The Peneletrope
A Cinematic Opposition Device
Created April-May 2024
Showed at PNCA MFA Thesis Exhibition
156x35” Wood And Fabric Kinetic Sculpture
As I approached the MFA Thesis Exhibition at PNCA, I was confronted with how best to display the collaborative animation work conducted in the Fabric Film Strip workshops. Where and how do they live as both an animation and as a static fabric object? As rather oversized rings of fabric measuring about forty feet long, a conventional wall-hanging display does not promise the most activated version of viewing the film strips. In order to answer this quandary, I devised a method of continuing the participatory ethos of this project into the exhibition space in the form of a hand-cranked conceptual film projector made specifically for the film strips. Inspired by the cinematic toys of the 19th century such as the zoetrope, the kinetoscope, and the zoopraxiscope, I wanted to create an exhibition that “is not simply a machine in miniature; it has an extra expenditure of energy invested in play, in the pleasure of the moment.” While this machine is not miniature in the slightest, it does operate similar to Zoe Beloff’s depiction of these toys as “constructed around loops, which remove us from linear time into an altogether more hypnotic state” which can, especially in this contemporary moment “create parallel universes, calling into question corporate visions of progress.” In construction, I looked to yarn spinning wheels for the basic template to engineer the machine around. In terms of aesthetics, I turned to the colors and graphics of the antique cinematic toys and the accompanying roadshows that introduced them to audiences, painting the object in eye-catching primary colors and adorning it with silk-screened fabric inserts that bridge the stylistic gap between the traveling circuses and early nickelodeons.
Thus, the Peneletrope Cinematic Opposition Device was born.
The Peneletrope is named after the Homeric figure of Penelope, who warded off suitors while her husband Odysseus was away at war by promising them that she would choose one to marry after she had finished the burial shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. Every day, she would weave the shroud, and every night she would unweave it to begin again the next day. In this way, Penelope can be seen as a creative thinker who wields the power of repetition and looping through textile work to control time, which felt pertinent to the project at hand. This name was also chosen as an homage to the feminist lineages at the heart of craftwork’s innovation since the beginning of recorded labor and art.
The second half of the title refers to Brian Holmes’s formulation of the “oppositional device” as “something between a prop and a performance, it’s a flow of relations in which distinct objects stand out and take on momentarily important roles… [and] becomes a social tool: a device to produce or provoke public speech.” These oppositional devices are an inversion of the Foucaldian conception of the device as a deterministic structure that “brings people together in a pattern of interaction upheld by some kind of technology and underwritten by some kind of logic or rule.” Instead, the oppositional device opens up the situation to new kinds of interactions beyond those prescribed by societal expectations, questions the forms of logic that govern us, and promotes more unruly forms of participation than usually allowed in the civil and cultural space. In labeling the Peneletrope a “Cinematic Opposition Device” I intended to provoke a reconsideration of what the standard forms of cinematic exhibition are, and if a “projector” can still be a projector if it does not project anything. Through this artifact of speculative design, I hope that these questions lead to further discussion and troubling of the ways and forms in which we receive and make moving images, pressing at the artificial border between those two actions in hopes of inspiring deeper engagement with collaborative practice as a mode of cinematic expression.
