows how the disappearance of madness is neither a blessing nor a step towards a more enlightened humanity, but, counterintuitively, another diminishment of human agency. However, when humans abdicate the centre stage of civilisation, agency doesn't just goes away. Like the Swiss watchmaker's slogan goes, you only look after it for the next generation. 'Our' agency once came from God, remember? If it now seeps out from the human subject, history's long-reigning potentate, like some enchanted fluid that is a medium for the great chain of modern history, it is certain to reappear somewhere soon and close by. Ever since the bourgeoisie cursed history by connecting capitalism and revolution, agency returns with a vengeance, like some accelerated spectre that only goes out to haunt at night in fresh bedlinen in the cut of the season.

The demon king Asmodeus leads and narrates Grayson's serial, the guardian of the treasure of the Temple of Solomon. In the aspect of a scantily digi-animated sculpture from a small church at Rennes Le Chateau where for a century, it has supported a Holy Water Stoup and met entering visitors with a plastery aspect of very active misanthropy in a welcome-to-Bedlam sort of way. Commissioned by the Free Priest Abbé Saunière from a prestigious factory that provided religious statuary in Toulouse, this particular Asmodeus was part of the renovations of the church and its surrounding lands that started the rumour that Saunière had discovered a hidden treasure of Spanish origin at the start of the last century. This rumour became the starting point of the complex series of fictions and fakes initiated by right wing fabulist Pierre Plantard and small-time-actor-with- vanguard-aspirations Philipe De Chérisey in the 50s and 60s, which has led hundreds of people to further speculate, 'research' and 'reveal' the Secret Society of the Priory of Sion and hidden currents of history. This is supported through the 'revelation' of hidden meaning in the smallest architectural and geographical events: everything becomes a clue... part of a network of association, influence and meaning, with so many occult dots to be connected by the open-minded... including this devilish statue that has been identified as Asmodeus by one of the seekers of truth. These fictions have flowed in the real and brought an entire world into being, including 21st century airport-lit and Hollywood epics; one of hidden 'truths', which is why the description of the unfolding events of this history of fakes and beliefs that constitutes the Mystery of Rennes Le Chateau is the central narrative arc of Grayson's project.

Intractable perverter of social relations, beholden only to his own laws, the devil is the perfect thing, a radical object. As an abstract surface of shape-shifting or metaphoric possibility, Grayson's Asmodeus is the host of a highly dynamic range of narratives and properties, and, as always, animation draws the viewer's attention to the vitality of objects while pseudo-recognitions enter the fray: 'Some of the discoverers of treasures have faked the treasures', as Grayson puts it in his liner notes. Vacuous effects, created and pimped by the disingenuous meddling of (highly agential) middlemen who infect discovery and dilute origins, subjecting us all to the thraldom of things and reified forces...

As with so many serials before it, the theatre of operations he has chosen for Possessions_inc. is that of a counter-Enlightenment with fascinating toys in the attic. Setting the stage between the psychoanalytical trope of the uncanny and a view of history as mystery, events are couched in a hesitant secularisation in which a web of over-determined narratives echo. Associated with a sensationalised otherness of Victorian-era pulp culture, serials were more than this, seeing that not only Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle published serially, but also writers of the canon such as Dickens, Flaubert, Dostojevskij. Its duration and emphatic relation to repetition links it to the TV series, the blog, and the podcast, as does its per tradition ambiguous relation that it establishes between domesticity and otherness. If serials were often consumed in a space that was affirmed as domestic in more than one sense - the Westerner's hearth, where she would read the weekly installment in the paper or, later, hear an episode of her radio play - it could also be a format that allowed for alterity to seep in.

The two radio plays that Öyvind Fahlström created for the Swedish national broadcast, Birds in Sweden (1963) and The Holy Torsten Nilsson (1966), were created in a comparable spirit of madcap genre hybridity as Possessions_inc. Where Birds is a concrete poem narrated entirely in Fahlström's home-grown monster-language 'Birdo', Torsten Nilsson wildly montages named celebrities, royals and politicians into a psychedelic style political thriller. With all the apocalyptic promise you want to read into this, Fahlström dubbed his radio plays 'blind movies', intending them to be consumed at night with the lights out. Such imaginary transport on the basis of limited visual information seems apt in relation to Possessions_inc.

'To study nineteenth-century women's serials,' writes Dale M. Bauer, 'you have to love repetition.' The formulaic character of serial B-literature aside, the love of repetition importantly allowed authors to reflect on ways of 'moving beyond an intolerable status quo,' for instance in relation to 'the fear of tragic repetition in women's lives.'[v] In this light, the serial's sense of social critique can be seen to reside in its heaping event upon event; the delays it continually produces in bringing the plot to a conclusion become zones of indetermination by which it produces new, non-intrinsic relations. As agency sneaks off, meaning appears in the cuts.

Marx's forbidden rhetorical fruit, his fascination of the spectral, can help accentuate how the other side of agential objects is objectified agency. Marx would definitely concur that proprietary relations, and our possessions themselves, are possessed. The psychokinetics of the fetish... In Asmodeus's flow of speech this extends to how we are 'spoken by the speech of capital', as Jeff Kinkle and Roberto Toscano put it, to address capital as a sentient being that puts us under its spell. This describes a shift from the customary patterns of commodity fetishism to what they call 'capitalist shamanism - a ventriloquism of impersonal structures that registers an ambient experience of powerlessness before the abstraction, complexity, and global scope of an economic spirit...'[vi] Think the runaway mouth in Beckett's Not I (1972), all yapping matter and linguistic organicity, but now spouting neoliberal blarney. Capitalism as a blind movie, spoken by each of us.

The rolling, proliferating episodes of Possessions_inc. may be seen as an attempt at so many descriptions of how totems rule the marketplace. Considering how things unfold, without sobriety and through the mouth of a devil, reference to such narrative matter-of-factness sounds absurd unless you dismiss a common-sensical understanding of description, in favour of seeing it as a way of exhausting and spending an object that has been revealed to you.[vii] In this literary economy you grind an object down in a kind of narrative potlatch that finds pleasure in calling up everything and their connections, in order to faithfully reduce normative reality to its hallucinatory constants.

If you in the 20th century were supposed to keep an open mind, the contemporary subject which is predestined for the network is expected to make the right connections. Once subjectivity was based in the dialectic between self and world that resulted from autonomy (for better or worse, another one of those near-extinct, modern terms). In the 19th and 20th centuries, political subjectivation came about through the acquisition of rights to become acknowledged as citizen or collective, say. But we no longer become somebody by choosing ourselves, as in existentialism, or through direct action, as in Marxism, or by balancing the ego and the unconscious, as in psychoanalysis. We don't even become somebody in the head-to-head of madness and norm. For better or worse, but perhaps more vulnerably, we today become somebody by feeling out attractions and tensions, ceaselessly connecting and reconnecting in sentient posthuman milieus, navigating flows and synching in with rhythms and intensities. From a dialectical understanding of history as so many struggles between incompatible forces, we have moved collectively to a cybernetic understanding in which history itself is domesticated, playing out inside networks according to systemic parameters. Put cybernetically, the self is an environment within systems of communication. Accordingly, in the world of K.W. Jeter's science fiction novel Noir (1998) the word 'connect' is an obscenity: people say things like 'connect you, you mother-connector' or 'connect that' or 'get the connect outta here'. In short, if you are connected, you are fucked.[viii] No wonder we are prone to being spoken.

Norbert Wiener, one of the fathers of cybernetics, realised towards the end of his distinguished career that a world ruled by feedback mechanisms would be a world gone literally loopy. In his God & Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964) - a title that in more than one way resonates with Grayson's serial and its star demon - Weiner quotes another instance of nonhuman, ominously plasmatic instability, the Golem. In Jewish folklore this is an animated anthropomorphic figure created from inanimate matter which can be seen as an archetype for the figure of the rebellious slave automaton who has been created in a human image and (therefore?) inevitably casts off its yoke of inhuman travail obligatoire.

A world cohabitated by humans and machines is one that Wiener unhesitatingly compares to the fiction of Lewis Carroll (in whose main work, of course, the figures are 'all mad', if we are to believe the Cheshire Cat).[ix] Such radical 'toying', as Wiener put it, with ideas concerning the reproducibility of life and other questions, are key to his ethical discussion of the use and misuse of modern automatisation.[x] Wiener resorts to the unholy mix of cybernetics and religion from the conviction that thanks to our capability to build intelligent machines and self-generative systems we - 'we', because the human species can seemingly only get together when it comes up against that which is radically non-identical to us - will some day soon be able to create artificial life. What will humankind decide to do with these great powers? How will it comprehend its miraculous mastery over human-made nature?

Asmodeus, the best thing we could have with us, may hiss out of the corner of his mouth that it is a mastery of which we shouldn't be too assured.

Footnotes

[i] Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly. Gollancz, London, 1999 (1977), 42.

[ii] Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf. Picador, London, 2002 (1927), 32.

[iii] Jamie Cohen-Cole: The Open Mind. Cold War Politics and the Sciences of the Human Mind. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

[iv] Thank you to Søren Andreasen for this remark. My translation.

[v] Dale M. Bauer: 'Serial Women Writers and Racial Intimacy,' in: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Litearure, Culture, and Theory, vol. 72, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 1-24. Accessed January 11 2018 on https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612464/pdf

[vi] Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle: Cartographies of the Absolute. Zero Books, Alresford, 2015, 46.

[vii] This would be Georges Perec's way, see for instance his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, 1974.

[viii] KW Jeter: Noir. Bantam Books, New York 1998. I am also quoting from Steven Shaviro: Connected. Or what it means to live in the network society (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2003).

[ix] Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories. Barnes and Noble, New York 1994, 65.

[x] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1966 (1964), 36.

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Possessions_inc. is a video project by Richard Grayson for Matt's Gallery. A new episode in the series will be posted online once a month over 2016 - 2019. A text by writer and curator Lars Bang Larsen To Be Spoken Like A Thing Possessed On Richard Grayson's Possessions_inc.

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Broomberg and Chanarin The Bureaucracy of Angels (2017)

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Broomberg and Chanarin The Bureaucracy of Angels (2017)

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The Bureaucracy of Angels records the demolition of 100 migrant boats in Sicily in the winter of 2016. These boats arrived laden with refugees from North Africa and while their human cargo were either sent home or absorbed into the asylum system, the boats themselves were never returned to their owners, laying beached on the concrete forecourt of Porto Pozallo in Sicily.

Broomberg and Chanarin have a long history of working in war torn countries and areas of conflict. Their research on themes of migration and movements of people lead them naturally to the current migration crisis. The artists visited Sicily a number of times where they were able to explore the area where migrants arrive from perilous journeys across the Mediterranean. They filmed the rescue missions by the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) foundation off the coast of Libya as well as the destruction of the boats left to decay once the migrant journeys have been made, in a vast shipping grave yard in Porto Pozallo in Sicily.

The film is narrated by the hydraulic jaws of the digger charged with the job of destroying these boats, tearing them apart into their constituent parts of timber and metal, a process that took forty days to complete. The digger appears in the narrow corridors of the boat yard, on the open sea and in the midst of a rescue operation off the coast of Libya, as a Cantastoria or 'singing storyteller', recounting the Sicilian ballad Terra ca nun senti. The song speaks of the fear and pain associated with immigration to and from Europe's most southerly territory over the last 150 years. The original music 'Terra ca nun senti' is by Alberto Piazza and performed by Rosa Balistreri. It plays alongside a new composition by John Woolrich performed by the London Sinfonietta.

The commission will be shown within King's Cross St. Pancras station in a location close to the exit of the Eurostar, a passageway between the UK and greater Europe, embedding the work within the station and enabling it to be shown to a transient audience.

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Harun Farocki: Parallel I-IV29 Whitechapel Gallery 2016

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Harun Farocki: Parallel I-IV29 Whitechapel Gallery 2016

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Coinciding with the major exhibition Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), the work charts the evolution of computer game graphics over 30 years. The rapid technological progression from the earliest symbolic forms to the realism of the present day is projected on four screens, each focussing on different aspects of the video game genre.

Over 70 years, Farocki created over 100 films and installations showing how image-making technology can be used to shape public perception. His work often tackles controversial topics, from the use of napalm by the U.S. in the Vietnam War in Inextinguishable Fire (1969), to video games and conflict simulation during the second Iraq War in Serious Games I-IV (2010).

