Memories of a Lost World - Travels through the Magic Lantern

This great, 704 p., picture book offers a view to the world, 1870 - 1930s, trough 900 magic lantern slide photographs. All slides are from the author's Fiell publishing archive.This is a trilingual book, English, German and French.

In this pre-globalized world we visit Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Southern Europe, Northern Africa, Central & Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, The Middle East, Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, South Eastern Asia, Oceania, Antarctica, South America, Central America, United States of America, Canada and Alaska.

The book opens with a short introduction on the history of the magic lantern slide and an essay on the importance of the use of photographical magic lantern slides as popular projected spectacle both to entertain and educate.



Click cover to see the FIELL's book page for this publication.
A promotion PDF is available showing some wonderful images from the book.

Erkki Huhtamo is Professor of Design | Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of 'The Roll Medium, The Origins and Development of the Moving Panorama until the 1860s'.
Jussi Parika is Reader at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton, UK) and the author of 'Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses and Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology'.

The Echoes of a Marvelous Lamp - Magic Lanterns in their Media Context

This Spanish doctoral thesis combines an illustrated textbook accompanied by a multimedia DVD with more than 1000 Magic Lantern related illustrations.
Unlike the Spanish printed book, the DVD is also readable in English and contains a multimedia application that presents the graphic and audio material of the project 'The Echoes of a Marvelous Lamp'.

This interactive version unveils the 'Universe of the Magic Lantern' by displaying 145 descriptive files and many animated magic lantern slides or other related optical devices.
Illustrations are from various sources, public a private, including 'Early Visual Media'.

Unfortunately something went wrong with the author's photo credits and many phantasmagoria slides are wrongly credited with copyright to me which is a pity for the original copyright holders such as the Hauch Collection in Denmark, the Cabinet of Physics in Helsinki & others.

The DVD is easy to browse through by following different historical or thematic itineries such as lanternists, audience, artefacts, etc. Plays with or without glass organ music in the background.
Besides some errors in captions (e.g. Theatrum Mundi marionette wrongly marked as Théatre d'ombres) the interactive DVD is a wonderful and useful illustrated source.

Click cover to see the Salamanca University bookpage.

3D Displays and Spatial Interaction:
Exploring the Science, Art, Evolution and use of 3D Technologies.

Scientific extremely well researched and equally interesting for media scholars in the field of both, historical and the very latest modern new media and it's applications.
One does not need to be a scientist to learn a lot from this enlightening, 419 pages, book with over 244 illustrations, many of them in color.

The book focuses on modern 3D displays and spatial interactions but links contemporary haptic 3D technologies with their historical forerunners such as stereoscopy, Pepper's Ghost & the Fantasmagoria.

'He who does not honour the past is not worthy of the present'.
Everyone involved with old and/or new media should read this most informative source which also deals with the use of new technologies in popular entertainment and virtual reality environments linked with the notion 'Suspension of Disbelief'.

The book reproduce the 'Moisse Fantascope' and explains the 18^th. century Phantasmagoria shows, forerunner of the creation of ethereal images by modern computer applications & interfaces. The historical ethereal image is wonderful illustrated by a smoke projection performed by the late Mike Bartley.

For the first time the book also reproduces an hitherto unknown Phantasmagoria poster recently discovered in the library of the University, Ghent. This Dutch language poster, 1831, annouced a 'Pantasmagoria Ghost Show' in Ghent.

Over 100 years of speculation and controversy surround claims that the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer, used the camera obscura to create some of the most famous images in Western art.

This intellectual detective story starts by exploring Vermeer's possible knowledge of seventeenth-century optical science, and outlines the history of this early version of the photographic camera, which projected an accurate image for artists to trace.

However, it is Steadman's meticulous reconstruction of the artist's studio, complete with a camera obscura, which provides exciting new evidence to support the view that Vermeer did indeed use the camera.

These findings do not challenge Vermeer's genius but show how, like many artists, he experimented with new technology to develop his style and choice of subject matter. The combination of detailed research and a wide range of contemporary illustrations offers a fascinating glimpse into a time of great scientific and cultural innovation and achievement in Europe.

