What is a Zoetrope?

It’s all about animation. Most likely you are familiar with flipbooks. A zoetrope uses similar fixed images seen in sequence each in a split second repeatedly, giving the illusion of motion. But the zoetrope uses a slotted cylinder with images on the inside. When looking through the slots, as the cylinder spins, the inner images seem to move. Here is a good visual explanation of a traditional zoetrope:

You can find more historical information here, but I am more interested how the zoetrope is used in sculpture. I remember seeing a zoetrope when I was very young. It wasn’t until resently that I became interested in making 4D sculptures with reference to a zoetrope. The following pictures are my very small 4 dimensional sculptures. After hanging them on trees, they spin in the wind; the small shapes with letters then move.

In this blog is a video of another piece I’ve made called DNA Prayer Wheel (look to the upper right). It’s a larger piece suspended by a string inside the box. When the viewer blows on the side, the piece winds up and spins. It was entered in the All-Student Juried Art Exhibition at Augsburg College in April of 2010. DNA Prayer Wheel was selected as 1^st Place – Award of Excellence by jurors / artists Betsy Byers and Cecilia Ramón.

Now for a large zoetrope. The following is an installation in Venaria, Italy by Artem Limited from the UK. They made the BRAVIA-drome for Sony that was used for a Sony advertisement. It’s quite impressive:

Next are sculptural zoetropes. Dimensional zoetropes use strobe lights to create the illusion of motion. Peter Hudson is a master artist in the use of dimensional zoetropes. His "Deeper" was displayed at Burning Man in 2004. Here is a good look at it:

There are many more types of animations techniques such as phenakistoscopes, praxinoscope, zoopraxiscope, mutoscope, and flip books, but I hope you enjoyed seeing these zoetropes.

Start seeing 4 Dimensional Sculpture

Whether called 4D, motion, or kinetic sculpture, sculptors that work with the fourth dimension usually consciously focus on how their art is affected by movement. Typically the movement is necessary to tell the sculptor's meaning in the piece, obviously, otherwise it would be done in the third dimension. Theo Jansen is a good example. He creates walking sculptures that use the wind to create motion. Although the following is an advertisement, it is a good example of Jansen’s work:

Not all 4D sculpture is this complex. Street graffiti artist, Joshua Allen Harris, uses the wind created by subway vents to create intriguing 4D sculptures:

The use of motors are more common to create movement in 4D sculptures. This kinetic sculpture is also aided by the use of a computer. Made by Art+Com, a design agency in Berlin, Germany, this piece uses metal spheres on wires:

Arthur Ganson is fairly well known by 4D artists. His pieces are like living machines that take on human traits. This movie short was made using his Machine with Wishbone:

Here is Ganson’s "Child Watching Ball". Note that the sculpture must be moved with the aid of the viewer:

Here Arthur Ganson talks about his work:

I will leave you with a work called Morpho Towers - Two Standing Spirals by Sachiko Kodama, which uses liquid magnets and electricity in its movement.

I hope this gives you a little taste of what is happening in 4D sculpture. Next post I will discuss zoetropes.

Art in the 4th Dimension

I thought I would start this blog by defining my view of four dimensionalism. There are actually two different interpretations. It’s interesting to note that both views are interpreted in art. The first view (philosophers call it the ontological view) is seeing an object in terms of time, and as a result the object shows movement. A sculpture that moves can be caused by wind, motors, light, heat, etc. becoming 4 dimensional art (this moving Bicycle Wheel sculpture - 1913 by Marcel Duchamp - is a good example). Of course moving pictures and dance are also 4 dimensional arts, but I will mostly focus on kinetic sculpture, painting, and graphic arts in this blog.

In this first view of 4 dimensionalism, the dimensions are expressed as the following:

• 1st dimension - a line


• 2nd dimension - a flat plane – a drawing or painting on a piece of paper


• 3rd dimension - a shape – a sculpture


• 4th dimension - a shape moving in a given space. – a sculpture moving through space

The other view is called spacial 4th dimension in which length, width, and height have one more addition (not time). This gets into some physics; so bear with me. First it means that one dimensional lines together make a 2 dimensional plane (let’s say a square). Then 2 dimensional planes together make a 3 dimensional shape (a cube). Then that would mean; 3 dimensional shapes together would define a 4 dimensional thing (called a tesseract or a hypercube). Ok if you have not fallen asleep…here is a sculpture that follows this school of thought:

"Octacube" by Adrian Ocneanu

So in this blog, there will be many additions of videos showing 4 dimensional art that I hope you will enjoy.