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Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever Moma PS1 Exhibition

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Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever Moma PS1 Exhibition

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Any Ever, 2007-2010 body of collaborative work.  Nonsequential series of seven movies, which are structurally conceived in two parts, one consisting of a trilogy, Trill-ogy Comp (2009), and the other a quartet, Re'Search Wait'S (2009-10). The movies are interconnected spatially via networked viewing rooms and materially by characters, semblances of plot, and formal, recurring motifs.

"this latest series mines emergent evolutions of identity, narrative, language, and visual culture for content, and propels these matters forward as expressive mediums, through darkly jubilant and categorically frenetic formal experimentations." What???!!!

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Find high-quality images, photos, and animated GIFS with Bing Images

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Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on Serpentine Gallery

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Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on Serpentine Gallery

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'Searching for physicality in the ways in which video is displayed'.
Multiple scales of screens - very large natural abstract environments on some walls as rooms and colour experiences. Then dotted around are smaller screens and workstations of different types with other video. Mix of fact an fiction narratives.
Combines large photographs and video with digital animations in Blender.

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Benedict Drew on 'The Trickle-Down Syndrome' at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Benedict Drew on 'The Trickle-Down Syndrome' at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Two video screens as part of a much bigger 'fictional space' of large paintings, drawing and sculpture.

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Benedict Drew on 'The Trickle-Down Syndrome' at the Whitechapel Gallery

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I really don not like all the flashing - it is not good for the viewer. This would have been a nightmare to watch - even though that is obviously a big part of the point, I think. I had to stop after about 5 seconds of scrolling through.

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The Bad Feel Loops

2019
Dimension variable
16mm film transferred to digital, 4 channel sound, 2 screen video projection.

filmed on 16 mm film and shot on the kent coast this work was commissioned by Science Gallery London for the exhibition On Edge, Living in the age of anxiety, the quadraphonic soundtrack combines atomised fragments of voice, modular synthesis and field recordings, the film is edited and animated digitally and projected on two large screens to conjure the sense of being inside the work.

The constant information overload many people experience as part of everyday life can be seen as both a potential trigger and a metaphor for the experience of anxiety. The Bad Feel Loops uses the language of noise, feedback, rhythm and repetition to invoke the feeling of anxiety, and invites the viewer to stay with the difficult feeling until it becomes an almost ecstatic experience.This work attempts to give form to the subjective experience of anxiety from within , and explores the potential value of staying with the experience of chaos or crisis, rather than trying to silence it

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The Bad Feel Loops 2019Dimension variable16mm film transferred to digital, 4 channel sound, 2 screen video projection. filmed on 16 mm film and shot on the kent coast this work was commissioned by Science Gallery London for the exhibition On Edge, Living in the age of anxiety, the quadraphonic soundtrack combines atomised fragments of voice, modular synthesis and field recordings, the film is edited and animated digitally and projected on two large screens to conjure the sense of being inside the work.

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Moving image and animation presentation might be viewed on the wall alongside paintings, on showreels with other moving image, and also as part of contemporary art installations which explore sculptural and architectural ideas of space, sound and movement. Each of these approaches presents animations
to an audience in different ways.

Research Task 5.3 Gallery Installations

Review photographs and other documentation of animations that have been included in gallery installations. How did the artist choose to install their work in terms of format, frame, atmosphere and audience. What were the practical issues in terms of equipment and other objects needed, and duration of the screenings.

Benedict Drew (Whitechapel Gallery Exhibit)

Sondra Perry (Serpentine Gallery Exhibit)

Jeff Keen (Tate Modern Gallery Exhibit)

Ryan Trecartin (Moma PS1 Exhibit)

Harun Farocki (Whitechapel Gallery Exhibit)

Compare the differences in presentation and how might you apply these approaches to your own animations.

Really interesting ideas:

Sondra Perry: Immersive spaces and juxtapositions of very large animated experience walls from video or digital animation (eg the Moving Turner wall)  in colours that have particular leanings of Sondra Perry with smaller videos to watch. Both individual animations and their juxtaposition are important in driving a concept narrative.

Do not mistake lots of rapidly flashing images for depth of concept - it is bad  for the viewer's health. I just walk straight out and can't be bothered.

Do not just use lots of loud garbled noise - been done far too many times before.

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4: Performance: Expanded Cinema and animation 

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4: Performance: Expanded Cinema and animation 

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Interest in performance art started in the 1970s and has been experiencing resurgence in all art forms in recent years. Theories of performance were adapted from anthropology, ethnography and sociology to observe how most cultures use performances to organise society and everyday life, whether they are formal shows such as ceremonies and rituals, or informal ones, such as chanting, dancing and playing. A relatively recent shift in contemporary art toward staging events can be seen – a renewed engagement with components of live events, performance and sound. This interest in performance influenced a new thinking about how films, animations and visual media should be shown.

The term ‘ Expanded Cinema ’ was coined by the American filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek to describe work both inside and outside the gallery including live performance, projector pieces, video and a range of media environments. Expanded cinema is used to describe a video, animation, multi-media performance or an immersive environment that pushes the boundaries of cinema and rejects the traditional one-way relationship between the audience and the screen. And there is a particular connection between animation and performance.

Research 5.4: Performance, expanded cinema and animation

Could not find these on-line:

Man Ray White Ball (1930) could not find this on-line

Giovanni Martedi Materialism Dialectique l'art (series) (1978) Mirror reflects images

Maurice Lemaitre Montage (1978-1990) Aleatory found footage projected onto a screen made with newspapers, while the audience reads imaginary scripts distributed by Lemaitre himself.

Roland Sabatier 'Look Somewhere Else' (1971)
The audience is invited not to look at the work or its execution.

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Animation installations can take place online, on mobile platforms or outside the gallery in everyday spaces. The
relationship between animations and audiences also changes as we encounter the work unexpectedly or are invited to participate in viewing it.

Research 5.4: Animations outside the gallery or cinema

Identify three different examples of showing work using the internet or mobile platforms or setting up animations as an installation outside of gallery or cinema spaces.

How do these approaches engage an audience differently from conventional approaches to art or cinema.

Broomberg and Chanarin's showing of The Bureaucracy of Angles outside King's Cross is likely to reach and affect very many people with its political concerns. The really evocative music is likely to attract people to view it. Even if people are in a hurry on their outward journey, they may well take more time to view it on their way back. It may however be a little long for people to spend time.

