Ott's Sneeze - A Bookworks Commission
Neal White and Lawrence Norfolk

'Ott's Sneeze is the ultimate schoolboy combination of icky bodily effluvia and nerdy science...'

Sally O'Reilly. Art Monthly (June 2003)

A project developed and realised in collaboration with the author Lawrence Norfolk

On January 7, 1894, in Thomas Edison’s West Orange laboratory, WKL Dickson tested the world’s first motion picture camera: the Kinetograph. One of Edison’s assistants, Frederic P Ott, took his place on the stage and sneezed. The forty-five frames of "Record of a Sneeze" were registered two days later at the Library of Congress: the first motion picture to be protected by copyright in the United States of America.

Ott’s sneeze has spent more than a century in representational limbo; perpetually announced, perpetually failing to appear. Now, with recent advances in laser, video and computer technologies, its recapture has become possible. In this book the authors look to find the missing sneeze.

For more details see Publication s

For reviews see: Art Monthly (June 2003), Source (Spring 2003)

O-1 ( a footnote)

A short film entitled 0-1 was produced from the data created for the book. In the film an inverted one second loop of a sneeze is shown at a rate that allows us to percieve of the unfolding constellation. I made the film for a lecture on 'Intuitive Logic' at the John Latham Study Day at Tate Britain in 2006, and as a tribute to his own one second drawings, and a friendship that resulted from his enthusiasm for the book. Still below is taken from the film.