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Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

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Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

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Content MACHINES OF THE UN/REAL:
MAPPING THE PASSAGE BETWEEN THE VIRTUAL AND THE MATERIAL
IN THE ATTRACTION
by
Lauren Fenton
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE)
December 201 8
Copyright 2015 Lauren Fenton
i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………..............iii
LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………iv
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS AN ATTRACTION?.....................................................1
Vindicating the Philosophical Importance of the Attraction:
Thesis and methodology in the context of past literature…………………………4
The Virtual, The Material, and the Experience of Exteriority:
Defining the terms of the argument……………………………………………...19
CHAPTER 1: OBJECTS AS SIMULATIONS:
Modeling the plenum in cabinets of curiosity……………………34
The World as Synecdoche:
Permutation, artificialia and cabinet architecture………………………………..34
Theatre of Mirrors: The Museum of Jurassic Technology……………………….59
Fishing For Ruins: Lost Book Found…………………………………………….71
The Crystal-Object……………………………………………………………….80
CHAPTER 2: PROCESS AND PERCEPTION:
Material agency in the 19th century attraction…………………..85
“Disappearing in a Homogenously Happening Universe”:
Attractions and the discourse of shock…………………………………………..87
ii
The Liveliness of Automation:
From the phenakistoscope to the Fleischers……………………………………101
An Aesthetic of the Operational:
Stage magic and the theatre of machines.………………………………………120
Instrumentation as Fiction: The phantasmagoria……………………………….132
CHAPTER 3: ALGORITHM AND WORLD:
The digital experience of visual effects………………………...156
The Power of Unreality:
Cinematic illusion and the red herring of the immersive interface……………..156
Archeology of Digital Effects:
Procedurality in 1960s-70s transductive art…………………………………….176
Spectacular Movie Machines:
The aesthetic choices of software………………………………………………190
Hunting for Visual Complexity:
Revelations of texture in computer graphics…………………………………...214
CONCLUSION: THE ONCE AND FUTURE ATTRACTION………………….251
The Case of the Mysterious Nuage Vert………………………………………..251
The Virtual Lives of Technical Objects………………………………………...260
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………269
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………295
iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Chair and members of my dissertation committee,
Andreas Kratky, Henry Jenkins, and Perry Hoberman, for their generous mentorship,
their invaluable critiques, and the intellectual and artistic excellence they have
communicated and modeled over the years, which has served as a longstanding
inspiration for my own professional pursuits.
I would also like to thank my beloved parents and sister, as well as my dear
friends and colleagues Lucille Toth, Clea T. Waite, Veronica Paredes, and Elizabeth
Ramsey for their emotional support and wise advice through the long years of this epic
Ph.D. And last, but emphatically not least, I want to express all my love and gratitude to
my husband, Jay Smallwood, for letting me know, in every possible way, that I could do
this.

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Artificialia: A carved ostrich carrying a real ostrich egg
in a piece that incorporates coral and fine gold work……………………41

Figure 2: Artificialia: Madonna mit Kind in den Wolken…………………………41
Figure 3: Pièces Excentriques……………………………………………………...42
Figure 4: Musical automaton………………………………………………………42
Figure 5: The “Augsburg art cabinet” …………………………………………….46
Figure 6: Kunstkammer and contents……………………………………………...48
Figure 7: Recursive cabinet architecture…………………………………………...51
Figure 8: Miniature enclosures……………………………………………………..52
Figure 9: Reconstituting the plenum………………………………………………..53
Figure 10: The tiny anfractuosities of matter………………………………………..55
Figure 11: The cabinet as a labyrinth………………………………………………..55
Figure 12: A “reconstruction” of Kircher’s hydrological clock……………………..62
Figure 13: The micro-mosaics of Henry Dalton……………………………………..67
Figure 14: Accidental configurations of material being……………………………..73
Figure 15: Objects stacked in indecipherable layers………………………………...75
Figure 16: “Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay” ……………………….81
Figure 17: Luna Park at night………………………………………………………..92
Figure 18: Animated gif of a phenakistoscope disk………………………………..109
Figure 19: Reve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel…………………….110
Figure 20: Phenakistoscope disks…………………………………………………..115
v
Figure 21: Koko the Clown seamlessly transfigures into a ghost,
a chain, and a bottle of wine/a glass. …………………………………..117
Figure 22: Total plasmaticity………………………………………………………119
Figure 23: A theatre of machines…………………………………………………..125
Figure 24: Illustration of a magic lantern…………………………………………..125
Figure 25: Diagram of an anamorphic mirror……………………………………...129
Figure 26: Jules Verne / Verne Gyula……………………………………………...130
Figure 27: Trompe l’oeil ceiling at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence………………….131
Figure 28: Schemata of the fantascope…………………………………………….136
Figure 29: Rear and frontal projection, using two fantascopes,
to make a figure appear to grow in a mirror. …………………………..138

