The Magic Rosette

In its day, the moving images in Émile Reynaud’s “The Magic Rosette” (1878) must have felt more exciting than some current developments in AI technology. Groundbreaking in both form and content, this is one of the few pre-cinematic works of art that possesses a sense of true magic. Released as part of his second series of praxinoscope strips, this proto-animation predates the development of abstraction in Western painting by approximately three decades, anticipating artists such as Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. A century on, Reynaud’s modest experiment in animation would also become a key influence on digital art produced by early computer models.