I’ve finally put together a decent proof of concept for a way of exhibiting animated discs using only a stepper motor.

When calibrated properly, it allows you to see the animation with your own eyes in broad daylight, and can also be captured with your average smartphone camera.

How it works

As with any animation device, the aim is to have the viewer only see the image when it’s registered in the correct position, and not see it when it’s transitioning to the next frame.

If you hold the disc still for a much longer time proportionally to moving it to the next frame, the viewer’s eye will only ever have the chance to focus on the still image.

Below is an approximation of the effect. Move the slider to see it at different time scales.

Stepper motors love starting and stopping. It’s what they do. So this motion is pretty simple to achieve in theory, but there were still some practicalities to iron out.

It bears repeating: we want to maximise the time the disc is still, and minimise the time it is in motion. That means the motor is given all the time in the world to do nothing, yet given almost no time for all the effort and stress of spinning the disc.

It turns out that trying to accelerate and decelerate a mass in a matter of milliseconds requires a lot of torque, and in early experiments it would often skip steps and fall out of sync.

For the purposes of my proof of concept, the solution was to make everything as small and light as possible.

After calibrating the motor with some paper prototypes, I hand embroidered some designs and affixed them to a wooden coaster. It allowed me to finally test the whole rig with the correct weight and materials.

Why I’ve been exploring this path

Previous iterations of my work have favoured one viewing method at the expense of another.

For example, my Embroidered Zoetrope installation is designed to favour the in-person experience. It uses a strobe light to syncronise the frames of animation and allows people to see the effect with their own eyes.

So what are the drawbacks?

First you need a space that is blackened. I don’t mean darkened, that won’t be enough. It needs to be pitch black to ensure no light is leaking in and making the designs blurry. In the context of a gallery this requires a dedicated room, something akin to a projection space. Having a dedicated space is nice, it adds a certain focus and reverence to the exibit, but it’s a huge hurdle that curators need to factor in when planning an exhibition. For some I imagine it’s prohibitive.

Secondly it is near impossible to capture the effect using a camera. This isn’t a dealbreaker, particularly when the focus of the work is the in-person experience, but when a work is partially about surprise and delight, being able to capture the effect and share it with others is a natural extension that just doesn’t work in this case.

What happens if you prioritise the opposite?

There are many artists who do prioritise the reverse; they design work that is activated using the framerate of the camera, which allows it to be viewed and recorded on a smartphone. This solves the recording problem and makes it vastly more accessible to a wider audience. But it compromises the design and the in-person viewing experience.

This approach is particularly common in commercial work such as vinyl records and slipmats with animated patterns on them. In order to reach the framerate required for the camera, you need to cram many more frames of animation onto the surface of the dics, so it greatly restricts the space available for the design.

In addition to this, the effect is still not visible to the naked eye, so something like a strobe light is still required.

Where to from here

I should call out that this isn’t something I’m claiming to have invented. I’ve seen plenty of other similar experiments using intermittent motion in this way, either with a stepper motor like I am using, or some other mechanism like a geneva drive. What I’m excited about with development isn’t really the act of ‘inventing’, but rather the new doors this has opened for me, allowing me to create work that could be much more accessible, portable and even sharable than my previous work has been.

Having played around with this proof of concept for a while, here are some of the considerations I’ve been pondering: