The CulturePulp Q&A: Vladimir, creator of bizarre homemade View-Master reels




As promised to readers of today's CulturePulp comic: Here's my epic Q&A with Vladimir -- quite possibly the world's only artist working in the View-Master medium.

I first witnessed Vladimir's brazen misappropriation of View-Master technology at a party last month. Without much explanation, the 27-year-old artist handed us all View-Master viewers and custom-made envelopes containing her reels. Then she put on an accompanying soundtrack CD. Prompted by the music, we flipped through two of her sweetly mind-boggling stories:




1. "Actaeon At Home" -- a wordless, silly slice of dream-logic about a writer, hunting, statuary and a speeding train, with a excellent musical score by The Apt Ensemble. As detailed in my comic, Vladimir's tale played with View-Master conventions in some surprisingly sophisticated and funny ways: for example, as the train in the story sped up, we were forced to pull our View-Master levers more and more quickly until it became almost sadistic.




2. This was followed by "The Public Life of Jeremiah Barnes" -- a narrated, utterly fake history lesson about the mysterious discovery of 86 earth-moving vehicles scattered over a stretch of forest. The ensuing mystery involves the FBI, an eccentric collector and a sensational trial -- with a surprising amount of story crammed into a few minutes and 28 stereoscopic pictures, all of them featuring model-railroad figurines shot in extreme close-up.

Vladimir seemed almost giddy as she watched us all watching the reels, our viewers pointed at whatever light sources we could find in the backyard. I was giddy enough to chronicle the experience in a comic. Then I met with her for an hour on First Thursday in Portland, OR -- and we talked about how (and why) she makes her reels, the art of stereoscopy, her love of reverse-engineering mass-produced objects, the history of View-Master, the ideas behind "Actaeon" and "Jeremiah Barnes," and much more.

An edited transcript follows the jump.

Click here to read the whole Vladimir interview!

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Q. Now, I understand you're about to go on a tour of California with your VladMasters and your live band.

A. Well, I'm not in the band. They play a live score to one of the VladMaster stories.

Q. So what's your role when you're there? Are you just a Master of Ceremonies?

A. Yeah. I don't really do much. I might introduce some of them, but I might just hide in the back and pass out View-Masters and collect them afterwards.

Q. I noticed -- at the party where you showed me and others a couple of your VladMaster programs -- that you were just really enjoying watching people watch the reels.

A. Yeah! I was really just enjoying the music! I hadn't listened to just the music for a while. It's by a trio called the Apt Ensemble. There was this guy I didn’t know very well who was a student at the Northwest Film Center, who did the scores to his own films, and I really liked those. So I asked him to score "Actaeon," and he got the other two to help.

Q. So how'd you get interested in stereoscopy?

A. I randomly bought my first View-Master in college, and it came with this set that basically told the history of the dinosaurs in, you know, 28 pictures -- which is a really ridiculous thing to try to do.

Q. Yeah, that’s a little compressive. They're like comics, almost. It's such a distillation of information.

A. Exactly -- only you can't change the size of the panels. But I liked that absurdly minimalist storytelling. So I had to figure out how to make them -- so I could tell stories like that.
And I didn’t really realize they were 3D until I was looking really closely at a disc, trying to figure out how to make them, and I said, "Why are there two copies of every picture?" I eventually checked out a book on stereoscopy, but the basic principle of stereoscopy is very simple: You take a left picture and a right picture, and then you arrange them in a viewing format so you trick each eye [into believing that you're looking at a single picture, not two separate ones]. And as soon as you understand that, it's not that hard to take 3D pictures.
Still, the process I go through is pretty painstaking. I shoot on 16mm movie film, chop it up into individual frames, and glue them onto the discs, which I then sandwich together. Real View-Masters have larger frames than mine do.

Q. Do you make the paper reels yourself?

A. No. Pinball Publishing does the printing and die-cutting for me. I just have to glue them together.

Q. How much does it cost to make a single reel?

A. I make enough to do 500 reels at a time, and that costs about $2,000.




Q. So how do you make the leap from admiring and collecting View-Masters to wanting to make them yourself?

A. Well, I just like to figure out how to make things. I like to reproduce mass-produced things and then give them to friends as presents. Like, I've made my own Scratch-It lottery tickets.