Figure 30: Robertson’s phantasmagoria……………………………………………139
Figure 31: Cabaret du Néant………………………………………………………..143
Figure 32: The X-ray séance……………………………………………………….145
Figure 33: Inside the Haunted Mansion:
a confusing, omni-directional space……………………………………150

Figure 34: The stretching elevator at the entrance of the
Haunted Mansion……………………………………………………….151

Figure 35: The Haunted Mansion phantasmagoria………………………………...152
Figure 36: Filming Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon)
by Fritz Lang at the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg,
Germany, 1929. ………………………………………………………...173

Figure 37: Effects artists use the Dykstraflex digital camera rig
to shoot a miniature for Star Wars.……………………………………..177

Figure 38: The camera follows the point of view of the spaceship
as it swoops through the trench. ………………………………………..179

Figure 39: László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator…………………………182

Figure 40: Walter Ruttmann, Lichtspiel: Opus 3…………………………………..182
vi

Figure 41: Oskar Fischinger, Circles……………………………………………….182

Figure 42: Oskar Fischinger, An Optical Poem…………………………………….182

Figure 43: John Whitney, Catalog 61……………………………………………...182

Figure 44: John Whitney, Catalog 61……………………………………………...182

Figure 45: Variations V, 1965……………………………………………………...185

Figure 46: Japanese poster of the Pepsi Pavilion at the
1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. …………………………………….187

Figure 47: Do we feel the need to explore all these options? ……………………...196

Figure 48: Excessive rainbow reflections in the ice-caves,
one of the film’s racetracks. ……………………………………………198

Figure 49: “Car-fu” ………………………………………………………………...199

Figure 50: Impossible landscape…………………………………………………...201

Figure 51: Internal and external realities
composited together on screen. ………………………………………...203

Figure 52: Meta-montage: encounters in post-diegetic time……………………….204

Figure 53: The racetrack in Speed’s mind is a “real” racetrack after all.…………..204

Figure 54: The Doof Warrior exhorts the drivers to more speed. …………………207

Figure 55: Testing the “Peacemaker”, a dual track vehicle
manufactured by Howe and Howe Technologies
for Mad Max: Fury Road, before its chassis is mounted. ……………...208

Figure 56: Previz animation of the scene in which Mad Max
is imprisoned in Immortan Joe’s fortress. ……………………………...210

Figure 57: Fusion of the camera with the production design………………………212

Figure 58: The camera as a stunt actor……………………………………………..212

Figure 59: Plastic as a “hero” texture………………………………………………220
vii

Figure 60: Computational Fluid Dynamics for an
imaginary maelstrom…………………………………………………...222

Figure 61: Novelty flesh……………………………………………………………225

Figure 62: Davy Jones’ uncanny skin texture……………………………………...226

Figure 63: Ambiguous ontologies………………………………………………….228

Figure 64: Digital “vanitas”? ………………………………………………………228

Figure 65: In-between copies………………………………………………………229

Figure 66: Sailing into the wormhole………………………………………………232

Figure 67: The black hole “Gargantua”, with its
unexpected accretion disk………………………………………………233

Figure 68: The Koch curve…………………………………………………………237

Figure 69: Visual effects’ first fractal mountains…………………………………..239

Figure 70: An object with infinite texture………………………………………….243

Figure 71: The original Mandlebrot set…………………………………………….243

Figure 72: “Landscapes” show fine details in the structure………………………..244

Figure 73: Krzysztof Marczak. Hybrid-Mandelbox-IFS-Fractal-3………………..244

Figure 74: hyperben2. Mossy_ruins………………………………………………..245

Figure 75: Theli-at. Inside a Box. ………………………………………………….246

Figure 76: Nuage Vert, HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) …………………252
1

INTRODUCTION:
WHAT IS AN ATTRACTION?

