The Wooden Lightbox: Live
Alex MacKenzie performs The Wooden Lightbox: A Secret Art of Seeing live in an intimate setting with a hand-cranked 16mm projector built from various relic parts and framed in an austere wooden box. The manual operation of the projector, placed in the middle of the audience, invokes a pre-electronic, pre-digital era of moving pictures when aesthetic astonishment was achieved through stagecraft and mechanical mastery. In the role of travelling projectionist, MacKenzie renews a tradition of itinerant exhibition from a time when the endurance of cinema was not seen as a given, and the shape of the medium’s future was yet undetermined. Through this invocation of the early days of cinema, The Wooden Lightbox confronts our taste for novelty and challenges the amnesia of new media discourses, demonstrating how concepts of mobility, interactivity, and visual wonder have long been central to moving image innovation.
This website responds to The Wooden Lightbox, both as a performance in Montreal on February 15, 2010 and as a touring and evolving work. Collected here are creative responses to the show, an interview with the artist, images from the film itself, and documentation of the apparatus and space.