SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

Question: I mean, if I were the user would I enroll it and—what was involved with memory of
the image before and then where you’re getting to?
Dr. Stafford: You would never unroll the whole thing all at once. I mean it’s useful actually and
do we cite many examples say from [sounds like “Norvels”?] or from the period where you get
a sense of how they’re used but you would never unfold them. You would probably unfold
them about this much. In other words and you’d get a scene and then you would just keep on
going. There are other things. You see I had to throw so much out that go along with it,
puzzles, wonderful puzzles at the same time where you get, for example metamorphic. I left out
the whole metamorphic section, landscapes where you would create your own quite literally
that you get a box of pieces the horizon line is the same but you could put them together in a
way. So, that this whole notion of new ability and what we think of choosing you know but I
mean choosing of course within parameters obviously under a certain limit that’s there but
that’s connected in a way to your question. The medium has stretched but it suggests to you
how far you unfurl it. In other words, you can unfurl it, people look at all of your four brothels
you know and go on. But I mean it’s very human in its dimension and also that’s a child’s so
that the level of detail is quite different or the stretch if I could put it, is different from if you
just walked around the corner, not around the corner, around the edge and looked at the Great
Exposition one which was meant for adults. So you know that kind of tailoring. Just like the
little infant’s cabinet is literally meant for a child’s hand.
Question: I was wondering if that journey to Hamburg could be used in a Zoetrope or
something? You know a spinning toy and have more of a sense of a journey. Is that where that
question is going?
Dr. Stafford: I don’t know. That’s a different medium. You see that’s a different—one could say
that’s a different technology. No, because in Zoetrope it’s repetitive. You see what’s interesting
about these, these don’t repeat the scenes, they’re quite different. In other words, in the sense
that it is a journey, you’re going from Hamburg to Altoona. In the universal exposition it’s a
little bit different, and the thing that’s amazing is that you can enter it anywhere. We arbitrarily
opened it in the middle; we could have unrolled it at the end just so you would see the amount
of roll that was left on the left and the right, here that we couldn’t unroll. Otherwise we’d need
you know to wrap it around the museum but the Zoetrope that’s rather different because there
are certain images there that are repeated. What it’s closer to—do you remember the blow book
that I showed you where certain images were repeated? I’m sorry, I really compressed so much,
but in the blow book there are sets of images. There are nuns, there are different kinds of
images then there are blank sheets of paper, then you get them again and of course, what the
charlatan does is amazing; he makes them disappear i.e., the blank pages and then suddenly
down the pike he makes them reappear again. So, that’s a little bit closer to the Zoetrophic
experience.
Question: I guess I was thinking that Jeff Wall in a way—it’s sort of like that trip to Hamburg.
You put it in a large enough spinning theatre and you have kind of a resistance, resistance of
vision and screen in between, that might be a sort of moving picture as well and it pre-figured
the movies.
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