May 27, 2009 permalink
LEGO Spectacle Automaton
Enlightenment-style LEGO theater spectacle automaton. Watch the behind-the-scenes shots at the end – it’s fully driven by Mindstorm NXT!
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May 27, 2009 permalink
Enlightenment-style LEGO theater spectacle automaton. Watch the behind-the-scenes shots at the end – it’s fully driven by Mindstorm NXT!
December 23, 2008 permalink
An early film special effect using a partly-silvered mirror to reflect and superimpose miniatures or other off-camera devices.
December 23, 2008 permalink
December 23, 2008 permalink
In 1903, the specialty watch company Helios built a trial run of miniature Boilerplates. The master of the hoax, an expert on Victorian automata, Paul Guinan, “tried” to “rebuild” one of these. The head resembles gas masks that soldiers wore in World War I, but as ornamental brass. The chest is as tubular as a Franklin stove, but gleaming with Baroque detail. Its knobby limbs were fully articulated , like an armature for special effect stop-motion seventy years later, or a thing in The City of Lost Children. […] For over a century, thousands of boilerplates have come down to us. They wait patiently. Patience has always been a virtue of the boilerplate; and of all hoaxes, including the Wizard of Oz himself.
December 23, 2008 permalink
[…] Gothic revivals polish decay, until it turns into special effects. Ultimately, they retrofit the haunted house until it looks as if no one has moved in yet.
December 5, 2008 permalink
From Wikipedia (link): The Eidophusikon (Greek: Ειδωφυσικον) was a piece of art, no longer extant, created by 18th century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg. It opened in Leicester Square in February 1781.
See also this modern day Eidophusikon project for more history and a replica video.
December 5, 2008 permalink
Potemkin villages were a new mode of special effects as power, as the erasure of memory in the late eighteenth century. But the principle evolves beyond one’s wildest imagination. All movie sets are Potemkin villages before they are shot as film. And all wars since 1989 have become Potemkin villages when they appear on global media. And yet, Baroque special effects already pointed toward this problem by 1650, that Baroque illusion served uneasy alliances to cover up the decay and misery of the kingdom.
December 5, 2008 permalink
Comenius begins his story with a pilgrim who is given mystic spectacles. But the lenses are cursed, ground by Illusion, rims hammered by Custom. Optical gimmicks were pervasive in many churches and theaters by 1622. Perspective could be accelerated or decelerated by tilting floors, narrowing walls, adding a deep focal point. Special effects were featured on ceilings: trompe l'oeil, accelerated perspective, anamorphosis – to induce a moment of wonder – a “vertigo” when the lid of a building simply dissolved. To many, these phantasms were progress, practical advances. But to Comenius, they might be the serpent’s eye.
Indeed in Labyrinth of the World, the spectacles distort God’s nature. To quote Shakespeare, the are “almost the natural man … [but] Dishonour traffics with man’s nature.” They are a prosthesis upon the eye, as McLuhan would say. To Comenius, they are an evil, not a cheerful global village. They make true distances vanish; ugly turns beautiful; black becomes white. However, luckily for Comenius’s pilgrim, these demonic spectacles do not fit properly. He can sneak looks below the rim, see the human labyrinth as it really is. If this were film, I would call what the pilgrim finds beneath his spectaceds Baroque noir, the town with no soul.