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| online video link |
Regrettably, I've never been happy with the third video in that series. The voice-over narration was awful. Finally, after years of wanting to replace it, I've now been able to reconstruct that third segment. The new version is greatly improved, and I have posted it online (the link is above), although it has now been retitled as Adelbert Ames and Anamorphosis / New Version / Part 3. It is entirely free to watch and to share with others.
Ames served in the US Army Signal Corps, and was involved in research that pertained to optics and vision. As far as I know, he did not contribute directly to the development of wartime camouflage, but as this video explains, he did have some connection to camouflage, in part because an artist / friend (who designed frames for Ames' paintings) named Hermann Dudley Murphy was an inspector of ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board.
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| Hermann Dudley Murphy |
Another surprising link is this: Murphy's son was Dudley Murphy, a young Hollywood filmmaker, and an expert on lenses and cameras, who (at his father's suggestion) was hired as Ames' technical assistant at Dartmouth College during the summer of 1921.
The younger Murphy then moved on to Europe. In the UK, he befriended the poet Ezra Pound and the Vorticist photographer Alvin Langdon Colburn. In France, he met the Surrealist artist Man Ray and the French painter Fernand Léger. It was Murphy and Léger (not just Léger, as if often mistakenly claimed) who made the famous experimental film called Ballet Mécanique.
This video tells the story of that, and ruminates about the link between that film and Ames' later experiments in vision. It's really quite interesting.
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| Ames distorted room |
