david lawrey & jaki middleton
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| The Sound Before You Make It (2005) | The Sound Before You Make It (2005)
Kinetic installation with strobe light and audio
Dancing zombies come alive, igniting our eighties pop music nostalgia in The Sound Before You Make It. Sydney collaborative artists Jaki Middleton and David Lawrey are interested in cultural memory and the historically playful resonance of perception, illusion and representation. Traversing the visual and aural iconography of pop culture, their projects utilise a range of familiar objects but position them within a new context through sampling. Middleton and Lawrey demonstrate how sampling can be used to call up the personal memories that are attached to specific cultural objects, while also highlighting the dissonance of their sampled setting.
The kinetic installation, The Sound Before You Make It, was inspired by the nineteenth-century technology of the zoetrope and its ability to create the convincing illusion of three-dimensional animation, long before the advent of film and television.
In 1834, English inventor William George Horner announced a new optical illusion: the Daedaleum. Its name was taken from the figure of Daedalus in Greek mythology, the builder and sculptor said to have crafted the first humans and animals in motion. Marketed in 1867, the Daedaleum was re-named the zoetrope in England and America. The term 'zoetrope' is taken from the Greek words zoe (life) and trope (turn). This proto-animation device was also known by other popular names like the 'wonder drum' and the 'wheel of life'.
Traditionally, the zoetrope consists of a simple drum with an open top, supported on a central axis. Hand-drawn picture strips of sequential images are inserted at the base of the drum. Slots are cut at equal distances around the outer surface of the drum, just above the picture strip. The drum is spun, creating the impression of movement when the viewer looks through the slits; the faster the drum moves, the smoother the effect of animated motion. By utilising 'persistence of vision', that is our eye's natural ability to retain an image for a fraction of a second after it has gone, the zoetrope turned a series of still images into continuous movement, making it crucial to the development of animation.
With cheeky historical abandon, Middleton and Lawrey have re-created the zoetrope's sequential movement of animated figures, using three-dimensional figures and strobe lighting in place of the traditional two-dimensional images and drum. Remixing the zombie choreography from Michael Jackson's special effects laden Thriller music video with nineteenth-century animation techniques, The Sound Before You Make It collides moving image history with our own pop culture recollections, to the tune of an unforgettable beat.
Saige Walton, ACMI
October 2006
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