I desire to revisit the dioramas, whose brutal, enormous magic
knows how to impose on me a useful illusion. I prefer to contemplate
a few theatrical decors, where I find artistically expressed and tragically condensed
the dreams I hold most dear. These things, because they are false, are infinitely
closer to the truth, while most of our landscape painters are liars, because
they neglect to lie.
Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1858”

Illusion, trick, spectacle – Baudelaire’s diorama was one amongst many
attractions that have delighted urban crowds since early modern times. A popular fixture
in many large cities in the first half of the 19
th
century, the diorama was a mechanical
“theater without actors and stories”
1
. A series of illuminated backdrops on a rotating
stage were animated by a system of shutters and pulleys, creating an impression of slowly

1
Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related
Spectacles. The MIT Press, 2013. 141. The diorama I discuss here is only distantly related to the use of the
term “diorama” today, which commonly refers to a type of museum exhibit.

2
transforming landscapes. Painted on both sides of translucent canvases, pictorial elements
appeared and disappeared, revealed by the sequential illumination of different light
sources. To achieve the sensation of presence, physical props and taxidermied beasts
were sometimes placed on stage to extend the landscapes into the spectators’ space.
2

Unlike the paintings exhibited at the prestigious “salons” of the Académie des Beaux-
Arts, dioramas did not cater to the connoisseurship of the public. They solicited a more
direct, more “naïve” response that did not rely on prior assumptions about aesthetic ideas,
the historicity of art, or the intention of the author. However, Baudelaire succinctly
communicates the hidden complexity of the spectator’s reaction to the diorama: delight in
the virtuosity of the illusion’s execution, the sensation of stepping into a dream or some
other parallel reality, and the intensity, even the violence, of his affective response. The
poet finds the sum of these effects expresses a “truth” that escapes the painters of the
academy preoccupied with authentic representation – namely, the attraction’s faculty to
disrupt perception and conscript the spectator in an experience of phenomenological
exception and singularity.
As I will argue throughout this dissertation, the diorama is only one of many
media that have proliferated from early modernity to the contemporary era that can be
categorized more fruitfully as attractions. Though they do not inscribe themselves in the
history of fine arts and have been generally understood as forms of popular culture,
attractions have played a fundamental role in pushing the limits of people’s expectations

2
ibid, 144-146. See also Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New
York: Verso, 2007. 164.

3
of reality. By entertaining generations of spectators, they have cultivated a sense that
there is more “out there” to be felt and seen that what we might come across in the
ordinary exercise of our lives. Today in the digital era, society’s growing creative
investment in attractions has lent them a new cultural salience. Spectators are
increasingly put in dialog with attractions – not only more established, though rapidly
evolving, forms like visual effects driven cinema and theme parks, but new species of
attractions that are transforming our experience of public and individual spectatorship:
urban screens, large-scale responsive audiovisual and kinetic installations in urban spaces
and festivals, and many emerging forms of so-called virtual and augmented reality such
as virtual reality headsets and other mobile pocket worlds. As the rate at which new
attractions appear increases, their importance is becoming recognized, not only in terms
of “minor” practices in the history of media, but in relationship to aesthetics, the nature of
the media consumer, the rise of modernity and the evolution of technological culture. As
these types of popular entertainment, articulated symbiotically with creative advances in
technology, acquire an ever larger part of our spectatorial investment as consumers of
aesthetic experiences, it becomes urgent to theorize attractions more comprehensively
and establish how they differ from other modes of spectatorship.
This dissertation aims to provide a theoretical framework for understanding a
certain number of experiences and objects that have until now been studied as separate
forms of media practices in terms of their common basis in the concept of the attraction.
It develops a rhetoric of the attraction as an aesthetic phenomenon with a specific
operational logic and epistemological attributes. It shows the concept of the attraction is
4
not only a useful tool for the comparative study of media across history, but may
illuminate transdisciplinary issues such as the phenomenology of spectatorship, the role
of scientific and technical knowledge in the construction of aesthetic experience, and the
subject’s desire for the material world (and exteriority in general) as an autonomous,
pluripotent domain that supersedes the subject
3
.

Vindicating the Philosophical Importance of the Attraction:
Thesis and methodology in the context of past literature

What is an attraction? The argument of this dissertation is that an attraction is a
system for visualizing hypothetical states of material experience and, concomitantly, for
putting material givens back into a state of potentiality or play. On a basic level, the
attraction provokes the attention of the viewer by producing a phenomenon whose
coherent differentiation from the background flow of perceptual information and
expectations throws the spectator in a state of happy agitation or excitement. In the case

3
For the purposes of the argument, this dissertation will limit itself to attractions that fall under the purview
of technologies for the production of sensorial effects, and visual effects in particular. It will therefore not
extensively discuss attractions that involve (human) performance as their mechanism of effect (for example
the circus, vaudeville theatre, festivals) since these involve preoccupations with the human figure,
intersubjectivity, and the meaning of community that are central to performance-based forms in a way that
they are not in other attractions. Performance-based attractions are an extremely large subject that cannot
be done justice as a sub-topic of this dissertation.

