Polyvision
Polyvision by Josef Svoboda and Jaroslav Frič (1967) "presented a panorama of Czech industrial life in an eight-minute film that used twenty slide projectors, ten ordinay motion picture screens and five rotating projection screens. While the subjects were usual industrial operations like hydro-electric power plants, steel rolling mills and textile mills, the visual material was presented in an unusual way. The screens where unconventional in that during the show they would move around: backwards, forwards, even sideways. Then there were other projection surfaces formed by steel hoops that spun around so rapidly that they seemed to constitute solid spheres and yet they were not solid." (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.)
Briefly, the Polyvision was the total conversion of a medium-size, rather high room into a film and slide environment. Mirrors, moving cubes and prisms, projections both from outside the space and from within the cubes, images which seem to move through space as well as cover the walls, ceilings, and floors all built the feeling of a full space of great flexibility. The 9 1/2-minute presentation used 11 film projectors, 28 slide-projectors, and a 10-track computer tape for programming. The material itself was banal-an account of Czech industry; but, of course, more "artistic" or "meaningful" material could be used in the system. No live performers participated. [1]
