A text I wrote in 1998:
”
#17 is a kinetic installation consisting of two discs that spin in opposite directions on aligned shafts. The discs have patterns on them so that a static image appears when their speeds are in a specific ratio. This image depends on the angle under which it is seen.
The installation was inspired by the anorthoscope, a device invented by Joseph Plateau in 1828. Plateau was a Belgian scientist who laid the foundations for film and television through his research into after-images. He is remembered especially as the inventer of the phenakistiscope, which became a very popular optical and philosophical toy later in the nineteenth century. The anorthoscope was its direct predecessor and embodies the solution to a problem which troubled scientists at the time. This problem was worded for the first time as ‘the enigma of the palissade’ by the English mathematician Peter Mark Roget. He asked himself why a rolling wheel appears to have curved spokes when it passes behind a palissade. A similar observation was made by Michael Faraday, who noticed that when two spoked wheels spin in opposite directions, a third ‘phantom’ wheel appears. Plateau correctly analyzed the cause of these phenomena as the interaction between periodic interruptions of the image and the temporal treshold of the eye, which is incapable of noticing these interruptions if their frequency exceeds a certain limit. This interaction causes us to see objects as distorted when they move at high speeds.
Plateau devised the anorthoscope in order to demonstrate these effects. The original anorthoscope consists of two discs which spin in opposite directions. The front disc is completely black apart from four transparent slits, so that it periodically interrupts the light. The other disc has a translucent anamorphic picture on it. When spinning, the distortion caused by the motion cancels out the distortion of the anomorphosis, so that a static and undistorted image appears.
The anorthoscope demonstrates in a very elegant way the interrelatedness of movement and perception. By doing this it subverts euclidian perspective and announces cubism and the first moving images filmed from planes and moving trains. The anorthoscope can be seen as the first symptom of what Einstein expressed in his threory of relativity. It embodies a world view that is based on encounters and interferences rather than on static wireframes set into motion.
#17 has only been presented in the “Nomadisch Paviljoen”: a temporary structure in the atrium of the city hall in The Hague. My anorthoscope had discs of two metres diameter and formed an extra wall of the pavillion.
”
(Pictures by Hein van Liempd)
On and off I am working on smaller versions that will generate more complex imagery. I presented a work-in-progress version of this in 2004.