5
of the diorama, this phenomenon is the complex play between the lighting and the
mechanized decors, which give the impression of a changing landscape. Which specific
landscape is being represented is not as germane to the attraction’s effectiveness as the
way in which the landscape is produced, the particular quality of the metamorphosis,
namely, the slow disappearance of one landscape into another. From the point of view of
the experience of the individual spectator, this distinct transfiguration of known givens
(theatre decors, light, machinery) into an emergent phenomenon (crossfading landscapes)
is what constitutes the diorama.
The attraction is effectively distinguished principally not by what it represents,
but by what it does, by the mechanism or process that sets its effect in motion. It presents
content in a serial fashion – each individual representation functions as an illustration of
an effect, one of the possible outputs of the attraction’s procedure of transformation. An
effect is not a type of content – but what does it show, exactly? An effect shows the world
manifesting itself anomalously– it reveals a facet of materiality that has not been
previously encountered, that deviates from what one has come to expect of the behavior
of known things. This destabilization of the known is the source of the spectator’s
agitation and excitement, because it places the spectator herself into a state of possibility.
For the spectator, objects become imbued with imaginary affordances. They are no longer
simply perceived: they quicken; they are in action. They manifest their autonomy. As
such, the attraction is a site where exteriority – the spectator’s sense of the world outside
herself that is not subject to her control, that she cannot assimilate, but that also
physically incorporates her – is expressed and negotiated.
6
By actualizing virtual phenomena in a sensible image and detaching extant
phenomena from their concrete backgrounds, the attraction illuminates the frontiers of
our relationship with objects. In doing so, it opens up a rift in our attention, which
becomes less instrumentally directed and more susceptible to the presencing of exterior
things, and to the imagination of their presencing. The spectator’s witnessing of this
phenomenological unfolding also confirms the procedural nature of the attraction.
Process is the performance of materiality over time, the trace of materiality in action – by
exhibiting material effects, the attraction is in fact exhibiting material processes. It
behaves as if it were another nature, a dynamic system that produces its own lineage of
parallel or “un-real” phenomena.

The complexity of this mode of spectatorship and what it reveals about our
imaginative rapport with material agency makes the attraction a fertile and significant
topic of analysis. At the heart of this dissertation’s polemic is the idea that the attraction
is not a trivial byproduct of aesthetic or technological activity, but a philosophically
important phenomenon whose dispersed and sometimes obscure instances trace a
consistent path through the history of modern media. Critical theory has often ignored the
central role attractions played not only in the histories of cinema and new media, but also
in the domain of technical innovation.
This casual dismissal of specific attractions as frivolous or ephemeral forms of
media, however, is symptomatic of a history of ideological bias against the attraction as a
purveyor of popular entertainment, a bias which evinces a suspicion of amusement or
7
excitement for its own sake – not only skepticism as to its social value but a belief in its
spiritual danger to the individual. An exemplary exposition of this view in early
modernity can be found in 17
th
century Janseniste philosopher Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, a
proto-existentialist theological treatise that argues that the pursuit of diversion is inimical
to self-examination and a meaningful life:
“The only thing which consoles us from our miseries is diversion, and yet this is
the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from
reflecting upon ourselves…Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and
this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But
diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
4

In Pascal’s thought the attraction – he uses the example of courtly entertainments for
enervated monarchs – is first associated with the flight from or defeat of the subject. He
argues that the excitement we derive from entertainment is in fact not a genuine good;
instead it lures us away from the exercise of our agency. The subject, in this case, is more
often than not a less than anodyne construct, which over the centuries would be defined
as the prerogative of a certain kind of individual. As Michael Saler reminds us, the
pleasures of “enchantment”, the affect of unrestrained enthusiasm when confronted with
the marvelous or the spectacular, became, as the Enlightenment progressed, increasingly
associated “with the cognitive outlooks of groups traditionally seen as inferior by the
Western elites: “primitives”, children, women, and the lower classes”
5
. These “naïve”

4
Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts. Translated by W.F. Trotter. Harvard Classics. New York, N.Y: P.F. Collier &
Son, 1910. 64
5
Saler, Michael T. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford
University Press, 2012. Kindle edition.

