pilot exercises

Exercise bike with attached zoetrope. 2015

The project Pilot Exercises consists of a reconfigured stationary bike that I transformed into a pedal-powered oversized zoetrope. Zoetropes were small mechanical animation gadgets popular in the nineteenth century prior to the development of the film camera and modern moving image technologies. When a user spins the Zoetrope, a series of images printed on the interior surface become animated, in a repeating fashion, when viewed thorough any one of several openings on the outside of the device.

In this work, when the viewer sits on the reengineered bicycle and begins to pedal, an endless looping animation of a human figure flying and transforming itself into a drone warcraft is revealed on the surface of the zoetrope. On one level this work comments ironically on our country’s deadly use of pilotless drone aircraft in pursuit of strategic agendas, the details of which are largely ignored or unknown.

Also, as a frustrated and purposeless piece of exercise equipment (you cannot actually work-out on this bike) and outfitted with an antiquated viewing apparatus, this work also reflects a perceived loss of direction and purpose in our embrace of new technologies without ethical frameworks, and specifically the uneasy mingling of technology, war, violence and entertainment.