Peep Media
Recently, our friend Jane Meyer tipped us off to the wonderful world of the Polyorama Panoptique.
Here’s a great little video that demonstrates what a person saw when they peeped into the Polyorama Panoptique. So simple, but so unbelievably charming and satisfying!
Erkki Huhtamo is a professor in the UCLA Film Dept who specializes in studying this kind of media, he posted numerous informational videos on this site, “The Crankie Factory” (what a great name!) to give you a peep media rabbit hole to jump into...
He wrote a book all about these intriguing objects!
We ordered a copy but it hasn’t arrived yet…it looks comprehensive and great, though I do wish it came with a Polyorama Panoptique. ; )
Chris: I have to tell my own history and accidental discovery of “Peep Media”
When I was a small child my parents had bought an old tube console stereo-the kind that is like a piece of furniture that would include an AM/FM tuner and turntable and the speakers are built in-I would play records on it and discovered that I could fit my head underneath and look in a little peep hole and see a dusty orange lit environment that looked like a little workshop-years later, the brothers quay animations looked like the world I saw inside the stereo! I would imagine little people walking around inside of the stereo and smell the dust warming up on the glowing tubes. I loved living inside of that dimly lit space that was part imaginary and part real.
Old Console Stereo
From Street of Crocodiles
Also, I had a dream around this time-I dreamt that I was holding a little wooden box and looking in and seeing ribbons of colored lights that would pulsate like the Aurora Borealis and I so wanted to make this box or discover it somewhere in the real world.
One more thing! I remember my neighbors house had the first terrarium I had ever seen-I would sit and stare into this thing and imagine I was tiny, sitting on the little rock alongside the little pond and I wanted to live in there.
Of course I grew up with viewmasters and kaleidoscopes and in my early twenties I tried to team up with a fine artist to make “Genre” type dioramas with music that I would only finally start making to go with my recent Dust of Suns album “Ignes Fatui”
-I wonder if we all are wired to love peeping into little worlds and Imagining ourselves inside of them?
Anyway, I thank my friend Jane for pointing me to another example of so called “Peep Media”
Thank you!