Q. I've always wondered: What is that gray scratch-off material made of?

A. Well, mine's not gray -- it's white. Because I use Wite-Out for that part. [laughs] It just takes a couple of passes through an inkjet printer: You print out a bottom level, and then you put some clear tape over where you want to scratch off, and then you put Wite-Out over it and you print a top layer.
And I like to make very elaborate form letters with signatures and stickers. I like to make things with detailed instructions that have stickers slapped over them that say, "Sorry -- we've since improved our product, so do this instead."

Q. It reminds me of people who try to figure out the recipes for mass-produced food -- like, when people divine the recipe for Twinkies. Is reverse-engineering these objects the art process itself?

A. Well, I don't know. The View-Masters have turned into something where I'm not so interested in the process, because that's a problem that's been solved. Now I'm excited about the storytelling method and the performance aspects of it. It's changed a lot from the days when I was saying, "Maybe I can figure out how to make some of these and give them to my friends as presents."

Q. How old were you when you started making them?

A. I started about two-and-a-half years ago. The first ones I made, I was shooting on reversal film, non-negative film -- I don't have any more of them. I just took pictures of some friends playing basketball, and cockroaches, and went downtown and took pictures of buildings. I wasn't even sure it was gonna work.

Q. How'd you get the cockroach to stand still?

A. Oh, it was dead.

Q. And you've told me that you don't even use mathematical measurements, really: You just sort of eyeball the distance between the two photos.

A. Well, at first, I would shift the camera two-and-a-half inches between shots -- more or less the distance between your eyes. But then I was shooting a cockroach in macro, and if you shift the camera two-and-a-half inches, the cockroach moves out of the frame. But I just sort of knew how much to shift between the two pictures.
I've since found out that there's a tripod for this with a professionally made slide-bar, with a ruler.

Q. It makes me wonder if the pros at View-Master use two cameras at once when they're shooting their reels.

A. I know a guy who used to be one of their principal photographers. Apparently they use a two-lens camera. And View-Master made a camera that shoots 35mm slide film. I have one; it's kind of a point-and-click camera with two lenses. It's just that I can't mass-produce its pictures without spending a lot of money.
And I go to meetings of the local 3D club that runs that museum that I was telling you about. They also teach classes there.

Q. Are you the youngest member of this group? Because for some reason I would imagine that attracts older hobbyists.

A. Sometimes, yeah. [laughs] They're very cool.

Q. Now, obviously, your new ViewMaster reels are a lot more complicated than pictures of cockroaches. Watching "Actaeon at Home," I was struck how you're using the ViewMaster medium almost like cinema; you were prompting us to pull the levers on our ViewMasters faster and faster as the story became more urgent. It was positively Eisensteinian.




A. [laughs] Thank you. That's the most recent one I've done, and I'm learning more about the medium and how to use it.

Q. Where did the idea to do this dream-story about a man and a train come from?

A. I had decided with this partcular one that I wanted to work with a live band that performed the score with the show. [When the band can't make it, there's also a soundtrack CD that can be played along with "Actaeon."] And at first I wrote this really elaborate story that was about patent rights and typewriters, and it was all extremely confusing. [laughs] And Peter [Broderick, of the Apt Ensemble] read it and said, "Yeah, this is interesting, but any music we do is gonna be background." So I went the other direction and tried to create a narrative just out of pictures. I've done three VladMasters with soundtracks, and this was the first one without narration.

Q. Was "Actaeon" also the first one you've done with live human actors?

A. Yeah. I mean, I'd taken View-Masters of people before, but not that's I'd used in the mass-produced ones like this.

Q. I'd imagine those actors have to sit very still.

A. Yeah. They had to sit still for like three minutes, and you have to be very careful about not bumping the tripod. In the shot where the gun goes off, I think his leg moved between the two pictures. It kind of hurts your head a little bit.

Q. How long does it take you to write a script for one of these?

A. That's the hardest part, because I procrastinate. It tends to be very last-minute.

Q. Have you ever shot the pictures first and written the story later?

A. I sort of do both at once. I work with a rough outline that contains the story arc, but the accompanying recording that cements it all is the last thing we do.




Q. At what point did you decide to go from shooting these things for your friends to mass-producing them and making them a source of income?

