Svoboda's
«Polyekran»
was a
very fascinating audio-visual experience which was
presented during the Expo 1967 in Montreal. One entered a
large room and sat on the carpeted floor where you watched
a wall of 112 cubes whose ever shifting and changing images
moved backwards and forwards. Inside each cube were two
Kodak Carousel slide projectors which projected still
photos onto the front of the cubes. In all there were
15,000 slides in the 11 minute show. Since each cube could
slide into three separate positions within a two foot
range, they gave the effect of a flat surface turning into
a three-dimensional surface and back again. It was
completely controlled by 240 miles of memory circuitry
which was encoded onto a filmstrip with 756,000 separate
instructions. Viewers watched a wall of 112 projected cubes
while seated on the floor. The show was about
‹The
Creation of the World of Man.›
On the
112 part screen, the earth came awake, flowers bloomed,
tigers suddenly appeared, the first men walked the earth,
then machinery was invented. Sometimes the image sequences
would first appear complete, then be broken up abstractly
in a modern art composition. It was pure multi-visual
technique that enchanted the viewer.
(Source:
Michael Bielicky, «Prague–A
Place of Illusionists, »
in
Jeffrey Shaw/Peter Weibel (eds), Future Cinema. The
Cinematic Imaginary after Film, exhib. Cat., The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA/London, 2003, p. 99.)