Mr. Brand, who is also a film archivist, said he began to think about a subway zoetrope while riding trains as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After moving to New York in the mid-1970s he began to experiment with ways to create one.

“I was so naïve,” he said. He initially conceived of a much more ambitious project, using blownup photographs to create a virtual film strip behind the light-box walls. He wanted to change the images regularly, making a movie, in essence, that subway riders would see only in little segments of 20 seconds or so, like a crazily attenuated version of the serials that once ran in theaters.

He came to understand that the images behind the walls needed to be bright and hyperactive to resonate in such a short time, so he began to think of the work as a moving painting. But his basic ideas  of reversing the motion-picture paradigm by having the images stay still while the viewers were in motion; of creating what he thought of as a movie that viewers would see a few seconds a day but repetitively over many years, a “decades-long movie”  remained the same.

“One of the main motives for making Masstransiscope was to find out for myself  as someone who makes obscure films that not many people watch  if it would be different to have a mass audience,” said Mr. Brand, who for several years in the early 1980s used to take an M.T.A. key that “someone slipped me” and descend into the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station where the light box sits to clean and repair the piece himself.

“And what I discovered is that it really isn’t all that different,” he said.

Except, perhaps, that he cultivated unlikely fans like Lou Corradi, a subway conductor who saw the piece several times a day for years in the early 1980s and loved it so much that he tracked down its creator. “So many passengers used to question me about your project, and I had no information to give them, sorta like when they asked about service delays! (wink),” Mr. Corradi wrote in an e-mail message to Mr. Brand in 2007, after spotting the darkened hulk of the project on a subway trip.