Infinite Zoom: Video Crank Installation

What if you could wind a four-minute continuous camera zoom forward and backward by hand like a mechanical mutoscope?

Infinite Zoom is an interactive four-minute continuous zoom set inside the brutalist concrete terraces and conservatory of London’s Barbican Estate. As you wind the handle (or scroll on the web), the camera travels from wide architectural views straight into microscopic pores of concrete and moss, emerging on the other side into a brand-new scene in an unbroken loop.

18-Second Motion Preview

Interactive Web Installation

Use your scroll wheel, trackpad, or touch drag to wind the zoom forward and backward. Because it loads the full ~60 MB video and audio into memory so you can scrub smoothly in both directions without lag, click Click to Load Interactive Installation below to start, or open it in fullscreen.

Multi-Scale Visual Journey

Across 6,011 frames (4 minutes 10 seconds at 24fps), the lens transitions seamlessly between human-scale street portraits, raw board-formed concrete brutalism, microscopic lichen ecosystems, and back out to another conversation on the terrace.

How I Put It Together

Normally, if you try to scrub a web video backward quickly, it stutters and the audio goes silent. I didn’t know how to code a custom video player from scratch, so I used Google Antigravity to help me solve the two things that mattered most for the feeling of the piece: making the four-minute zoom scrub smoothly forward and backward with inertia (so it glides to a stop like a heavy flywheel, or brakes like a turntable when you click), and making the soundtrack play both forward and in reverse as you wind.

Role: Concept, Visual Direction, 3D-Printed Crank Enclosure & AI Workflow.

More Interactive Micro-Cinema & Spatial Experiments

Explore the companion interactive canvases built alongside Infinite Zoom: