The zoetrope, a nineteenth-century animation device, is reclaimed as a contemporary art form in the work of artist Daniel Young Kim, whose ceramics unite modern technology and traditional craft into a contemplative experience.
A moon-shaped ceramic pot spins at the center of a turntable. Its surface decoration comes to life: a flower blooms and returns to seed, creatures spit stars that cycle into phases of the moon, an eye opens into the sun, looping with no beginning or end. Viewers gaze at the spinning vessel, mesmerized, caught between watching a tiny cinema and the trance of a Buddhist prayer wheel.
This is the Caravan Moon Pot, a ceramic vessel that adapts the mechanics of early animation devices, using spinning motion to reveal a looping sequence of animation across its curved surface.
Persistence of Vision
Drawing on a career in visual effects and stop-motion, and working in our home studio alongside my wife, ceramic artist Sybylla Lindert, I developed a practice bridging digital technology with the physical language of pottery. Animated ceramics emerged as the form where these disciplines converge. The question is how to bring digital design and animation experience into the kiln. How to make clay move. The ceramic zoetrope offers an answer, but realizing it demands an entirely new process.
The vessel begins as a digitally sculpted model, is 3D-printed, and then cast in silicone to produce a plaster mold. Each piece is slip cast, glazed, and fired. My technical background in digital production informs every stage, from generating the form to translating animated designs into silkscreens for printing the surface decoration. I design the animation frame by frame, then digitally map it onto the pot’s curved surface so each image lands in precise registration around the sphere. A homemade decal film transfers the imagery onto the glazed vessel, where a final firing fuses it permanently to the surface.
Transferring animated imagery onto clay meant figuring out how a digital sequence could live on a curved, fired surface. Earlier experiments with underglaze transfers proved limited; iron-based toner decals could produce only a single color; commercial lamination cover coats were too thick and rigid to wrap around curves; and solvent-based cover-coat formulas released fumes unsuitable for indoor studio work. After months of trial and error, I arrived at a decal solution that is pliable, safe to handle indoors, compatible with custom overglazes, and burns away cleanly in the kiln.
The decals are thin and flexible enough to conform to the vessel’s curves and vanish completely without visible edges. They also allow precise positioning so that when the vessel spins on a turntable, the sequence’s registration aligns with the rotational speed and the shutter of a camera or strobe, and the viewer’s persistence of vision transforms the still frames into continuous motion.
Wheel of Life
The zoetrope’s name comes from the Greek words zoe (life) and tropos (turning), literally a ‘wheel of life.’ Joseph Plateau developed his phenakistoscope in 1832. Simon von Stampfer’s stroboscope followed in 1833, both using spinning discs and mirrors to create the illusion of movement. William Horner invented a cylindrical version in 1834, though it wasn’t until William Lincoln patented it in 1867 that the device received the name we know today.
For much of its history, the zoetrope has been treated as a novelty, marketed as a Victorian parlor toy and filed alongside magic lanterns as ‘philosophical amusements.’ Treated not as art but as mere curiosity, it is remembered today as an antique footnote in the history of cinema. Yet the zoetrope remains a niche medium with profound creative potential: a storytelling language capable of conveying time and space while carrying the viewer into the liminal territory between seeing and dreaming.
Total Work of Art
The Caravan Moon Pot is designed with a recessed foot that fits over the spindle of a record player, allowing the accompaniment of music. Displayed this way, the zoetrope pot approaches what Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” synthesizing multiple disciplines into a unified experience. The ceramic form, animated imagery, and accompanying music merge into something greater than their parts.
Long before cinema, the zoetrope demonstrated that perception could build motion from fragments if given the right rhythm. On a record turntable, the visual rhythm of sequential frames and the audible pulse of music move together in time. When Eadweard Muybridge created his motion studies in 1878, he changed how artists understood time by showing action broken down into its parts. Edgar Degas, aware of both Muybridge’s photographs and Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography, devoted much of his work to depicting what he called “movement in its exact truth.” The zoetrope shares this lineage. It takes motion as a static sequence and reassembles it through perception. Its frames are an artistic interpretation of movement that inherently includes the candid states between the key expressive poses, converging scientific dissection and artistic truth into an experience of time, space, and narrative.
The zoetrope requires no peripheral technology to function, yet it invites multiple modes of viewing. It can be read as a static sequence of images on a motionless sculptural form, animated through traditional viewing slits, or viewed via synchronized strobe or a camera’s rolling shutter. It exists as a static work of art while inviting experiential engagement through the mobile devices we carry everywhere. Yet its staying power lies less in optics than in a more primal impulse: the need to feel spirit stirring inside matter.
The word animation derives from Latin anima, meaning soul or breath. It shares a root with animism, the belief that objects possess spiritual essence. To animate is to ensoul. This transforms the zoetrope from an optical trick to something more remarkable and numinous.
the author Daniel Young Kim is a Korean-American visual-effects artist and ceramicist whose practice bridges new technologies with traditional craftsmanship. After two decades in visual effects, including work on the Academy Award–winning Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, he creates zoetrope vessels at Gldnmnky Studio in Portland, Oregon. Visit gldnmnky.comor @gldnmnkyon Instagram to learn more.