Click cover to see the accompanying webpage or goto to the publisher's webpage.

Optical Media

This major new book provides a concise history of optical media from Renaissance linear perspective to late twentieth-century computer graphics. Kittler begins by looking at European painting since the Renaissance in order to discern the principles according to which modern optical perception was organized.

He also discusses the development of various mechanical devices, such as the camera obscura and the laterna magica, which were closely connected to the printing press and which played a pivotal role in the media between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.

After examining this history, Kittler then addresses the ways in which images were first stored and made to move, through the development of photography and film. He discusses the competitive relationship photography and painting as well as between film and theater, as innovations like the Baroque proscenium or 'picture-frame' evolved from elements that would later constitute cinema.

The central question, however, is the impact of film on the ancient monopoly of writing, as it not only provoked new forms of competition for novelists but also fundamentally altered the status of books

In the final section, Kittler examines the development of electrical telecommunications and electronic image processing from television to computer simulations.
In short, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of image production that is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand the prevailing audiovisual conditions of contemporary culture.
Click cover to see the table of contents on the publisher's website.

The Education of the Eye

The University of Westminster has always been at the forefront of technological change in the heart of London, providing educational programmes shaped by the changing needs of the capital. It has also contributed to the social and cultural life of London in some remarkable ways.

When the University’s predecessor, the Polytechnic Institution opened to the public in the newly fashionable Regent Street in August 1838, it was committed to the promotion of science. It achieved this aim by visual means, exploring innovative ways of demonstrating practical science and new technologies to a general audience.

The Royal Polytechnic Institution became a major Victorian tourist attraction. Visitors could be submerged in the diving bell, have their photograph taken in Europe’s first photographic studio, see the new industrial machines in motion, or watch a spectacular lantern show in the Polytechnic Theatre.

The Education of the Eye tells this exciting story for the first time, drawing on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources. In keeping with the Polytechnic's reputation for visual spectacle, it is lavishly illustrated with more than 70 contemporary images, many of which have not been previously published.

 (information from publisher)



Sequences, Contemporary Chronophotography and Experimental Digital Art

This volume explores the proliferation of contemporary art that uses sequences of images to explore ideas of space, time, movement and duration. Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge and other 'chronophotographers' first explored these ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century; since then chronophotography has been in the shadow of cinema, but now its emerging once again in post-cinema practices, digital art and new experimental photography.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, artists have found that sequences offer new opportunities for exploring continuing issues regarding aesthetics that operate at the intersection of time and space.

The book contains a number of illustrated essays by international critics and theorists and discusses the work of a wide range of artists engaged in contemporary chronophotography. The introduction also uses insights from chronophotography to dispel the myth of persistence of vision.

The book can be ordered from Wallflower Press.

'Lanternes Magiques - Le Monde Fantastique des Images Lumineuses'

A richly illustrated catalogue almost entirely devoted to the world of the Toy Magic Lantern. This exhibition publication depicts many rare toy magic lanterns in full color accompanied by a detailed description.

The catalogue offers historical essays written by leading pre-cinema historian Laurent Mannoni (Cinémathèque Française) and other researchers + a complete list of the exhibited lanterns, slides, illustrations, etc.

In addition, a chapters with biographical information of Toy Magic Lantern manufacturers turns this catalogue into a valuable reference source.

Manufacturers:
Molteni, Carpenter & Westley, Bing, Carette, Falk, Planck, Rose, Schoener, Ganz, Aubert, Giroux, Lapierre, Lefèvre, Maison de la Bonne Presse, Martin, ... etc.

The exhibition runs in the Musée Unter Linden Colmar, France.

See Early Visual Media's Toy Magic Lantern page.
Click book-cover to visit the exhibition website.

Technologies of Magic

Technologies of Magic collects essays that investigate the coexistence of very old forms of thought belief in ghosts, magic, spirits and contemporary culture.

Offering a new way of thinking about technology in today’s world, this distinctive collection frames ghosts and magic as fundamentally performative performing new kinds of cultural work in the world. Modern ghosts are not asked to identify themselves, but are instead made to account for the work they do.

