In 1888, Kodak’s brand new and super simple cameras hit the market, along with their film developing service. “You press the button, we do the rest”, went the advertisement, marking the first time in history when the photographer was not required to actually understand what went on behind the shutter. This trend has endured for more than a century, as today only the engineers of the producing company understand the inner workings of imaging devices. While this is considered normal, the great majority of users have absolutely no idea how the captured light ends up on a remote screen as an image. The price of accessibility and easy operation is the ever-greater separation of man and technology.

 

Through technological advancement, every medium tends to less and less obstruct visual throughput. In contrast with this visually transparent, and technologically obscure system, my aim was to construct a machine, where the formation of the image becomes transparent. It was built mostly from recycled parts and features an open-source microcontroller unit. The three loops of black and white film carry the image broken down to three colour channels, backlit with the three primary colours of human vision. These images are then fed through a special prism capable of mixing the three channels into a single, colour image to be projected on a flat surface by a set of lenses. The horizontally moving still images are far from a cinematic experience, since the narrow viewing angle, caused by the etched surface of the circular screen, forces the viewer to actively observe.