8
consumers of enchanting experiences were often perceived as unfinished subjects. The
Frankfurt School’s influential Dialectic of Enlightenment further linked this apparent
regression away from intellectual autonomy to the inauthenticity of the pleasure of the
attraction, this time as it related to the inauthenticity of a “culture industry” dominated by
the consumption of the media artifacts of mechanical reproduction. Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno depicted 20
th
century media culture as a system of mass distraction that
transforms autonomous individuals into passive consumers. Attractions like films (at the
time considered by most to be part of that low-art category) exemplified how the industry
marketed meaningless variations in style in order to mask the lack of substantial
differences in their products. These serial efforts represented capitalism’s triumph of
effect over meaning: “the culture industry has developed in conjunction with the
predominance of the effect, the tangible performance, the technical detail, over the work,
which once carried the idea and was liquidated with it.”
6

Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s conflation of spectatorship with consumerism was
developed by Guy Debord into an ontology of the illusory image in The Society of the
Spectacle. Debord argued that spectacles – the secondary realities manufactured by
television, cinema, advertisement – had saturated the experience of everyday existence to
the point where people could only live vicariously though them. Debord built upon the
notion of spectacle as a diversion to argue that modern society had become permanently

6
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University press, 2002. 99
9
distracted, prey to a double consciousness that allowed objects to become masters over
subjects:
“Spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous
movement of the non-living… It is not a supplement to the real world, its added
decoration. It is the heart of the irreality of actual society… Where the real world
is transformed into simple images, simple images become real beings, and the
effective causes of a hypnotic behavior.”
7

Pascal’s association of the attraction with death finds a correlate in Debord’s definition of
the spectacle as the inverse of life. In a monstrous reversal of the natural humanistic order,
attraction-images become agents while individuals are de-animated, as if the spectacle
had captured the life force, in a manner of speaking, of its consumers and appropriated it
for its own growth.
Theorists of postmodernism, most notably Jean Baudrillard, subsequently
reiterated the idea that the multiplication of spectacular “simulacra” had precipitated a
crisis in subjectivity, which reverberated across realms of aesthetic and economic
production
8
. Frederic Jameson in particular theorizes the post-modern attraction – in the
guise of pop art and Las Vegas architecture – as the flattening of interiority into a
depthless affect. In this movement, expression, or the subject’s drive to manifest his
image in the exterior world, disappears in favor of a “compensatory decorative
exhilaration.”
9
While postmodernist theorists are sometimes accused of being

7
Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. 16-17, 23. Author’s translation.
8
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989)
argues that late capitalism has led to the fragmentation of social purpose and the aestheticization of the
public sphere.

9
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146, no.
July-August (1984): 59–92.
10
inappropriately enchanted by the current transition to the information and entertainment,
or “infotainment”, society that they describe, they themselves retain an understanding of
the spectacle as a phenomenon destructive both to social values and the realization of the
individual. This assumption is, arguably, rooted in critics’ own ambivalence towards the
validity of aesthetic regimes assembled as bricolage from popular choices and tastes
rather than articulated through the systematic pursuit of art historical agendas.

While the attraction suffered from a dangerous reputation in critical studies and
philosophy, media theorists have more recently started to challenge this portrayal by deep
diving into the specific cultural practices surrounding spectacular media. Henry Jenkins’
approach to the study of popular art, ranging from the influence of vaudeville on the
aesthetics of early sound comedy to the internet fan cultures of transmedia franchises, is
self-consciously guided by a critical methodology that examines these media phenomena
from the point of view of the rationale behind their popular appeal, rather than from the
generalist or prescriptive perspective of a critic that sees himself standing “outside” the
object of his study. This allows Jenkins to unpack aspects of entertainment culture that
have appeared self-evident or unproblematic to modernist and postmodernist theorists of
spectacle. One of these aspects is the affect of immediacy, of intensity in the attraction
that has since Pascal been correlated with the passivity and anomie of the subject. Jenkins
challenges the notion that this spectatorial stance can be reduced to an uncomplicated
surface: “we often respond to these wow moments as if they defied any interpretation, as
if they spoke to us purely on a visceral level. Yet, they may be some of the richest
11
openings for cultural analysis”
10
. The “new critical language” that Jenkins articulates
operates on the basis of "a close understanding of the link between details and their
emotional force"
11
that reveals how the pursuit of technical and creative virtuosity
structures our sensation of being entertained. Vaudeville, for example, emerges as a
singular aesthetic system whose “rules” of heterogeneous assemblage of acts and
performative excess break down the conventions of theatrical and cinematic “high” art
12
.
This approach defines the point of view of an immersed and spectating critic, and
conversely, defines the spectator as an informed, discriminating and passionate consumer
(perhaps even scholar) of attractions. It creates a framework for a phenomenology of the
attraction by analyzing it as an experimental and avant-garde practice hiding in plain
sight. I use this perspective as a methodological ground for my dissertation’s comparative
exploration of attractions.