I saw it on line on my iPad, and also on my large computer screen several times. Putting the work on-line has the advantage that the exhibition is less time-bound, and also links can be shared and circulated on peoples' social media networks - as I myself have done for this video. But for on-line viewing it is important to look at resolution and format. You Tube is more blurry on my large computer screen than vimeo.

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5: Animation festivals: Research 5.4: still to do

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5: Animation festivals: Research 5.4: still to do

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The majority of animation festivals are focused on commercial animation, however many have an ‘experimental’ and ‘student’ category. Most film festivals will include animation as a category as well as an experimental category. But the scope and number of international animation festivals mean that it is important to target which festivals that would be suitable for the kind of work you make.

The Directory of International Film and Video Festivals is a searchable database of 600 festivals around the world. You can search by genre, deadline, month and country to find full details.
http://film-directory.britishcouncil.org/festivals-directory

FLAMIN (The Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network) has a list of upcoming listings and opportunities to apply for. Other festivals you may be interested in are:
● Oberhausen
● Eyeworks
● London Animation Festival
● Annecy International Animation Festival
● Anne Arbour
● Punto Y Raya

TASK: Do some research to identify festivals that you would be interested in showing at and attending. Look at their entry requirements and the kinds of films they show as well as their submission dates. Make a list of any appropriate festivals.

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2: Viewing different scales and durations

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2: Viewing different scales and durations

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With the development of modern and contemporary art,  that we expect to see in a gallery has broadened. This means animations might be viewed on the wall alongside paintings, on showreels with other moving image, and also as part of contemporary art installations which explore sculptural and architectural ideas of space, sound and movement. Each of these approaches presents animations to an audience in different ways.

Different formats: in the cinema, on television, digital screens from tablets, mobile phones, to larger digital billboards or projections change the experience and expectation of the audience. They offer:
Different viewing environments eg degrees of comfort and relaxation, outside disturbances and effects, surface textures etc
Scale of viewing and how much can be encompassed in the screen and at what scale to be noticed or merely part of peripheral vision
Duration and narrative possibilities for sequential or simultaneous narratives
Audience control: ability to watch something from start to finish, pause the animation, or dip in and out of it.

Research 5.2: Viewing different scales and durations

TASK: Choose three different films or video with animated content that you have seen recently: one in the cinema and another on a phone, laptop or tablet.
● Write about the difference between these three viewing experiences.
● Do you think the scale of the screen affected how you understood the film and your ability to concentrate?
● If so, in what ways was this so and what were the factors that differed in each case? (such as duration, context, sound, quality, format).

Films seen in the cinema are a collective experience from a fixed viewpoint that the viewer generally sees from beginning to end - sometimes with popcorn. Films tend to be much longer with engrossing narrative in which both colour palette and audio are very important.

Films seen in a gallery are often projected very large, sometimes in multiple screens where the viewer is sometimes able to move around, go in close up, move from screen to screen. This is often more suitable to shorter looped animations as an immersive conceptual rather than narrative experience.

Films seen on a mobile phone can be both longer narratives (larger phones) or short loops (small phones), or designed as interactive experiences. Because the viewer has complete control to dip in and out, scroll onto the next clip, it is really important that the first few frames have impact. Sound is generally less important because of external distractions unless the viewer wears earphones.

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Ian Gouldstone is an artist and filmmaker whose work incorporates games, animation and new media. He experiments with algorithms, interrelationships between visuals and sound and performance projections of the same animations onto different surfaces.

See his many different projects, how and why he made them:

https://iangouldstone.com

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British experimental filmmaker Guy Sherwin produced a number of what he called “optical sound films” in the 1970s while a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. Sherwin explored synthetic sound via myriad cameraless techniques, altering the shape of the filmstrip, bleaching or developing the celluloid, and turning representational imagery into sound. For his Phase Loop (1971), Sherwin fashioned the titular twelve-second loop by punching a hole into black film every twenty-four frames, allowing a brilliant circle of light to burst through every second during projection. He also scratched a horizontal line into the optical soundtrack every twenty-six seconds. The resulting piece has twelve visual flashes and eleven audible blips. The sound and image fall in and out of sync with each other as the film loop plays. Sherwin described the film as “a microcosm of film’s temporal experience: synchronization and its loss, repetition, reflection, syncopation, anticipation, resolution.”

For his five-minute Newsprint (1972), he affixed newspaper clippings directly onto the celluloid, placing the same pieces twenty-six frames further down on the optical soundtrack so that the sound and image would sync upon projection. The words move too quickly to be read in full, but their journey through shutter gate and projector mirrors an individual’s experience of scanning text quickly for comprehension. Newsprint also anticipates the increasing rapidity of information dissemination, a flow so voluminous and brisk that it overwhelms comprehensive understanding.

Sherwin’s films of the mid-seventies left behind his cameraless experiments in favor of obtaining synthetic sound from photographed imagery. These “sounds made with a camera” works include Railings (1977), in which Sherwin ran his camera along iron railings. He used the resulting imagery as the basis for the film’s soundtrack. That same year, he did the same in Musical Stairs, filming the steps leading to the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. As before, the image becomes the soundtrack. The reduced images of the stairs became the horizontal lines comprising the film’s soundtrack. By tiling his camera up and down to capture varying numbers of the concrete steps, he could produce a variety of tones–eleven in all. The more stairs in the frame, the higher the pitch becomes on the soundtrack. By varying the film’s exposure, he could also adjust the volume, so that as the image darkened, the sound became louder.

https://handmadecinema.com/filmmaker/guy-sherwin/

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British experimental filmmaker Guy Sherwin produced a number of what he called “optical sound films” in the 1970s while a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. Sherwin explored synthetic sound via myriad cameraless techniques, altering the shape of the filmstrip, bleaching or developing the celluloid, and turning representational imagery into sound. For his Phase Loop … Guy Sherwin Read More »

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1975 (2009)
10mins Colour Silent Super 8 film performance for transparent screen and white paint

"The most vivid portrayal of (...) paradoxical space must be Guy Sherwin's film-performance 'Paper Landscape' (1975/2003). Here, for one magical moment, we believe that the filmed protagonist (the artist himself), after slowly tearing away the paper screen obscuring the view, has transgressed the surface of the image and entered the great beyond, running into an English pastoral idyll, only to be shattered when the back-painted projection screen is slashed by the present day artist, bringing us back into our dislocated present."

https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/guy_sherwin/paper_landscape.html

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Jeff Keen (1923–2012) was a pioneer of experimental film whose rapid-fire animations, multiple screen projections and raucous performances redefined multimedia art in Britain.

