By directly projecting three dimensional objects and mechanisms in order to obtain a picture, this work, is experimenting with a different kind of cinema. Julien Maire made one-to-one scale glass reproductions of the different stages of a drop of water falling and jumping back up out of the surface. The sequenced images represent tiny, fleeting moments: they are photographic in the sense that it is photography and later on cinema that gave them lasting reality. Copying a fluid element in sculpture is part of a paradox which Maire has studied carefully. It is especially the three dimensional precision of the projection of these sculptures which made this considerable effort worthwhile: although rickety and jerky, the images obtained are of a very special quality and precision and there is no distortion when they are enlarged.

"Julien Maire's performances using proto-cinematic micro-machines both evoke and outdistance the illusions of the phantasmagoric projectionists of the pre-cinema. His intricate archaeology though seems not primarily concerned with retrieving the effect-ploys of optical illusion, but of reimagining the apparatus as itself as illusory, one in which the image and its operation are meticulously intertwined. In this sense, rather than allegorizing the image, Maire allegorizes the machine." - Timothy Druckrey