100 (diameter ) x 180 (height) cm
Lacquered wood, lambda print, custom electronics, LED lights
Redefining the traditional ideas of the victorian zoetrope, Digital Zoetrope revolves around themes of urban exploration and sensory impressions emerging from the different speeds we traverse our cities, and how by age, profession, interests, among other factors, we are exposed to new visual, tactile and sonic layers enriching our sensory impressions as individuals functioning in a collective network of relations that seem to coincide, but never intersect. Digital Zoetrope was commissioned by onedotzero.
We wanted to create a container that both celebrated the heritage of motion arts as well as its digital present while affording us a very literal medium for the content – the idea of altered states through motion. From there the idea of a hi-tech zoetrope arose.To illustrate the idea of disparate images coming together Troika deconstructed legendary type designer Wim Crouwel´s Gridnik typeface for the zoetrope, breaking the typeface into verticals, horizontals and diagonals which merge into letters and words at speed.
The zoetrope itself is an updated model of the original zoetrope designed by William Horner in 1834. The original zoetrope uses light and motion to animate individual images or frames, much like traditional film that creates a similar effect by showing a rapid succession of frames causing the illusion of motion. Whilst traditional zoetropes commonly display small loops of figurative animations, Troika’s zoetrope works from an abstract pattern that magically starts to form words when it is lit with the right frequency. Building on this concept, Troika created a state of the art and unique prototype, designing and programming all components from scratch. By controlling the frequencies of rapidly blinking LED lights at the center of the zoetrope, it is possible to display different words or alternating patterns depending on the speed of the flashing lights. The viewer cannot see the flickering of the lights due to an effect known as persistence of vision whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed.
The Digital Zoetrope was commissioned by onedotzero and first exhibited at the British Film Institute, London in 2009, and subsequently has been touring to Moscow and the Holon Museum in Tel Aviv with 'Decode', an exhibition curated by the V&A.