Atmopragmascope

A Volumetric Machine That Reveals How Seeing Actually Works

Interaction without interfaces.
The Atmopragmascope engages the viewer through temporal alignment, depth coherence, and perceptual completion—no buttons, no gestures, no UI chrome. Interaction happens at the level of attention and biological timing.

A machine that stages time.
Frames are not rendered—they’re performed. Each revolution is a cut. Each strobe is an edit. The viewer doesn’t navigate the experience; they witness it unfolding with inevitability.

Headline:
What happens to immersive media when the computer disappears?

Pull quote:
“I wasn’t trying to recreate the past. I was trying to remove the present and see what survived.”

Motion as structure, not decoration.
Here, motion is the display architecture itself. The volumetric image only exists because of precise mechanical choreography—rotation, occlusion, illumination.

Headline:
A volumetric display powered by steam and persistence of vision.

Pull quote:
“The eye doesn’t care how modern your tools are. It only cares about timing.”

Headline:
Before pixels, there was perception.

Pull quote:
“This machine doesn’t render reality. It negotiates with biology.”

Challenge

I set out to build a forward-scatter volumetric display—something that normally depends on GPUs, real-time rendering pipelines, synchronization clocks, and firmware—using only pre-electronic tools. No microcontrollers. No software. No pixels in the modern sense.

The impossible problem wasn’t just technical. It was existential.
If my work claims to interrogate perception, augmentation, and visual bandwidth, what happens when I remove the very tools that usually mediate those ideas? What narrative remains when the interface is no longer invisible?

Insight

The interface was never the computer. It was the eye.

By stepping backward a century, I realized something subtle but profound: modern computation often hides the mechanics that perception depends on. In stripping it away, the mechanisms reappear—not as abstractions, but as physical truth.

Persistence of vision, temporal slicing, depth reconstruction, and motion coherence don’t belong to digital systems. They belong to biology.
By using cams, rotating facets, steam power, and mechanically timed illumination, the Atmopragmascope makes those perceptual contracts explicit. The machine doesn’t simulate vision—it negotiates with it.

This wasn’t about reenactment. It was about reframing authorship: letting 19th-century constraints rewrite my contemporary voice.

Execution

Steam. Copper. Wood. Timing instead of code.

The Atmopragmascope is a swept-volume display constructed from first principles:

A mechanically driven wooden cam assembled with wooden nails distributes 16 discrete frames around its circumference, with sub-milimeter accuracy each occupying a distinct radial depth.
A steam-powered engine provides continuous rotational motion, stabilized and calibrated through mechanical tolerances rather than feedback loops.
Each frame is strobed into visibility at the exact moment it becomes planar with the viewer’s perspective—achieved through physical contacts, not clocks.
The result is a forward-scatter volumetric image with approximately one inch of perceivable depth, assembled entirely through motion and persistence of vision.

Every part was fabricated by hand. Brass, mahogany, copper. No abstraction layer.
The process images—boilers, pistons, brazed seams—are not documentation. They’re part of the interface.

Impact

It didn’t just show an image. It exposed a lineage.

Demonstrated that volumetric display principles predate electronics—and that modern XR is part of a much longer perceptual continuum.
Reframed contemporary media practice by removing computation as a creative crutch.
Functioned as both a working display and a critical artifact, collapsing engineering, sculpture, and perceptual science into a single object.
Altered how I think about narrative authorship: not as something rendered, but something revealed through constraint.

This project didn’t chase novelty.
It changed the thread of my work—forcing intuition and concept to realign around the body, not the machine.

We are surrounded by displays and technologies whose mechanisms are hidden from view. This work was an exploration of revealing the underlying architecture of not only how we generate and parse visual information but how it can be delivered. The design process and its outcomes are derivatives, in part, of the mechanics of the eye which guide our estimation of a “fair curve.” Working within the parameters of 19th-century tools and techniques, I adopt the perspective of research modalities relevant for a time in which the eye and low-level visual mechanisms for discerning thresholds, edges, and shapes were the dominant tools in the creation of experimentation. Modern design and engineering tools–while enabling increasingly complex and sophisticated research–can also obfuscate the fundaments of form and function. By minimizing the influence of technological aids we give our vision in the act of creation, the articulation of this machine intended to give form to the fundamental algorithms inherent in early biological visual processing.