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The zoetrope, a nineteenth-century animation device, is reclaimed as a contemporary art form in the work of artist Daniel Young Kim, whose ceramics unite modern technology and traditional craft into a contemplative experience.
This is the Caravan Moon Pot, a ceramic vessel that adapts the mechanics of early animation devices, using spinning motion to reveal a looping sequence of animation across its curved surface.
Persistence of Vision
Drawing on a career in visual effects and stop-motion, and working in our home studio alongside my wife, ceramic artist Sybylla Lindert, I developed a practice bridging digital technology with the physical language of pottery. Animated ceramics emerged as the form where these disciplines converge. The question is how to bring digital design and animation experience into the kiln. How to make clay move. The ceramic zoetrope offers an answer, but realizing it demands an entirely new process.
The vessel begins as a digitally sculpted model, is 3D-printed, and then cast in silicone to produce a plaster mold. Each piece is slip cast, glazed, and fired. My technical background in digital production informs every stage, from generating the form to translating animated designs into silkscreens for printing the surface decoration. I design the animation frame by frame, then digitally map it onto the pot’s curved surface so each image lands in precise registration around the sphere. A homemade decal film transfers the imagery onto the glazed vessel, where a final firing fuses it permanently to the surface.
Transferring animated imagery onto clay meant figuring out how a digital sequence could live on a curved, fired surface. Earlier experiments with underglaze transfers proved limited; iron-based toner decals could produce only a single color; commercial lamination cover coats were too thick and rigid to wrap around curves; and solvent-based cover-coat formulas released fumes unsuitable for indoor studio work. After months of trial and error, I arrived at a decal solution that is pliable, safe to handle indoors, compatible with custom overglazes, and burns away cleanly in the kiln.
The decals are thin and flexible enough to conform to the vessel’s curves and vanish completely without visible edges. They also allow precise positioning so that when the vessel spins on a turntable, the sequence’s registration aligns with the rotational speed and the shutter of a camera or strobe, and the viewer’s persistence of vision transforms the still frames into continuous motion.
Wheel of Life
The zoetrope’s name comes from the Greek words zoe (life) and tropos (turning), literally a ‘wheel of life.’ Joseph Plateau developed his phenakistoscope in 1832. Simon von Stampfer’s stroboscope followed in 1833, both using spinning discs and mirrors to create the illusion of movement. William Horner invented a cylindrical version in 1834, though it wasn’t until William Lincoln patented it in 1867 that the device received the name we know today.
For much of its history, the zoetrope has been treated as a novelty, marketed as a Victorian parlor toy and filed alongside magic lanterns as ‘philosophical amusements.’ Treated not as art but as mere curiosity, it is remembered today as an antique footnote in the history of cinema. Yet the zoetrope remains a niche medium with profound creative potential: a storytelling language capable of conveying time and space while carrying the viewer into the liminal territory between seeing and dreaming.
Total Work of Art
The Caravan Moon Pot is designed with a recessed foot that fits over the spindle of a record player, allowing the accompaniment of music. Displayed this way, the zoetrope pot approaches what Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” synthesizing multiple disciplines into a unified experience. The ceramic form, animated imagery, and accompanying music merge into something greater than their parts.
Long before cinema, the zoetrope demonstrated that perception could build motion from fragments if given the right rhythm. On a record turntable, the visual rhythm of sequential frames and the audible pulse of music move together in time. When Eadweard Muybridge created his motion studies in 1878, he changed how artists understood time by showing action broken down into its parts. Edgar Degas, aware of both Muybridge’s photographs and Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography, devoted much of his work to depicting what he called “movement in its exact truth.” The zoetrope shares this lineage. It takes motion as a static sequence and reassembles it through perception. Its frames are an artistic interpretation of movement that inherently includes the candid states between the key expressive poses, converging scientific dissection and artistic truth into an experience of time, space, and narrative.
The zoetrope requires no peripheral technology to function, yet it invites multiple modes of viewing. It can be read as a static sequence of images on a motionless sculptural form, animated through traditional viewing slits, or viewed via synchronized strobe or a camera’s rolling shutter. It exists as a static work of art while inviting experiential engagement through the mobile devices we carry everywhere. Yet its staying power lies less in optics than in a more primal impulse: the need to feel spirit stirring inside matter.
The word animation derives from Latin anima, meaning soul or breath. It shares a root with animism, the belief that objects possess spiritual essence. To animate is to ensoul. This transforms the zoetrope from an optical trick to something more remarkable and numinous.
the author Daniel Young Kim is a Korean-American visual-effects artist and ceramicist whose practice bridges new technologies with traditional craftsmanship. After two decades in visual effects, including work on the Academy Award–winning Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, he creates zoetrope vessels at Gldnmnky Studio in Portland, Oregon. Visit gldnmnky.com or @gldnmnky on Instagram to learn more.
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