A video commissioned by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum to introduce and explain the nineteenth-century optical devices—pre-cinema apparatuses—held in its collection. Five are featured: the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistoscope, the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope, and the Praxinoscope Theatre.

These were originally visual toys meant to be turned by hand, yet as cultural properties of considerable value the museum's holdings cannot be touched by visitors. Here they were filmed in actual operation. Beyond the movement itself, the work captures the texture of the materials, the mechanisms within, and the visual effects that operation produces, so that one can grasp bodily how people of the nineteenth century brought moving images into being.

Making visible the motion of the devices and the principles of the moving image—things difficult to see while everything sits still—the work was made to connect the objects held in the collection with the visitors who stand before them.