At the center is a fully mechanically constructed slitscan camera — developed and built exclusively using materials, tools, and techniques that were available around 100 years ago, at the time when László Moholy-Nagy, with his concept of the "New Vision", laid the foundations for a media-technical perception. The construction deliberately avoids any form of digital technology. Instead, all components are based on historical principles and craftsmanship: multiplex wooden plates, a wind-up Märklin spring motor from 1929, gear racks and wheels made with traditional metalworking, a handcrafted glass spirit level, classic slotted screws — produced according to contemporary standards — as well as an interior coated with shellac and soot. No CNC milling, no computer-assisted fabrication: everything was created using the means available in the 1920s and 1930s.

From a technological perspective, such a device would have been conceivable at the time. The physical principles of slitscan photography — in which an image is captured strip by strip over time rather than all at once — were known. Early applications appeared, for example, in photo-finish technology for motorsports (e.g., the Rotoflo Circular Film Camera). However, in this specific, technically conceived form, this camera technology is not historically documented and only emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is where the project begins: as a constructed artifact of an alternative technological history. It exemplifies the untapped potential of past eras and highlights the role of perception, zeitgeist, and cultural focus in technological developments. As László Moholy-Nagy formulated in his theory of the New Vision: "Every generation has its own optical focus." This refers not only to a stylistic shift but to a fundamentally altered approach to the world: for Moholy-Nagy, the camera was not merely a reproduction tool, but a "seeing machine", an instrument that produces new ways of perception through technology — a tool that shapes both the gaze and the image.

In this sense, the camera designed here is understood as a practical extension of Moholy-Nagy's New Vision: it does not ask how seeing was at that time, but how it could have been, if technology, thought, and perception had been conceived differently.