- John Potts is an associate professor in media at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the author of Radio in Australia.

- Edward Scheer is senior lecturer in the School of Media, Film, and Theatre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is the editor of 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud and Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader.

Click on cover for more detailed information or order this book from the publisher.

Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg and the Visual Media of His Age.

(Review from 'The Magic Lantern Society' Newsletter N^o. 90 - December 2007)

A remarkable doctorial thesis by Vreni Hockenjos for Stockholm University. August Strindberg (1829 - 1912), Swedish author & playwright, was known for his 'cinematic vision. The purpose of this thesis is to outline the visual media that could have contributed to this vision and how they could have influenced Strindberg.

Strindberg himself wrote about sciopticons, transforming pictures and dissolving views, so it seems he was very conscious of the visual culture of his age. The book is in English, and really a history of the visual media in Strindberg's time. it is interesting as a general history of pre-cinema media and its impact on Strindberg's work.

The book is well illustrated, and some of the illustrations are not commonly known. There is a large section on magic lanterns, some work on panoramas, and some very interesting illustrations of moving panoramas, shadow theatre and photographic practice.

To order a copy of this interesting and easily readable thesis, contact the author, Vreni Hockenjos by e-mail.

For more information click on the cover of the book.
Read an abstract of the thesis in PDF format.

Phantasmagoria - Specters of Absence.

Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “Phantasmagoria” in which familiar scenes and stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections to create dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects.

These lively, interactive events incorporated storytelling, mythology, and theater in a single art form that entertained while providing a space for thinking about the otherworldly playing with the viewers’ anxieties regarding death and the afterlife.

A comparable trend can be seen in works by contemporary artists who create ghostly images to reflect on notions of absence and loss, using spectral effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath. These artists’ approaches range from the festive to the ironic, counterbalancing the emotionally charged, often somber implications of their subject matter.

The shadow literally, the absence of light, represents something that is beyond the object yet inseparable from it. In many of the works in Phantasmagoria, shadows are used to allude to death, the obscure, and the unnamable, and to construct allegories of loss and disappearance.

See the origin of phantasmagoria on Early Visual Media.
(follow subsequent pages)

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself.

It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing ideas about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces.

As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women--scientists and philosophers--who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance séances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics.

'Phantasmagoria - Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media' can be ordered directly from: Oxford University Press. Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

The Haunted Gallery.

The dawn of cinema dramatically changed our visual culture.

'The Haunted Gallery' is a fascinating and well illustrated book showing the influences of the young medium, Moving Pictures, in relation to Painting, Photography, Magic Lantern pictures, Astronomy and Stage Magic at the 'hing point' of the 19^th. & 20^th. Centuries.

This groundbreaking book explores the history of Visual Media in Britain during this key period that witnessed a transformation from stasis to movement across the entire range of Visual Media.

For this as it may, this book should become one of the inavitable reference sources for all 'vintage and today's' media history enthusiasts.
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

'The Haunted Gallery' (291 pages) can be ordered directly from:
Yale University Press.

See also Routledge's Encyclopedia of Early Cinema

Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre.

'Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre' presents a highly diverse parade of inventions that have influenced our perceptions marches: from the perspective paintings of the Renaissance, continuing with the notorious 'train sicknesses' of the nineteenth century, to the modernday 'helicopter view'.

A constant feature of the sensory transformation through history is instruments and machinery, from the camera obscura, via the stereoscope to the multimedia art of today. And in the same way, an ever-returning question is what these things do to us.

Petran Kockelkoren (1949) holds the chair in Art and Technology at the Department of Philosophy, University of Twente. He also holds a lectorship Art and Technology at ArtEZ, Institute of the Arts. This book is a revised version of Kockelkoren's inaugural oration, published as part of the series 'Fascinations.

'The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded' can be ordered directly from: NAi Publishers
This book is available in English or in Dutch.
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

Visit the Fairground page on Early Visual Media.

Thierry Lefebvre et Laurent Mannoni.

"THE FLIP BOOK SHOW" Books turns into cinema

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