Influenced by Surrealism and precursor of Punk and part of 1960s movements.
Appearance of random thrown togetherness, but based on underlying concepts and meanings.
Going beyond the frame: Multiple screens. Pictures in pictures. Wrap Around screen.  Audio and performance. Painting/Video/Performance.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/jeff-keen

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https://www.jeffkeen.co.uk

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Jonas

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/joan-jonas

MOMA

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Joan Jonas – BMW Tate Live: Performance Room

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Animation can be considered as documentation of a performance or a kind of performance in its own right. (See Part 4)

While many aspects of performance and expanded cinema takes place within the context of contemporary art, these boundaries are also being challenged through popular culture. For example, through the development of dance music, VJs (Video Jockeys) have started to use projected animation and moving image to complement DJ’s music. These visuals provide ambience to club environments,
often synching animations to musical rhythms and motifs. Through software developments that allows real time animation to take place and greater links between sounds and images, VJs are often performing live, rather than
presenting premade content.

TASK

Choose a piece of music and take three of the animatics you have produced for this unit and use this as the source material for a short performed projection or screening. This can be done by hand, intervening in the playback of each video with hands, shadows or other means. Or you can use a trial version of one of the below VJ software packages to produce a live video event.

Trial VJ software with free trials:
● Resolume: http://resolume.com/
● Modul8: http://www.modul8.ch
● VDMX: http://vidvox.net
● ProVideo2: http://www.renewedvision.com/pvp.php

For inspiration see excerpts from the animated work of Jeff Keen ‘ Instant Cinema ’ and the work of Joan Jonas and Guy Sherwin.

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E5.1: Make an optical device: still to do

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E5.1: Make an optical device: still to do

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TASK
Building on the previous research task, make your own optical device and create a short animation to work with it.
If you are less technically minded, an easy starting point would be a flipbook, and the easiest of the devices to make would be a thaumatrope or zoetrope. You can find plenty of tutorials online on how to make them.
If you are more technically minded, you may want to try experimenting with a Raspberry Pi or other software related optical device.
Add photographs of your working processes to your learning log. You could use the building of your optical device as an opportunity to create your own stopframe animation by sequencing your documentation or creating a short animatic showing the making process as well as the resulting animation.

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Open Source hardware: Arduino and Raspberry Pi

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Open Source hardware: Arduino and Raspberry Pi

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino

https://www.raspberrypi.org

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What's the difference? Arduino vs Raspberry Pi

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′Nouveau Phenakisticope,’ France, c. 1835Alphonse Giroux et Cie

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′Nouveau Phenakisticope,’ France, c. 1835Alphonse Giroux et Cie

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https://praxiscope.tumblr.com/page/2

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A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that very gradually change from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

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Artist Juan Fontanive constructs perpetually looping flip book machines that depict flying birds lifted from Audubon guides and illustrations of butterflies. Part film and part sculpture, almost every aspect of the flip books are assembled by hand from the minutely toothed gears, clips, nuts, bolts, worm wheels and sprockets to the carefully screen printed imagery.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/04/new-bird-butterfly-flip-book-machines-by-juan-fontanive/

For more of his work see:
https://www.riflemaker.org/s-Juan%20Fontanive

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Artist Juan Fontanive ( previously) constructs perpetually looping flip book machines that depict flying birds lifted from Audubon guides and illustrations of butterflies. Part film and part sculpture, almost every aspect of the flip books are assembled by hand from the minutely toothed gears, clips, nuts, bolts, worm wheels and sprockets to the carefully screen printed imagery. Of the curious devices Gild Williams remarked, "Fontanive's artworks seem strangely possessed, producing curiously moving animals that are neither living nor dead, or creating ghostly systems which seem to float mid-air and follow a pace and logic of their own." You can see much more of his work over at Riflemaker.

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Bird & Butterfly Flip Book Machines by Juan Fontanive - Colossal

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Artist Juan Fontanive (previously) constructs perpetually looping flip book machines that depict flying birds lifted from Audubon guides and illustrations of butterflies. Part film and part sculpture, almost every aspect of the flip books are assembled by hand from the minutely toothed gears, clips, nuts, bolts, worm wheels and sprockets to the carefully screen printed imagery.

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The phenakistiscope (also known by the spellings phénakisticope or phenakistoscope) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Like a GIF animation, it can only show a short continuous loop. Unlike the zoetrope and other successors, common versions of the phénakisticope could only practically be viewed by one person at a time.

It was invented almost simultaneously around December 1832 as the Fantascope by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and the Stroboscopische Scheiben ('stroboscopic discs') by Austrian professor  of practical geometry Simon Stampfer. In the French newspaper Le Figaro in June 1833, the term 'phénakisticope' was used from the root Greek word φενακιστικός phenakistikos (or rather from φενακίζειν phenakizein), meaning "deceiving" or "cheating", and ὄψ óps, meaning "eye" or "face", so it was probably intended loosely as 'optical deception' or 'optical illusion'.

The phénakistiscope usually comes in the form of a spinning cardboard disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed radially around the disc's centre is a series of pictures showing sequential phases of the animation. Most commercially produced discs are lithographic prints that were coloured by hand, but also multi-colour lithography and other printing techniques have been used by some manufacturers.

Small rectangular apertures are spaced evenly around the rim of the disc. The viewer would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the images reflected in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images keeps them from simply blurring together so that the user can see a rapid succession of images that appear to be a single moving picture. When there is the same number of images as slots, the images will animate in a fixed position, but will not drift across the disc. Fewer images than slots and the images will drift in the opposite direction to that of the spinning disc. More images than slots and the images will drift in the same direction as the spinning disc.

The pictures of the phénakisticope became distorted when spun fast enough to produce the illusion of movement; they appeared a bit slimmer and were slightly curved. Sometimes animators drew an opposite distortion in their pictures to compensate for this. However, most animations were not intended to give a realistic representation and the distortion isn't very obvious in cartoonish pictures.

