Hand Crank Media: Proposal for an archaeology

The hand crank plays a supporting role throughout the history of media. However, from the kinescope to the portable smut viewer to the OLPC cloud computer, the hand crank has served to sync techniques of the body to the various media worlds it inhabits.

Much of early cinema was institutionalized by debating the slippages between the hand cranks of the projector and those of the camera. Theater managers would direct their projectionists to speed up or slow down a reel based on attendance numbers.  Producers would counter by instructing camera operators to shoot as fast as possible to avoid excessively frenetic motion at the point of reception. But for burgeoning cinephiles, only the hand of a virtuoso could discern the proper texture of a moving picture.  F.R. Richardson, in a 1911 issue of Moving Picture World: “The operator ‘renders’ a film, if he is a real operator, exactly as does the musician render a piece of music. … I have often changed speed half a dozen times on one film of 1000 feet.”

The common story is that with the advent of automation, the art of the hand crank and its associated cultural forms are lost.  A media archaeology of the hand crank could short circuit this commonly accepted trajectory of “the art of light and shadow” by constructing an alternate history of moving pictures in which the many half-lives of the hand crank take center stage.

A short list of historical gadgets that were either powered or operated by hand crank:  the graphophone; portable 8mm film viewers (widely marketed alongside porn reels); toys such as the Kenner Blow-a-Tune or Fisher-Price Movie Viewer (which played cartridges containing Loony Tunes, Sesame Street, and instructional films such as diaphragm insertion); the hand charged weather radio and LED flashlight; Kinora flip-book cartridges (German daumenkino = cinema of the thumb); Lyman “Easy Pour Media” for use in the “Hand-Crank Media Sifter” to clean bullet casings; and its close cousin, the 1940s Sarnoff television set colorized by Willemite powder which would be hand poured by the consumer into an ignition chamber at the top of the unit.

As if taking place within an alternate history of electrification in which power was never broadcast outward from centralized generators but produced by and stored within each individual consumer device, the operations uncovered by this archaeology––private viewing in public space, sifting and differentiating, the peep hole, backlighting––will outline a history of media that proceeds as if the standardization of a split second never happened.

Spanning a range of media, the motion of the hand crank has helped crystallize paradigms from early cinema all the way up to mobile media.  Reintroducing this tactile dimension into the wildly undifferentiated environment of networked, digital video might thus help us to better render the contents of an otherwise neutral delivery system of 1’s and 0’s.  In a contemporary landscape in which it is increasingly difficult for users to make distinctions between media types, an exhibition of these gadgets would allow us to quite literally feel our way through past and future paradigms of the interface.

Hand-crank media have historically compelled decisions on privacy and publicity, the conditions of spectatorship, and the aesthetics of the moving image. An exhibition that seeks to construct this rich genealogy will allow users to experiment with scenarios for the possible futures of screen culture in the very act of operating the devices.