TLDR

Wheel Of Life was an art show at the Hyde Park Art Center featuring new work created for zoetropes that ran from March 19, 2022 to July 2, 2022. Curator Scott Wolniak invited 13 artists from around the nation who normally don't work with moving images to construct 16 frame animations to be brought to life by the motion of the zoetrope.

I was orginally hired by Scott to design and build both manual and motorized zoetropes, but by the end I was involved in more or less every part of the exhibition design process.

I also built an exhibition site and a webapp that allows artists to quickly prototype their animations on a 3D zoetrope. If that sounds like more your cup o' tea, check it out here!.

The exhibition space in its nearly final form.

Project Origins

At the University of Chicago, Scott teaches a class on experimental animation where the first assignment is to produce a 16 frame, looping animation to be played on a large metal zoetrope. This very prompt would become the basis for Wheel Of Life, only now extended to 13 professional artists.

Scott reached out to me in 2021 seeking help for such an exhibition, knowing that I had experience building things from my job at UChicago's prototyping lab. I was tasked with designing and building 16 zoetropes, some motorized, some not, and some sporting artist specific modifications. I happily accepted, and after some pandemic related delays we got started with our R&D process.

Building the Zoetropes

What's A Zoetrope?

A zoetrope is a spinning circular drum with evenly spaced slits on the side. When you line the interior of the drum with frames of an animation (either as individual frames or a continuous strip) and give things a spin, looking through the slits from the outside will produce the illusion of animation.

Drag to change slit width

narrower

Play with the slit width slider and see how it affects your ability to discern the animation!

The main parameters at play for a zoetreope are its spin speed and the width of its slits -- the latter being the most important factor in maintaining the illusion of animation. You can think of the slits like the open shutter of a camera, allowing a specific amount of light through for a specific period of time. If the slit is too wide, the image of a frame can persist a bit too long for our eyes to perceive a smooth transition from one frame to the next, and if its too narrow, then the image may not register to the eyes at all.

Building Ze Zoetropes

After a bunch of cardboard prototypes, we decided to move forward with building a modular zoetreope with laser cut wood, since we could easily produce copies and precisely implement our design specs (for the most part). The design itself was simple: a circular base with slots where 16 rectangular frames with small inserts could fit to form the 16-sided walls of the zoetrope. Each rectangular frame ofcourse had the aforementioned slit cut out to enable the viewer to look through the drum.

An unfinished wooden zoetrope. — After a lot of experimentation, we found a slit width that worked well and got to prototyping.

I took to Adobe Illustrator to set up our cut paths, making test cuts to measure the kerf for the type of wood we used made appropriate adjustments, and rinsed and repeated the process until the planned design specs were properly tuned. However, due to the inconsistent thickness and warping of the plywood sheets we were using (note: we would need 3 boards to build one zoetrope due to size limitations of our laser cutter), I reasoned that some of the rectangular frame inserts would not always fit into the base and that there would be some small gaps that would leak light in between the frames once assembled.

To get around the inconsistencies in wood thickness, I simply erred on the side of caution and sized the height of cutouts in the base to the thickness of the thinnest plywood board in our batch of material. That way if a side insert did not fit, we could just gently sand it down until it did. As for the gaps, we simply lined the spaces between each frames with black caulk, since the zoetropes were going to be sprayed black anyhow.

Gettin' Em To Spin

Getting the zoetropes to spin stably was definitely a pain point in the project and we eventually settled on using a mix of liberally lubed lazy susan bearings and a set of large coupled bearings connected by a thick wooden dowel. The latter spun for a lot longer and far more consistently, but we let the artists decide which spin style they preferred. Most of the zoetropes ended up using the lazy susan bearings surpisingly and the metal whooshing sound produced by this bearing became a thematic element of the show's workshop/unfinished aesthetic.

Motorized Experiments

While our original plans included having motorized zoetropes that would be interactively controlled by visitors, we ended up not including them in the show since they conflicted with the shows 'handmade' aesthetic while also being rather distracting due to sound of the motor. Below is an early prototype spun using an Arduino powered NEMA 17 motor.

Working With The Artists

By far the most rewarding part of the exhibition design process was working with the artists. Managing communications with them and helping their ideas come to life was equal parts frustrating and inspiring and overall helped me shape my collaboration skills considerably.

A praxinoscope featuring artwork by Georgina Valverde. — Georgina's wondrous praxinoscope was a crowd favorite.

We had mentioned at the beginning when reaching out to them that we were open to modifications to our zoetrope design and that we would try our best to make things happen. A couple of them took us up on our offer, most notably Georgina Valverde, who sought to convert her zoetrope into a praxinoscope, which employs a mirrored column in the center of the drums to produce the illusion of motion. I worked with Georgina to source mirror acrylic and designed a column held together through laser cut acrylic joinery. Paired with her colorful artwork, the result was a breathtaking sight to behold!

The Show

Two black wooden zoetropes that were used by local children to learn about animation — We had a station at the back of gallery where a workshop was held for local children to make their own zoetrope animations.

Scott and I worked closely with the Hyde Park Art Center's brilliant preparator Jeff Robinson to design and construct the tables and lighting for the zoetropes. We grouped certain artists together by theme and gave especially unique works their own isolated table. We also set up a community table at the back of the exhibition, where a workshop for local children to construct their own animations would be held.

The atmosphere of the show was bound together by an ambient soundscape produced by the amazing Franny Levitin. The soundscape sampled several field recordings we made of the sound of a zoetropes spinning and complemented the unfinished and workshop-y aesthetic we were going for.

Patrons enjoying a praxinoscope. — Some lovely patrons get up close and personal with Georgina's praxinoscope.

The show turned out incredible and was enjoyed by many throughout the summer of 2022. I learned a great deal from the privilege of working on it and have plans to continue designing and building more mechanical animation devices in the future...