The distortion and the flicker caused by the rotating slits are not seen in most phénakisticope animations now found online (for instance the GIF animation above) because they are created with software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistiscope

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The phénakisticope (better known as phenakistiscope or the later misspelling phenakistoscope) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Dubbed " Fantascope" and "Stroboscopische Scheiben" ( Stroboscopic discs) by its inventors, it has been known under very many other names until the French product name Phenakisticope became common (with alternative spelling). The phenakistiscope is regarded as one of the first forms of moving media entertainment that paved the way for the future motion picture and film industry. Like a GIF animation, it can only show a short continuous loop.

When it was introduced in the French newspaper in June 1833, the term 'phénakisticope' was explained to be from the root Greek word 'phenakisticos' (or rather φενακίζειν - phenakizein), meaning "to deceive" or "to cheat", and ὄψ - óps, meaning "eye" or "face", so it was probably intended loosely as 'optical deception' or 'optical illusion'.[citation needed ]

The term phénakisticope was first used by the French company Alphonse Giroux et Compagnie in their application for an import license (29 May 1833) and this name was used on their box sets. Fellow Parisian publisher Junin also used the term 'phenakisticope' (both with and without the accent).

Inventor Joseph Plateau did not give a name for the device when he first published about it in January 1833. Later in 1833 he used 'phénakisticope' in an article to refer to the published versions that he was not involved with. By then, he had an authorized set published first as Phantasmascope, later changed into Fantascope. In many writings and presentations Plateau used both the terms phénakisticope and fantascope, seemingly accepting phénakisticope as the better known name and holding on to fantascope as the name he preferred.

The spelling 'phenakistiscope' was possibly introduced by lithographers Forrester & Nichol in collaboration with optician John Dunn; they used the title "The Phenakistiscope, or, Magic Disc" for their box sets, as advertised in September 1833. The corrupted part 'scope' was understood to be derived from Greek 'skopos', meaning "aim", "target", "object of attention" or "watcher", "one who watches" and was quite common in the naming of optical devices (e.g. Telescope, Microscope, Kaleidoscope, Fantascope, Bioscope).

The misspelling 'phenakistoscope' can already be found in 1835 in The American Journal of Science and Arts and later ended up as a standard name through encyclopedias, for instance in A Dictionary of Science, Literature, & Art (London, 1842) Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literature, and Art (New York, 1852).

The phénakistiscope usually comes in the form of a spinning cardboard disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed radially around the disc's center is a series of pictures showing sequential phases of the animation. Small rectangular apertures are spaced evenly around the rim of the disc. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the images reflected in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images keeps them from simply blurring together so that the user can see a rapid succession of images that appear to be a single moving picture.

When there is the same number of images as slots, the images will animate in a fixed position, but will not drift across the disc. Fewer images than slots and the images will drift in the opposite direction to that of the spinning disc. More images than slots and the images will drift in the same direction as the spinning disc.

Unlike the zoetrope and other successors, common versions of the phénakisticope could only practically be viewed by one person at a time.

The pictures of the phénakisticope became distorted when spun fast enough to produce the illusion of movement; they appeared a bit slimmer and were slightly curved. Sometimes animators drew an opposite distortion in their pictures to compensate for this. However, most animations were not intended to give a realistic representation and the distortion isn't very obvious in cartoonish pictures.

The distortion and the flicker caused by the rotating slits are not seen in most phénakisticope animations now found online (for instance the GIF animation on this page). These are usually animations created with software. These do not replicate the actual viewing experience of a phénakisticope, but they can present the work of the animators in an optimized fashion. Some miscalculated modern re-animations also have the slits rotating (which would appear motionless when viewed through an actual phénakisticope) and the figures moving across the discs where they were supposed to stand still (or standing still when they were supposed to move around).

Most commercially produced discs are lithographic prints that were colored by hand, but also multi-color lithography and other printing techniques have been used by some manufacturers.

The phenakisticope was invented almost simultaneously around December 1832 by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and the Austrian professor of practical geometry Simon Stampfer.

As a university student Plateau noticed in some early experiments that when looking from a small distance at two concentric cogwheels that turned fast in opposite directions, it produced the optical illusion of a motionless wheel. He later read Peter Mark Roget's 1824 article Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures which addressed the same illusion. Plateau decided to investigate the phenomenon further and later published his findings in Correspondance Mathématique et Physique in 1828. In a letter to the same scientific periodical dated December 5, 1829 he presented his (still nameless) Anorthoscope, a disc that turns an anamorphic picture into a normal picture when it is spun fast and seen through the four radial slits of a counter-rotating black disc. This invention was later marketed, for instance by Newton & Co in London.

On 10 December 1830 Michael Faraday presented a paper at the Royal Institution of Great Britain called On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions about the optical illusions that could be found in rotating wheels. He referred to Roget's paper and described his associated new findings. Much was similar to what Plateau had published and Faraday not only acknowledged this publicly but also corresponded with Plateau personally and sent him his paper. Some of Faraday's experiments were new to Plateau and especially the one with a fixed image produced by a turning wheel in front of the mirror inspired Plateau with the idea for new illusions. In July 1832 Plateau sent a letter to Faraday and added an experimental disc with some "anamorphoses" that produced a "completely immobile image of a little perfectly regular horse" when rotated in front of a mirror. After several attempts and many difficulties he constructed a working model of the phénakisticope in November or December 1832. Plateau published his invention in a 20 January 1833 letter to Correspondance Mathématique et Physique. He believed that if the manner of producing the illusions could be somehow modified, they could be put to other uses, "for example, in phantasmagoria".

Stampfer read about Faraday's findings in December 1832 and was inspired to do similar experiments, which soon led to his invention of what he called Stroboscopischen Scheiben oder optischen Zauberscheiben (stroboscope discs or optical magic discs). Stampfer had thought of placing the sequence of images on either a disc, a cylinder (like the later zoetrope) or, for a greater number of images, on a long, looped strip of paper or canvas stretched around two parallel rollers (much like film reels). He also suggests covering up most of the disc or the mirror with a cut-out sheet of cardboard so that one sees only one of the moving figures and painting theatrical coulisses and backdrops around the cut-out part (somewhat similar to the later Praxinoscope-Theatre). Stampfer also mentioned a version which has a disc with pictures on one end and a slotted disc on the other side of an axis, but he found spinning the disc in front of a mirror more simple. By February 1833 he had prepared six double-sided discs, which were later published by Trentsensky & Vieweg. Matthias Trentsensky and Stampfer were granted an Austrian patent (Kaiserlichen königlichen Privilegium) for the discs on 7 May 1833.