Jenkins’ theorization of the “wow” effect resonates with a growing body of
cultural history of media that seeks to examine various popular spectacles as sites of
affective confrontation with unexpected perceptual phenomena. The terminology of
“attraction” was first employed by Sergei Eisenstein as a critical tool for film theory.
Inspired by circus and vaudeville theatre acts, the filmmaker articulated his personal

10
Jenkins, Henry. The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: NYU
Press, 2006. 4
11
ibid, 9.

12
Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 63-70.
12
vision of cinema as a “montage of attractions”
13
, a meaningful juxtaposition of sub-
narrative units or scenes whose stark, intense emotional content functioned like
percussive beats in a piece of music. Whereas Eisenstein saw the attraction as a means of
forcefully conveying the simple conflicts of political propaganda, Tom Gunning saw it as
a demonstration of spectators’ learned capacity to doubt and evaluate visual evidence.
Gunning drew widespread attention to the concept of the attraction in the early 1990s by
shedding light on the first decade of cinema as a “cinema of attractions” dominated by
trick films, vaudeville routines, erotic skits, and actualités that documented everything
from picturesque views from railway cars to battles and athletic events
14
. Gunning
highlighted the importance of the novelty of cinematographic technology in
understanding the audience’s enthusiasm for this variety content, and its relationship to
the affect of astonishment
15
. Specifically, he referred to the cinematograph’s performance
of an “optical uncanny”
16
which rewarded the viewers’ skepticism as sophisticated

13
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’” Translated by
Daniel Gerould. The Drama Review: TDR 18, no. 1 (March 1974): 77. For Eisenstein, the aesthetic
integrity of a film was not dependent on plot or character but on the thematic harmonies and counterpoints
produced by the sequential arrangement of these different affective units.
14
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon : Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA, USA:
Harvard University Press, 1991. 29, 31
15
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” In Viewing
Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1994. This early era of cinematic attractions, with its own specific way of addressing the
viewer, was supposed to pre-date the grammar of montage and formal conventions that formed the basis of
narrative cinema.
16
Gunning, Tom. “Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny.” In
Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis, 68–90.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 73. The jarring disconnect between the audience’s rationalist
expectations and the fantastical animation of the objects on the screen excited a feeling of wide-eyed
curiosity. For Gunning, this uncanny affect marked the difference between a cinema of attractions and
diegetic cinema.
13
consumers with the spectacle of impossibly life-like images. Gunning effectively
presented an alternative view of the attraction as a form of critical affect that playfully
solicits intellectual curiosity – in contrast to Eisentstein’s assumption that the attraction’s
affective intensity annihilates the critical distance that allows spectators to freely think for
themselves. In the last ten years, theorists like Scott Bukatman and Angela Ndalianis
have further analyzed the relationship between certain types of attractions and positive
affects like wonder or the sublime, which push the spectator towards self-examination
and self-transcendence. Ndalianis examines wonder as the aesthetic complement of
scientific curiosity in the context of the Baroque aesthetics of theme park rides, while
Bukatman identifies a resurgence of the sublime in visual effects for science fiction
cinema and animation. Like Gunning’s uncanny in the cinema of attractions, Bukatman
sees the sublime as an affective modality that “stage(s) a confrontation with the limits of
human power and agency…heavily freighted with the weight of the unknown.”
17
Far
from stupefying the spectator into passivity, these extreme states of hyperbolic perception
uncover the spectator’s epistemological desire, a need to explore alternative experiences
of perception and embodiment that is strongly correlated with the imaginative faculties.
Other investigations of specific attractions have linked spectacular affect with the
evolution of media technology in the context of historical shifts in regimes of perception.
Barbara Stafford’s analysis of the visual and technological culture of the Baroque and
Enlightenment periods illuminates the role of devices of amusement such as automata,

17
see Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012. 137. See also the section “Two Kaleidoscopic Perceptions” in
Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham, N.C:
Duke University Press Books, 2003.
14
reflective toys, perspective boxes and other pocket perceptual accessories in defining an
alternative model of knowledge production through perceptual engagement – a model
that held sway before the institutional divergence of art and technology, when
aestheticizing scientific phenomena and exploring them in entertainment was a prominent
practice
18
. Friedrich Kittler also identifies early modern attractions as technologies of
information as well as perception, specifically in his discussion of the magic lantern
19
.
Jonathan Crary discusses 19
th
century attractions such as the stereoscope in the context of
a historic divorce of vision from its reference in the body
20
, while Oliver Grau claims that
attractions enter media history as part of a larger teleology of perceptual immersion that
reaches its apex in contemporary virtual reality systems
21
.

