I helped Allen with the technical design for this piece, a digital version of the 100-year-old mutoscope. Turning the handle moves a flipbook of images; in this case a Quicktime movie in Macromedia Director. Provided hardware design and software.

Allen is an accomplished artist, with interesting video and installation work. The completed Mutelescope shows more surreal images and notions of time than a traditional mutoscope.

His original idea was to use three micro switches connected to a BX-24 microcontroller to detect the turn of the shaft (pictured left).

I suggested eliminating electronics and moving parts in favor of a Griffin PowerMate, a handy device I had experimented with and thought was perfect for installations. It is a large continuous-turn potentiometer with removable button casing; pushing acts as a mouse click. It plugs directly into a USB port, and can easily send commands or ASCII characters to any program when turned or pushed. The handle was affixed to the PowerMate.




The blue glow of the Powermate's underside can be seen installed. A small Shuttle XPC runs the Director program, which uses the PowerMate input to flip through a Quicktime movie; pushing it toggles a selection screen for movies, based on files in a folder for ease of updating. Some customisation functions are also built in, to adjust speed and size of movies for example, so that the installation can be updated or calibrated easily while in the gallery.

This was a fun and satisfying project. It recalled my very first physical computing project in 1995, the video turntable. We had also worked with real mutoscopes in a 1999 exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. And I'd worked a lot with interactive video, for example in Moving Pictures.

Images: Allen Coombs