Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed.
During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik performances used several film and slide projectors simultaneously to create abstract moving environments. Elsewhere he explored single-frame animation, scratching directly onto film and even experiments in drawn optical sound.
This is where experimental-film history begins to overlap surprisingly well with modern VJ culture.
A contemporary VJ can run several video layers, blend them, map them onto architecture and synchronise them with music in realtime. Fischinger had none of that digital flexibility. Every additional projector was another physical machine, another film path and another alignment problem.
Yet the artistic question was already there.
Why should cinema consist of one rectangular image directly in front of a seated audience?
Once several projections begin occupying space, the screen stops being only a window. Light itself becomes material.
Fischinger later became famous for tightly synchronised abstract animation, but I find these earlier multiple-projection experiments even more interesting today.
The technology is obsolete.
The idea is not.
A century later, Resolume, projection mapping and immersive audiovisual performances are still exploring what happens when moving images escape from a single screen.