A reconstructed thematic of the attraction emerges from a comparative reading of
these histories of media technology: the attraction as the product of an open inquiry into
the gap between the act of perception and knowledge of the physical world. The affect of

18
see Stafford, Barbara Maria, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a
Box to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001; and Stafford, Barbara Maria.
Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge (Mass.);
London: The MIT Press, 1996. Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman explore a similar terrain in their
survey of speculative scientific instruments from the 16
th
to 19
th
centuries.
19
Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media. 1 edition. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. The magic
lantern was an itinerant projection mechanism with interchangeable slides that maintained its popularity as
an entertainment and didactic instrument late into the 19
th
century. Kittler claims it was one of the first
media platforms to automatize knowledge, while also functioning as a species of hardware “drug” that
transfigured the experience of the night. 100.
20
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. 125-127. Other scholars have alternatively discussed certain attractions as
sites of heightened embodiment, notably Lauren Rabinovitz with regard to early 20
th
century amusement
park rides and kinetic movie-going experiences.
21
See Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2003.
15
the attraction, as explored by Gunning, Bukatman, and Ndalianis, is negotiated in this
shifting zone. I use this epistemologically questioning and questing spectator as my point
of entry into the phenomenology of the attraction. However, my treatment of the
attraction as a set of technological practices deviates from the media historical
perspective. In Crary’s, Kittler’s and Grau’s accounts the attraction is often examined as
a particular turning point in the construction of apparatuses, a technical solution in the
modernizing effort to mediate perception in ever more complete and totalizing ways
22
. In
this context attractions are not so much perceived as individual media – in Rosalind
Krauss’ sense of “a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions… (that)
produce an experience of their own necessity” – as avatars of mediation. I understand the
attraction – inclusive of what are commonly viewed as different types of apparatuses – as
a mode spectatorship constructed on a logic of procedurality. It is a mode of spectatorship
that is, in a certain sense, about viewing materiality as a process – it is, in effect, a vehicle
for imagining technicity itself as a form of procedural materiality. Within this perspective,
I examine the “hardware” of different attractions as systems with synergistic effects that
(again in Krauss’ terms) create “a specific structure of experience”.
My focus, unlike Crary and Kittler, is not on media as agents of historical change,
whether this pertains to shifts in regimes of perception or shifts in social and poetic being.
My approach towards the categorization of attractions is actually closer to media
archeology’s more flexible taxonomy of media artifacts. While this dissertation is

22
I understand this generalization to refer only to their treatment of forms of media that can be categorized
as attractions. They of course differ substantially in their approach to media theory. In particular, Kittler’s
emphasis on the apparatus as hardware allows him to extensively explore media such as the gramophone or
the computer as sites of material agency or expressive materiality. In this respect, this dissertation’s
theorization of attractions is in sympathy with Kittler’s project.
16
structured chronologically from early modernity to the digital era for purposes of clarity,
this does not reflect an argument that attractions have evolved in a uniform direction nor
that they are converging on some teleological purpose
23
. My approach to a certain extent
follows Siegfried Zielinski’s model of media “variantology”
24
, which considers different
media as budding evolutionary forms that correspond, echo and also slide out of phase
with each other across time and place. Zielinski’s model explores diversity within a larger
media ecology, a concern that also characterizes the work of Erkki Huhtamo (although in
other respects Huhtamo’s analytical tool of the “topos” differs substantially from
Zielinski’s). This commitment to excavating media artifacts neglected by the critical
agendas of media discourse has led them to resurrect or rediscover a number of
attractions, including Renaissance experiments in “natural magic”, peep shows,
stereoscopic cinema and balloon panoramas, amongst others. This consciousness of a
“deep time” of media allows the critic to imaginatively inhabit artifacts and experiences
that have physically disappeared, and in this sense can achieve a type of aesthetic
engagement with past media similar to Henry Jenkins’ academic-fan engagement with
contemporary popular culture. As media archeologist Ernst Wolfgang explains, “historic

23
This does not deny movements or trends in the historical evolution of media – these are simply not the
focus of my argument.

