An Old Soul in a Young Body: Reincarnating Time in Status Quontinuum

From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, reviving the dead or extinct continues to captivate our imagination, even when it concerns the rather innocent media equivalent of this occult practice. For artists like Robert Breer, Ken Jacobs, Gregory Barsamian, and Zoe Beloff, ‘excavating’ the affordances of magic lanterns, mutoscopes, zoetropes and other obsolete audiovisual devices has become a crucial aspect of their artistic practice. Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka coined the term zombie media for repurposing obsolescence in contemporary art: “the concept of the archive is increasingly being rethought not as a spatial place of history, but as a contemporary technological circuit that redistributes temporality” (Hertz & Parikka, 2012: 427). Status Quontinuum (2021) , a 3D printed zoetrope film and installation created by author Guido Devadder, could not have existed without such a cross-temporal perspective on moving image media. Although created with contemporary technology, the blueprint of the phenakistiscope serves as the fundamental inspiration for this work. This practice-based essay will explore the DNA of several 19th century philosophical toys and examine how these elements were translated into Status Quontinuum, thereby focusing on the “new in the old '' (Zielinski 2006) in both temporality and materiality.