Media Archaeology: Duo 16Â
I am a hopeless browser of second-hand film equipment. A few weeks ago, I found a projector which plays cartridges loading with 16mm film and magnetic tape. It functions like a slide projector but with a soundtrack. It was used by traveling salespeople to sell products door to door. Up to 10-minute presentations could be played on a robust projector that looks a lot like a suitcase. My interest in working with film is also a media archaeological desire. Looking at it, I could see the potential form making a new work with it.
How to use it:
Plug it in to a wall socket.
Put the cartridge loaded with 16mm film and magnetic tape into the back of the machine.
Open or close a lever to project onto a wall or the internal screen.
Turn on the volume nob which also functions as an on switch
Press the green ‘start’ button.
The machine will play the full presentation till the end. The cartridge doesn’t need to be unwound, pressing ‘stop’ is akin to reset as after this is done the presentation is ready to begin at the start again.Â
The magnetic tape provides two operations; a soundtrack and a sync point between audio and picture. Embedded on the magnetic tape is a pulse that operates the ‘slide show.’
I only know this because I have another similar Elmo slide projector which marries 35mm roll film with a tape cassette. The Elmo is more open in a sense, because it has recording capabilities. I bought this machine in a similar desire to see how I could manipulate it for my own purposes. Perhaps this will allow me to embed the necessary pulse to engage the slide show in the Duo 16.Â
Both the Duo 16 and the 35mm Elmo projectors afford tinkering. The Duo 16 cartridge can be opened with a screwdriver.
Opening it, it is obvious how it works. One side holds a loop or 16mm film still frames. The other side holds the magnetic tape.
This loop is a little more complecated. It is threaded so as to untread through the middle. I was a bit clumsy opening it and will need to be careful to put it back together.
While there will be some hurdles to load the cartridge I can replace the content with my own media. This makes it the cartridge a friendly carrier, an open carrier. The pulse function which moves one image to another is the biggest hurdle to overcome. I am thinking to use it for an upcoming film screening as the speaker it quite loud and the dated content in the cartridges offers a point of reference for using the medium. Before I open more cartridges, I will ‘digitize’ them by playing them and recording it onto HD video. I have recorded one cartridge iPhone for now. The sample below, which describes the outdoors as an uncomfortable place, fits with themes I have been engaged with for the last two years and might be a good sample of found footage for an upcoming screening.
https://vimeo.com/761302462
Thinking about what I might make to insert into the cartridges in the future it is obvious that the soundtrack can afford a more complex design than the frame-by-frame imagery. Still pictures, accompanied by a soundtrack of my design. I could take an abstract approach, or a narrative approach supported by the soundtrack. It occurs to me that viewing a slide show is something like scrolling through a ‘story’ on Instagram or TikTok. The way the carriers work are different at a mechanical level. If I took to my Smart phone with a screwdriver nothing will be obvious. There are no levers or wheels. A user is locked out of the software in a Smart phone.  The results might be surprisingly similar, however. Technology touted as ‘infinity in your pocket’ hasn’t really progressed more than home-made or commercial presentation slide shows. Instagram and Tiktok are the cartridges we slip into our phone. You might reach a wider audience, but you are not sharing time and space together. Not like the door-to-door sales person. What will I sell with my machine?
