The roots
of Cockeyed Creations go back many years, to an
offhand purchase at the Clignancourt flea market
north of Paris.
There multimedia designer Jim Gasperini fell in
love with and purchased an elegant antique table-top
stereo card viewer.
Stereo photography
was an everyday pastime and common educational
tool throughout the late 19th century and
early 20th.
Most middle-class families in America and
Europe had a parlor viewer, though the elegant
French model pictured at left was top of the
line.
More
common were hand-held viewers like the one
to the right.
Having
purchased a viewer, Gasperini needed something to view.
Charmed by the uncanny sense of "presence" in
vanished worlds, he went on to collect well over a thousand
antique views in flea markets, antique shops and photography
shows.
As a collector he specialized in humorous situations,
bygone industrial processes, and items of sociologic interest.
Until
the arrival of the motion picture, the stereo view was
the most technically sophisticated visual medium available.
Stereo views printed on "Holmes
cards" were sold by the millions. Salesmen sold boxed
sets door to door. Sunday school students passed around
viewers showing images of the Holy Land, and sets designed
as tours of faraway lands saw extensive use in classrooms.
Though he lost his first Realist to
the Colorado River when his raft flipped on the 10th day, the
results from film shot before that (safely stored in a dry bag)
ignited a new artistic obsession.
Fast
forward more than a decade, to the spring of 2001. Invited
to join a private 18-day rafting trip down the Grand Canyon,
Gasperini realized that the batteries for his digital camera
would not last the trip.
Coming across an old Stereo Realist
camera from the 1950's, it occurred to him for the first time
that he could make his own stereo photographs, and took it along.
Jim Gasperini taking the oars on Doc Watson's boat in the Grand Canyon. Photo Margot Wilhelm
Animated .gif, one of Gasperini's
first experiments with "time for space wiggle"
In 2003 he began exhibiting
fine-art versions of his images as Stereojet
prints, and experimented with web presentation using a technique
he dubbed time for space
wiggle, at first using animated .gifs but soon switching
to Flash. How to create time-for-space wiggle is explained in
an article for the OCC newsletter Panoram.
Also in 2003 began the
greeting card project that would see fruition in 2004 as Cockeyed
Creations.
Our cards are entirely
created in the USA. Pre-press and printing occur in San Francisco,
lenses are made in Missouri, die-cutting happens in Santa Clara,
and assembly is handled by the non-profit Commercial
Support Services of Contra Costa County, employing the developmentally
disabled.
