Remember View-Masters? Sure you do -- they were those delightfully simple plastic devices through which most of us were introduced to 3-D images. The viewing system was invented by William Gruber in Portland, Ore., and, coincidentally, Portland also so happens to be the birthplace of the Vladmaster -- handmade View Master reels designed, photographed and hand-assembled by stereoscopic artist Vladimir.
Bay View's Paper Boat Boutique and Gallery has carried her products for years and on Tuesday, March 27, in conjunction with UWM's Union Theatre, Paper Boat is hosting Vladimir for an evening of Vladmastery, "Cover Your Eyes in Delight!"
Vladimir arrives in Milwaukee carting 200 View Masters for a live performance in which each attendee is given a viewer and a set of discs and then is led through a story by a soundtrack featuring music, narration, sound effects, and ding noises to cue the change from image to image.
"I hand-make my own View-Master disks," says Vladimir. "I take the photos and hand-assemble the disks. They each tell little stories over the course of four disks. They also have soundtracks, which lead the audience through the stories. Some of the soundtracks have narration and some of them are exclusively musical."
Her Vladmasters make use of toys, neglected household objects and odd ephemera to tell 28-picture, wildly entertaining tales. The four stories planned for Tuesday's performance are:
- Lucifugia Thigmotaxis -- about the misadventures of a cockroach.
- The Public Life of Jeremiah Barnes -- about the discovery of an inordinate number of steam shovels in the midst of the forest.
- Actaeon at Home -- about a man seemingly attacked by the room he sits in.
- Fear & Trembling -- about a dinner party.
"It's quite wonderful to be experiencing this private narrative peering at the tiny photos inside of the viewer while knowing that everyone around you is doing the same thing," she says. "There is also the lovely sound of hundreds of View-Masters clicking simultaneously."
"Cover Your Eyes in Delight," presented by the UWM Film Department's Experimental Tuesdays -- a program that features films and "cinematic alternatives" that examine the content of media as well as the form of media, explains UWM Film Department's Carl Bogner.
"We see Vladimir as an artist that works to reinvent in pleasurable ways the movie-going experience," says Bogner, who has been hosting Experimental Tuesdays for five years. "This is not a move, but it's about being in a theater looking at images with other people. The View-Master is designed to be used at home alone, but she likes to collect people together to create this new private experience in a public setting."
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