Publisher and Plateau's doctoral adviser Adolphe Quetelet claimed to have received a working model to present to Faraday as early as November 1832. Plateau mentioned in 1836 that he thought it difficult to state the exact time when he got the idea, but he believed he was first able to successfully assemble his invention in December. He stated to trust the assertion of Stampfer to have invented his version at the same time.

Peter Mark Roget claimed in 1834 to have constructed several phénakisticopes and showed them to many friends as early as in the spring of 1831, but as a consequence of more serious occupations he did not get around to publishing any account of his invention.

According to Mathias Trentsensky, of art dealer and publishing company Trentsensky & Vieweg, Stampfer had prepared six double-sided discs as early as February 1833 and had repeatedly demonstrated these to many friends. In April 1833 Trentsensky applied for an Austrian patent (k.k. Privilegium) together with Stampfer, which was granted on 7 May 1833. A first edition of four double-sided discs was soon published, but it sold out within four weeks and left them unable to ship orders. These discs probably had round holes as illustrated in an 1868 article and a 1922 reconstruction by William Day, but no original copies are known to still exist. Trentsensky & Vieweg published an improved and expanded set of eight double-sided discs with vertical slits in July 1833. English editions were published not much later with James Black and Joseph Myers & Co. A total of 28 different disc designs have been credited to Professor Stampfer.

Joseph Plateau never patented his invention, but he did design his own set of six discs for Ackermann & Co in London. These were published in July 1833 as Phantasmascope and later as Fantascope. Ackermann & Co soon published two more sets of six discs each, one designed by Thomas Talbot Bury and one by Thomas Mann Baynes.

In the meantime some other publishers had apparently been inspired by the first edition of Professor Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheiben: Alphonse Giroux et Compagnie applied for a French import license on 28 May 1833 for 'Le Phénakisticope' and were granted one on 5 August 1833. They had a first set of 12 single sided discs available before the end of June 1833. Before the end of December 1833 they released two more sets.

By 16 June 1833, Joh. Val. Albert published Die belebte Wunderscheibe in Frankfurt and soon marketed internationally. This version had uncut discs with pictures and a separate larger disc with round holes. The set of Die Belebte Wunderscheibe in Dick Balzer's collection shows several discs with designs that are very similar to those of Stampfer and about half of them are also very similar to those of Giroux's first set. It is unclear where these early designs (other than Stampfer's) originated, but many of them would be repeated on many discs of many other publishers. It is unlikely that much of this copying was done with any licensing between companies or artists.

Joseph Plateau and Simon Stampfer both complained around July 1833 that the designs of the discs they had seen around (besides their own) were poorly executed and they did not want to be associated with them.

The phénakisticope became very popular and soon there were very many other publishers releasing discs with numerous names, including:

Periphanoscop - oder Optisches Zauber-theater / ou Le Spectacle Magique / or The Magical Spectacle (by R.S. Siebenmann, Arau, August 1833)

Toover-schijf (by A. van Emden, Amsterdam, August 1833)

Fores's Moving Panorama, or Optical Illusions (London, September 1833)

The Phenakistiscope or Magic Disc (by Forrester & Nichol & John Dunn, September 1833)

Motoscope, of wonderschijf (Amsterdam, September 1833)

McLean's Optical Illusions, or, Magic Panorama (London, November 1833)

Le Fantascope (by Dero-Becker, Belgium, December 1833)

The Phenakisticope, or Living Picture (by W. Soffe, December 1833)

Soffe's Phantascopic Pantomime, or Magic Illusions (December 1834)

Wallis's Wheel of Wonders (London, December 1834)

The Laughingatus, or Magic Circle (by G.S. Tregear, circa 1835)

Le Phenakisticope (by Junin, Paris, 1839?)

Das Phorolyt oder die magische Doppelscheibe (by Purkyně & Pornatzki, Breslau, 1841)

Optische Zauber-Scheiben / Disques Magique (unknown origin, one set executed by Frederic Voigtlaender)

Optische Belustigungen - Optical Amusements - Optic Amusements (unknown origin)

Fantasmascope. Tooneelen in den spiegel (K. Fuhri, The Hague, 1848)

Kinesiskop (designed by Purkyně, published by Ferdinand Durst, Prague, 1861)

The Magic Wheel (by J. Bradburn, US, 1864)

L'Ékonoscope (by Pellerin & Cie, France, 1868)

Pantinoscope (with Journal des Demoiselles, France, 1868)

Magic Circle (by G. Ingram, circa 1870)

Tableaux Animés - Nouveau Phénakisticope (by Wattilaux, France, circa 1875)

The Zoopraxiscope (by Eadward Muybridge, US, 1893)

Prof. Zimmerman's Ludoscope (by Harbach & Co, Philadelphia, 1904)

After its commercial introduction by the Milton Bradley Company, the Zoetrope (patented in 1867) soon became the more popular animation device and consequently fewer phénakisticopes were produced.

Many versions of the phénakisticope used smaller illustrated uncut cardboard discs that had to be placed on a larger slotted disc. A common variant had the illustrated disc on one end of a brass axis and the slotted disc on the other end; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror and was claimed to produce clearer images.

Fores offered an Exhibitor: a handle for two slotted discs with the pictures facing each other which allowed two viewers to look at the animations at the same time, without a mirror.

A few discs had a shaped edge on the cardboard to allow for the illusion of figures crawling over the edge. Ackermann & Co published three of those discs in 1833, including one by inventor Joseph Plateau.

Some versions added a wooden stand with a hand-cranked mechanism to spin the disc.

Several phénakisticope projectors with glass discs were produced and marketed since the 1850s.

Joseph Plateau created a combination of his phénakisticope and his Anorthoscope sometime between 1844 and 1849, resulting in a back-lit transparent disc with a sequence of figures that are animated when it is rotated behind a counter-rotating black disc with four illuminated slits, spinning four times as fast. Unlike the phénakisticope several persons could view the animation at the same time. This system has not been commercialised; the only known two handmade discs are in the Joseph Plateau Collection of the Ghent University. Belgian painter Jean Baptiste Madou created the first images on these discs and Plateau painted the successive parts.

