EDIT: This post has been edited and updated with a new snapshot gallery from P-SSC Peter Marsilio as well as new video embeds from the new PSSCDDD backup video account. 5/2/23
The PARALLAX-SHIFT Stereo Club had a little meetup at the opening reception of a Ken Jacobs retrospective titled “Up the Illusion”, at Broadway Windows, a street level, public art space exhibition located at the corner of 10th st & Broadway in Manhattan on Wednesday April 19th.
The exhibition, curated by Adam Lambert, will be up for the next 7 months. If you happen to be in NYC it is definitely worth a trip to pass by, the image below is a window map showing the titles of each piece in their respective windows.
The reception was a super casual street party and it was a blast. It started to get packed almost as soon as it began and it stayed that way long into the evening. Attendees and well wishers took up the whole corner, clamoring about on the sidewalk, peering through the windows to take in Kens work, offering congratulations and gathering in groups to catch up with old friends and to meet new ones. Passers by were stopping to check out the art and became part of the scene that mobbed up the corner of 10th & bway from about 6pm- after dusk.
The corner of 10th & Bway is a coveted corner for creative communications of all kinds and a selection of Ken’s work is displayed on a variety of digital displays and CRT’s, each one displaying a different looped selection an even includes a collection of drawings used in some of his animated videos.
Ken Jacobs is a pretty big deal- he is a famed multidisciplinary artist with a lifetime of notable and acclaimed work. I personally know Ken Jacobs’ old 16mm movie street style documentary work of NYC’s lower east side and of course his stereoscopic films. I attended a showing at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY, about 8 years ago where I got to see his 3D films on the big screen as a passive polarized feature.
We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with Ken during the party and especially to get the chance to interview him and ask questions about his work. He didn’t wasn’t too keen on the idea of a video interview so we chatted it up and he was very gracious to answer our questions and is extremely charming and personable man. It was a really great honor to have the chance to speak with him so casually and Id like to think we became friends this evening 🙂
I of course asked him what inspired him to pursue stereo communication in the first place- and he recanted an excellent story about how he got into 3D film making. He told us about his university days with a painting professor named Hans Hoffman who was calling for traditional painterly techniques for creating the illusion of depth. Many of those techniques include what is already known to be the basic monocular cues for representing depth via monocular cues, such as colors fading and getting fuzzier and lighter into the distance, 2 & 3 point perspective, occlusion, etc… Ken was exploring the medium of film at the time and discovered it was an absolutely effective medium to literally impress depth through animation and temporal motion. He proposed this idea to his professor, who apparently was a devout traditionalist and rejected it, demanding him to confirm to his teaching curriculum.
Ken said “fuck that” and went and did it anyway.
This animated film style that Ken developed and explored uses repetitive motion or brackets of animated actions to impress the wholeness of a set of views or images or film clips in bursted repetition as a singular item in it’s own right- or at least that’s how Ive taken it and it is a format that most people are familiar with, it’s actually experiencing a cultural renaissance-
Ken developed a format that would be most commonly identified as an animated gif, but of course began explorations with film long before graphic image files ever existed. His animations often explore elements of motion and time but also in different points of perspective and shifts in parallax of the image or the capture, which when repeated express depth over time through this monocular format. Most people would recognize this format to be what is commonly known as an animated wiggle gif, or 3D animated gifs.
I BELIEVE KEN JACOBS TO BE THE INVENTOR OF THE WIGGLE GIF FORMAT AND THE 3D WIGGLE GIF- he is at the very least, the earliest known practitioner of this format that I am aware of.
Ken is celebrating his 90th birthday… Unless someone can produce for me a 100 year old artist/filmmaker that told their old college art professor to fuck off 70 years ago and went on to invent a wiggle gif, then that’s the story IM PERSONALLY going to keep surviving down.
Ken Jacobs developed this animated bust format as a format and gives the current modern day wiggle gif format, some roots and history. I am very familiar with this format (it’s a subject of my research investigations) and know that even though I’ve been referring to it as the “wiggle gif”, it in fact goes by many, many names. It’s recent rise in popularity and it’s obscure and unknown origin has opened up the opportunity for hundreds of modern practitioners and product marketers to claim it by their own given names, which of course is very confusing and has no connection to it’s history or to the cultural heritage surrounding 3D formats.
The second question I asked Ken, was what is the name HE gave to this repeated, monocular 3D animation style- what is now so popularly known as a wiggle gif, animated gif, 3D animated gif, etc..
His response… “ETERNALISM”
“ETERNALISM“, IS THE NAME KEN JACOBS CHRISTENED WHAT I KNOW AS THE WIGGLE GIF FORMAT, and now from this moment on, I will refer to it as ETERNALISM…
As the earliest known practitioner of this format, I will have to start carrying down this name throughout all my attempts to communicate it, so it can become known throughout the historic process and 3D cultural heritage community- as well as to its countless modern practitioners- to whom it’s origin and history will likely remain a mystery unless the term makes its way into the modern vernacular of popular culture.
One of our newest members, Peter, asked Ken about his creation process, whether his work was created by multiple stills or small clips of video.
Ken said that they are sequential stereo stills shot burst mode with a Fuji W3, and then repeated, processed, edited and animated in Ken Jacobs’ absolutely unmistakable style.
Of course Gerald Marks was in attendance. There is rarely a 3D related event in NYC that he isn’t at. Gerald Marks gets around and Gerry & Ken Jacobs go waaaaaaaay back. They are both boys born and bred in NYC. Both had lifelong careers in art and are particularly well known for their works as stereographers and they both taught at Copper Union. It was fun just to hear them shoot the breeze.
Our little group eventually grew to include Roberta Bennett and Rachel Amodeo, Eric Drysdale, Gerald, Peter, our new friends Sosh and Mark. Ken seemed as happy to meet all of us as we obviously were to meet him.
CONGRATULATIONS KEN JACOBS 👏👏👏👏 and thank you for your lifetime of creative contributions. We absolutely love you and appreciate the hell out of your work.
If you have trouble playing back the video (I seem to be) here is a link to an Instagram post with a bunch of videos shot that evening
https://www.instagram.com/p/Crvzk9or10W/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
I’ll be peppering this post with some more photos from our members once I get permission and following this post with some ETERNALISM style works of my own, once I get the film processed in the Imagetech 3lens lenticular camera I shot the event with. Everyone asked me if it was a 3D camera, but what else would I be bringing to this reception for a living legend Stereographer?
All images/video by ilicia Benoit, 2023, unless otherwise noted.
Thank you so much for reading!
-ilicia
PARALLAX-SHIFT 