STORY
STORY
People first discovered photographs could be sequenced and viewed as moving pictures back in the 1890s, and it’s this industrial era that we like to acknowledge in our flipbook work.
Our foray into flipbook art started in 2009, when we traveled in Europe and the middle east; we fell in love with the mid-twentieth century mechanized signs that were still operating, especially the split-flap (or solari) departure/arrival boards in train stations, with their mesmerizing
“click-clack-click-clack”
Back in L.A., we fed our new mechanical obsession by taking field trips to old aerospace junk yards and rummaging through the obsolete equipment. Wendy was enchanted by the look of it all – corroded metals, gauges, dials and buttons – and the design of a long gone era. Mark, on the other hand was excited about the functional parts and the guts. Having grown exposed to the aerospace industry, he felt nostalgia for the old equipment. We also started interacting with a local hackerspace, and it soon became clear that tech art was a natural progression.
WISH
WISH
Once we’d solved the issue of developing the technology – our wish was to bring emotional depth to the flipbook medium. How people connected to these magical movie machines became most important; that’s when the craft really began to take a hold of us.
We’re enjoying a moment when our art is becoming more self-aware and beginning to develop a unique personality of its own.
OUR FUTURE
OUR FUTURE
Invent - Imagine - Explore. Community is important to us, and we love collaborating with fellow creatives. To nurture that connection, we created “FlipBooKit”, a DIY kit that enables anyone to build their own hand-cranked miniature movie machine. We’ve been moved and amazed to see what other people have made with this artistic technology.
History of the Moving Image
The first flipbook appeared in Birmingham, England in 1868 when the British lithograph printer John Barnes Linnett patented his new invention under the name kineograph, literally “a moving picture”. Although the earlier phenakistoscope was able to produce a circular sequence of images, Linnett’s kineograph was the world’s first type of animation to use a linear sequence of images.
Almost thirty years later, Max Skladanowsky, the early German filmmaker and inventor, also prepared to unveil his own moving photographic images. He and his brother Emil had not yet developed their own film projector, and he exhibited his serial images as a flipbook in 1894. That same year, the American Herman Casler unveiled his new invention, the Mutoscope – a mechanized flipbook that, instead of binding the images as a flipbook, mounted them to a rotating cylinder.
It was Casler’s invention that truly captured the public’s imagination and his variation of the classic flipbook was a popular attraction well into the 20th century, often appearing in amusement parks and arcades. At the turn of the century, Henry William Short introduced the filoscope, a flipbook that included a small metal holder that made it much easier to flip the pages and see the images come to life.