The impression of a person's nose and mouth on a pinscreen
Pin art, also known as a pinscreen, is an executive toy. It consists of a boxed surface made of a crowded array of pins that are free to slide in and out independently in a screen to create a three-dimensional relief. Other similar product names are "PinPressions" and "Pinhead". The original Pinscreen toys were made of metal pins, which were heavier and tended to bend easily; newer Pinscreen toys are generally made of plastic pins. Pinscreens have also been used for animation production; a larger device working on a similar principle was invented by Claire Parker in 1935.[1][2]
A 4-by-8-foot (1.2 m × 2.4 m) pinscreen is at the Swiss Science Center Technorama in Winterthur, Switzerland. This screen is like a large 3D drawing pad that can work with different sizes of paintbrushes for calligraphy.
In popular culture
The pinscreen was popularized in the 1985 music video for the Midge Ure song "If I Was", which included a giant body-sized version.
In the 1988 film Vice Versa, Marshall Seymour keeps a pinscreen on his office desk. Charlie (Judge Reinhold) pushes his face into it and sticks out his tongue.
In another 1988 movie Earth Girls Are Easy, as Valerie is wrecking various things of her philandering boyfriend Ted, she takes his pinscreen and also sticks out her tongue.
In the 1990 film Darkman, a pinscreen is used to duplicate a character's hand.
