Animate Matter
A 3D printed Zoetrope exploring the repertoire of digital design tools for animated structures
Data.
More than 1,000 hours of 3D printing and 18 revolutions per second go into animating architecture. Animate Matter — a 3D-printed zoetrope developed by the Digital Design Unit (DDU) at the Technische Universität Darmstadt — took a prominent place at the 2016 Luminale in Frankfurt am Main.
How it works?
The zoetrope is a device of the pre-film era that creates the illusion of animation through rotational movement. Similar to a flipbook that renders moving pictures from a series of still images, DDU’s 3D zoetrope is a revolving disk subdivided into 18 slices. Each slice holds a gradually advancing frame of a parametrically designed, moving composition of architectural objects.
A rapidly flashing strobe light, synchronized to the rotational speed of the disk, illuminates the installation and keeps the objects from blurring together. A microcontroller syncs the rotation of the disc to the frequency of the strobe light. While the rotation is not perceptible by the human eye anymore, the choreography of the animation becomes visible. The system allows for gradually changing the frequency of the light, which makes objects appear to move slowly forward or backward.
The project was on display at Luminale 2016, and DARK 2017. It is now part of the collection of the Lichtforum NRW.
The project was supported by Stratasys.
