The Phonokinetoscope (2001)
By Rodney Graham
Rodney Graham talks about The Phonokinetoscope ArtForum, November 2001 The Phonokinetoscope comprises a five-minute 16 mm film loop and a twelve-inch vinyl record with fifteen minutes of music on it. The projector is activated when the needle engages with the record--technically making it a phonokinetoscope, after Edison's early cinematic invention. Reading W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson's amusingly florid 1895 History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph, the first history of the cinema, I was reminded that, contrary to popular belief, the earliest experiments in film integrated image and sound. The Dicksons effuse: "The inconceivable swiftness of the photographic succession and the exquisite synchronism of the phonographic attachment have removed the last trace of automatic action, and the illusion is complete. The organgrinder's monkey jumps upon his shoulders to the rich strains of Norma." Perhaps the Wizard of Menlo Park was already thinking of music videos. My phonokinetoscope is somewhat more rudimentary than Edison's: Not only is there no guarantee of synchronicity, but in fact my unsynched loop allows for innumerable sound/image juxtapositions--and thus myri…
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