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      Lawrence Norfolk and Neal White

      Ott's Sneeze

      108 pages | Two colour | 210 x 148 mm, Soft cover | 2002 | Edition of 1,500 copies
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On January 7 1894, Frederic P. Ott, a laboratory assistant of W.K.L. Dickson (the inventor of the Kinetograph) stood before the world’s first movie camera and sneezed. The paradox of the forty-five frames of Record of a Sneeze is that it shows no sneeze − the droplets and globules of Ott’s explosion were too fast, too many or too small. Having eluded the Kinetograph, the sneeze has spent more than a century in representational limbo; perpetually announced, perpetually failing to appear.

In Ott's Sneeze, novelist Lawrence Norfolk and artist Neal White have reconstructed this missing sneeze employing the most recent developments in laser, video and computer technologies. The resulting sequence of photographs of the progression of the sneeze in space is shown alongside Dickson’s original forty-five frames together with a commentary linking the two centuries.


1894年1月7日、世界初の映像カメラであるキネトグラフの発明家・W.K.L DIcksonの助手・Frederick P. Ottは、その初めて撮影の時にカメラの前でくしゃみをした。くしゃみを記録した45フレームは、Ottのくしゃみで発生した小滴があまりに早く、多く、小さすぎたため、くしゃみの何も写していないというパラドクスを生み出した。
本書のなかで、小説家・Lawrence Norfolkとアーティスト・Neal Whiteはこの「失われたくしゃみ」を、最先端のレーザー、ビデオ、コンピューター技術を駆使して再構築した。その結果できたくしゃみをする過程のシーケンス写真はDicksonのオリジナルの45フレームに並んでコメントとともに収録され、2世紀の間をリンクさせることになった。
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