A. The first two I made don't have soundtracks. "Kafka Stories" and the "Italo Calvino" story just have words printed on the discs. I was doing those because I had friends that ran a little craft fair, and I thought it would be an interesting way to make some money -- and it worked really well. And then I built the Web site and started selling them there.
And then I asked Matt McCormick if I could do something with View-Masters for the PDX Film Festival -- not imagining a performance, but maybe doing an installation or a promotion or something like that. And he said, "I know -- I'll put you in the Invitationals and you can do a show for everybody!" It was sort of terrifying, but it was such an amazing opportunity that I wasn't going to pass it up.

Q. What's been your experience with the local View-Master hobby culture? The collectors?

A. Well, Portland's where View-Master was invented. The View-Master plant was out in Beaverton, I believe.

Q. Oh, right! I used to drive by it all the time as a kid!

A. Unfortunately, I think they're having some pretty huge environmental problems now. But they moved out in the early '90s, I think; now they make View-Masters in Mexico and they're headquartered in Buffalo, NY.
Periodically I'll meet someone who worked there or someone whose mom or dad worked there. Last year, the national Stereoscopic Society meeting was here -- and I went to that, and I found that the collectors were into collecting View-Master View-Masters; they were just into collecting everything manufactured by View-Master. And so when they encounter reels produced by an outside manufacturer, they get kind of confused. [laughs] They didn't know how to categorize or quantify it.

Q. Now, in order to do your shows, you have to maintain a supply of View-Master viewers, as well.

A. Yeah. I go thrift-store shopping every week or two and round them up.

Q. Yeah, I noticed that you've given me a viewer with a "Harry Potter" logo on it.

A. They're pretty easy to come by in thrift stores. I also buy them in bulk. That "Harry Potter" one is the late-'90s viewer design. If you go to that 3D museum, they have a whole history of View-Master viewers; there are even some early ones made of Bakelite -- an early plastic.

Q. One of the things I loved about the two VladMaster shows we watched at that party was that they had almost a storybook feel. There was something sort of comforting about hearing that ding that told us to pull the lever for the next picture.

A. Yeah, I love that, as an audience member watching a VladMaster, you have control, but you're also sort of being told what to do.

Q. Yeah, there's a kind of tension. It's not passive, but it's not quite reading, either.

A. Yeah. I played with that in my first one with a soundtrack, which you haven't seen. It sort of presents a cockroach's-eye view of things. And everything in the apartment becomes foreign and re-interpreted through the eyes of the cockroach. So I played with expectations by describing the next slide before you heard the sound that told you to cue it up.




Q. Have you found any other artists doing what you do?

A. No, not that I've run across. I mean, people have told me that they've seen art shows that incorporate View-Masters, but I haven't heard of anyone who makes them and tells stories with them.

Q. Let's talk about the other VladMaster story you showed us, "The Public Life of Jeremiah Barnes."

A. That was all told with toys and model-railroad men that I got at Vic's Hobby Supply.

Q. Which railroad scale do you prefer?

A. The HO scale. I loved shooting them really close up, because their surfaces aren't entirely molded or defined. I like getting really close to things, like with the stuff I shot with cockroaches. I probably spent three or four 12-hour days just setting stuff up and photographing it. I think I was getting five pictures a day, depending on how complicated each setup was. It's really hard when you're working that small, because moving the camera around is really painstaking.




Q. And I love that, for a little while -- as you tell the story of this guy who was prosecuted for stealing giant earth-moving vehicles to add to his collection -- I wasn't sure if it was a true story or not.

A. Yeah. The idea had been rolling around in my head for a long time; it came from when I was a kid and there was a construction development near my house. And there was all this construction machinery just sitting out there that they'd leave out; I'd go play on it on the weekends. And I'd think that it would be so easy to steal it all if you had a big enough truck.




Q. The story is sort of a perfect distillation of childhood obsessions.

A. I've always collected toys, and now I have something to do with them.

Q. It strikes me that this making these VladMaster reels may actually get harder in the digital era; it would be more difficult to make these reels using a process that didn't involve film. Digital photography is actually making this even more anachronistic.

A. Yeah. I know. I don't know how much longer we can count on 16mm film being around.

Q. What will you do if it becomes too expensive to produce these reels?

A. I don't know. Probably something else. I sort of know that it's inevitable. Hopefully I'll be bored of it by then.


Posted: Fri - August 26, 2005 at 12:00 AM        

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