In 1849 Joseph Plateau discussed the possibilities of combining the phénakisticope with the stereoscope as suggested to him by its inventor Charles Wheatstone. In 1852 Duboscq patented such a "Stéréoscope-fantascope, stéréofantscope ou Bïoscope". Of three planned variations only one was actually produced but without much success. Only one extant disc is known, which is in the Plateau collection of Ghent University.

The first known plan for a phénakisticope projector with a transparent disc was made by Englishman T.W. Naylor in 1843 in the Mechanical's Magazine - Volume 38. His letter was illustrated with a detailed side view of the device. Naylor suggested tracing the pictures of available phenakisticopes onto glass with transparent paint and painting the rest black. Nothing else is known of Naylor or his machine.

Franz von Uchatius possibly read about Naylor's idea in German or Austrian technical journals and started to develop his own version around 1851. Instrument maker Wenzel Prokesch made a first model for him which could only project images of a few inches in diameter. A more successful second model by Prokesch had a stationary disc with transparent pictures with a separate lens for each picture focused on the same spot on a screen. A limelight revolved rapidly behind the disc to project the sequential images one by one in succession. This model was demonstrated to the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1853. Prokesch marketed the machine and sold one to magician Ludwig Döbler who used it in his shows that also included other magic lantern techniques, like dissolving views.

From around 1853 until the 1890s J. Duboscq in Paris marketed different models of a projection phénakisticope. It had a glass disc with a diameter of 34 centimeters for the pictures and a separate disc with four lenses. The discs rotated at different speeds.

An "Optical Instrument" was patented in the U.S. in 1869 by O.B. Brown, using a phenakistiscope-like disc with a technique very close to the later cinematograph; with Maltese Cross motion; a star-wheel and pin being used for intermittent motion, and a two-sector shutter.

Thomas Ross developed a small transparent phénakisticope system, called Wheel of life, which fitted inside a standard magic lantern slide. A first version, patented in 1869, had a glass disc with eight phases of a movement and a counter-rotating glass shutter disc with eight apertures. The discs depicted Ice Skaters, Fishes, Giant's Ladder, Bottle Imp and other subjects. An improved version had 13 images and a single slot shutter disc and received British Patent 2685 on 10 October 1871.

Henry Renno Heyl presented his Phasmatrope on 5 February 1870 at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. This modified magic lantern had a wheel that could hold 16 photographic slides and a shutter. The wheel was rotated in front of the light source by an intermittent mechanism to project the slides successively (probably with a speed of 3 fps). The program contained three subjects: All Right (a popular Japanese acrobat), Brother Jonathan and a waltzing couple. Brother Jonathan addressed the audience with a voice actor behind the screen and professed that "this art will rapidly develop into one of the greatest merit for instruction and enjoyment." The pictures of the waltzing couple survived and consist of four shots of costumed dancers (Heyl and a female dancing partner) that were repeated four times in the wheel. The pictures were posed. Capturing movement with "instantaneous photography" would first be established by Eadward Muybridge in 1878.

Eadward Muybridge created his Zoopraxiscope in 1879 and lectured until 1894 with this projector for glass discs on which pictures in transparent paint were derived from his chronophotographic plates.

The phénakisticope was invented through scientific research into optical illusions and published as such, but soon the device was marketed very successfully as an entertaining novelty toy. After the novelty wore off it became mostly regarded as a toy for children, but it still proved to be a useful demonstration tool for some scientists.

The Czech physiologist Jan Purkyně used his version, called Phorolyt, in lectures since 1837. In 1861 one of the subjects he illustrated was the beating of a heart.

German physicist Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller published a set of 8 discs depicting several wave motions (waves of sound, air, water, etcetera) with J.V. Albert in Frankfurt in 1846.

The famous English pioneer of photographic motion studies Eadweard Muybridge built a phenakisticope projector for which he had his photographs rendered as contours on glass discs. The results were not always very scientific; he often edited his photographic sequences for aesthetic reasons and for the glass discs he sometimes even reworked images from multiple photographs into new combinations. An entertaining example is the sequence of a man somersaulting over a bull chased by a dog. For only one disc he chose a photographic representation; the sequence of a running horse skeleton, which was probably too detailed to be painted on glass. This disc was most likely the very first time a stop motion technique was successfully applied. Muybridge first called his apparatus Zoogyroscope, but soon settled on the name Zoöpraxiscope. He used it in countless lectures on human and animal locomotion between 1880 and 1895.

The Joseph Plateau Award, a trophy resembling a phénakisticope, was a Belgian movie award given yearly between 1985 and 2006.

Several vinyl music releases have phénakistiscope-like animations on the labels or on the vinyl itself. In 1956 Red Raven Movie Records started a series of 78 RPM 8" singles with animations to be viewed with a device with small mirrors similar to a praxinoscope to be placed on the center of the disc. Since 2010 audio-visual duo Sculpture has released several picture discs with very elaborate animations to be viewed under a stroboscope flashing exactly 25 times per second or filmed with a video camera shooting progressively at a very high shutter speed with a frame rate of 25fps.

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The phénakisticope (better known as phenakistiscope or the later misspelling phenakistoscope ) was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. Dubbed " Fantascope" and "Stroboscopische Scheiben" ( Stroboscopic discs) by its inventors, it has been known under very many other names until the French product name Phenakisticope became common (with alternative spelling).

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1: Animation Without a Screen - optical devices

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1: Animation Without a Screen - optical devices

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In the 19th Century, optical devices and toys displayed short, continuous looped illusions of movement across image sequences.

Optical Devices: 19C
Phenaktistiscope
Zootropes
Kinetoscope Parlours or ‘ Penny Arcades’ where for a penny one could view a film lasting about a minute. Patrons were primarily men and boys, who came to peep through the kinetoscope, often at sexually suggestive films.

Mechanical Flipbooks and electronic platforms

1. Juan Fontanieve’s mechanical flipbooks and wall based optical devices.

2. Arduino and Raspberry Pi microcontrollers programmed to move mechanical, digital or electrical parts.

3. Ian Gouldstone algorithmic simulations.