It seems that in our current age, the barriers between artistic mediums are being broken down and reimagined more often than ever before. In the DJing sphere, the music is almost always accompanied by pre-planned visuals. While they undoubtedly serve as a substantial contributing force to the experience, their artistic value is always greatly overshadowed by the music. Once again, however, a new horizon has been breached by video jockey and audiovisual artist MissTake.
Her creation, the Phenakistomixer, combines the precision and skill of using DJ turntables with the aesthetic of dark, complex visual animation. Crafted with painstaking attention to detail and frame-by-frame illustrations, MissTake has created a completely unique approach to live performance using equidistant slits on a rotating disk to simulate moving animation on a projected screen.
“After tackling the tedious calculations to find the exact parameters for each animation—which came out to be 32 frames on a single vinyl—Krebs set her turntables to 45rpm and stationed the pitch slider to meticulously fix the frames in view. Then, by setting the camera to 25fps, with a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second, Phenakistomixer 1.0 came to life, intoxicating festival goers with a kinetic display of ‘visual cocktails.’”
In of her most recent upgrades to her setup, MissTake has included technology that allows for the translation of light into sound. It uses an optical sensor to scan the intensity of light reflections off the illustrated surfaces and transforms them into sound waves.
For a full look at the Phenakistomixer and it’s creator, check out The Creators Project here.
Source/Photos: TheCreatorsProject
