The Cross-Country That Learned to Keep the Beat

Okay, so you’re asking what I’ve been doing in the garage for the last four hours, and I’m going to try to explain this without sounding completely unhinged. You know how Victorian parlours had those spinning drum things with slits? Zoetropes. You spin them, look through the slits, and a sequence of still drawings animates because your brain can’t help stitching frames together. Persistence of vision. The same trick that makes movies work, just mechanical instead of projected.

Right, so what if the animation wasn’t a galloping horse or a bouncing ball, but a flight path? A real one. From my logbook. Specifically, the cross-country I flew to Vermilion last September—the one where I detoured around some building cumulus and ended up tracing this weird flattened S across the prairie.

Stay with me.

The GPS log from that flight is just a list of coordinates and timestamps. Latitude, longitude, altitude, repeat. When I printed it as a 3D sculpture a few weeks ago, the path was frozen in space—a single wire floating over an invisible landscape. Beautiful in its way, but static. It didn’t move. And that flight moved. Every heading change, every correction for wind, every decision point where I chose left instead of right. The sculpture couldn’t show any of that because time was baked out of it.

So here’s the idea: instead of one continuous line, slice the track into frames. Twelve of them, say—one every thirty degrees of rotation around the route’s geometric centre. Each slice becomes a raised spoke on a disc. Print the disc. Spin it under a strobe light. Photograph.

If the strobe fires at exactly the right frequency—once per spoke per rotation—the disc appears to freeze, and the flight path animates. Frame by frame. Turn by turn. The whole flight playing on loop, exactly as fast or slow as I want.

You’re probably thinking: why?

Honestly? Because when I was messing around with Holding-Pattern Polyrhythm Loops, I realized aviation already has rhythm built in. Standard-rate turns are three degrees per second. Holding patterns have fixed leg durations. The sky has a time signature, even if no one writes it down. A zoetrope has timing too—it needs a specific frame rate to animate smoothly. What happens when you sync those two clocks?

The answer, it turns out, is that the strobe rate maps directly to a tempo. At 20 RPM with 12 spokes, the strobe needs to fire four times per second. That’s 240 BPM. Jungle tempo. Too fast for most things, but you can scale it—slow the disc, reduce the spokes, whatever fits your ear. The point is that the visual loop and the beat lock together. The flight path becomes a drummer. The shape of the route becomes the rhythm.

This afternoon I computed my first centroid. This is the tricky bit: you can’t just average all the GPS coordinates and call it the centre, because if the route doubles back on itself, the average lands somewhere the aircraft never went. The centroid has to be geometrically meaningful, or the spokes wobble when the disc spins. I used the centroid of the convex hull—basically, shrink-wrap the whole track and find the middle of the shrink-wrap. Close enough for a first attempt.

Twelve spokes. Thirty degrees each. The slicer says four hours and eighteen minutes. I’m watching layer seventeen go down right now.

What I don’t know yet: whether the physical disc will balance properly, whether my strobe controller will phase-lock with the turntable motor, whether the whole thing will photograph as anything more than a blur. I suspect my spokes are too thin—the research suggests at least two millimetres for clean strobe photography, and I printed at 1.2 because I didn’t read far enough ahead.

But here’s the thing. Thirty-nine hobbies in, and I’m still finding new ways to interrogate the same data. That September flight exists as numbers in a file, as a sculpture on a shelf, as a relief tile with mountains underneath it, and soon—maybe—as a visual beat you can watch and hear at once.

The disc will probably wobble. The first print usually does. But somewhere in the next few hours, I’m going to spin a plastic circle under a flashing light and watch myself fly to Vermilion, frame by frame, at whatever tempo I choose.

I’ll let you know if it sounds like anything.