24
Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by
Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008. 7
17
media objects are radically present when they still function, even if their outside world
has vanished. Their “inner world” is still operative.”
25

Indeed this dissertation argues that certain defunct forms like cabinets of curiosity
and the phantasmagoria do in fact persist through contemporary avatars, and conversely,
that historically specific media like late 1960s and early 1970s electromechanical art can
be interpreted as proto-digital attractions. For this purpose, within each chapter I will
sometimes jump forward or backward in the chronological order to trace the
phenomenological lineage of a particular effect. In order to ground my discussion in the
historical context of specific modes of spectatorship, I introduce each chapter with a
critique of the particular conception of the attraction that most urgently dominated the
cultural debate during the time period covered in the chapter. To this end, I discuss the
role of Baroque aesthetics and 17
th
century experimental science in shaping the
exploratory spectator of the cabinet of curiosities, as well as the importance of the turn-
of-the-century discourse of urban sensory shock for understanding the ambivalence of the
amusement park spectator. More prominently, I inscribe my analysis of digital visual
effects in the context of historically evolving questions around the nature of immersion
and the affordances of the digital image. If I have conclusions to draw from the historical
passage from analog to digital media, it is that, as far as the attraction is concerned,
certain characteristics that have been theoretically associated with the digital image, such
as modularity and the algorithm (understood as a series of steps or an actionable process)

25
Ernst, Wolfgang. “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media.”
In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi
Parikka. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. 241

18
can be found in older attractions, while certain organizational affordances like recursion
are vastly expanded in digital attractions. Even within the more restricted purview of
attractions, I have generally found it more productive to think in terms of digital images
rather than a digital image – in terms of the diverse regimes of spectacular expression
made possible by the digital image rather than a specific or unique relationship between
the digital image and spectacular effects.
Within this organizational structure, my methodological angle will be to
reconstruct the “interior world” of the attractions featured in this project, as Wolfgang
puts it – to reconstruct the phenomenology of their effects and mode of spectatorship
based on research into and analysis of their technical/technological operation, as well as
through in-depth analyses of my own aesthetic encounters as a critical and affectively
engaged spectator with the attractions themselves. I will also contextualize and support
my claims regarding specific attractions by delving into historical accounts that shed light
on how these attractions were perceived and experienced by intellectually and affectively
invested spectators in their own time – conveyed through their individual voices or as
members of the public
26
. In each case, I will attempt to answer the question: how does
this attraction work? For the attraction, this question means both: how does it function on

26
I do not interpret these accounts in the context of audience reception theory or audience analysis. My
interpretative framework is the phenomenology of attractions in the context of their technical and aesthetic
effects on the individual spectator. I do not analyze spectators in terms of how they become part of different
audience constituencies (whether these are institutionally, economically, demographically constructed or
formed by consumers’ own initiative to self-identify as fans, for example). I also do not analyze
spectatorship semiotically, in terms of how consumers might interpret/read a specific media product as a
text, or through reception contexts and rituals. Of course, I do not discount the relevance of these
approaches to the study of attractions – this methodology simply does not fall within the purview of my
argument. The one exception when I do consider a specific attraction in the context of its target audience is
when I discuss the “Mandlebulb” in Chapter 3, because its identity as a phenomenon of internet
participatory culture played a determinant role in the evolution of its technological and aesthetic
affordances.
19
a technical level and, how does it operate phenomenologically on the spectator? As I
hope to show, in the attraction these two questions are linked in a very specific way
because an attraction is a process for the generation of material effects and the material
imagination.

The Virtual, The Material, and the Experience of Exteriority:
defining the terms of the argument

Moving forward with this rhetoric of attractions, it is important to clarify the
terms “virtual”, “material” and “exteriority” around which the thesis of this dissertation
revolves. I argue that the attraction acts as a two-way transducer between the material and
the virtual. The attraction realizes imaginary phenomenologies as sensible images, and
conversely, it produces emergent phenomena – new objects – from its own physical
components. This thesis implies that attractions have more than one kind of relationship
with the virtual: namely, they relate to the virtual as emergence, as simulation, and as
projective imagination.
Pierre Levy places the origins of our current understanding of the virtual in the
scholastic virtualis, the virtue or power of something to evolve into its proper form. To
follow an Aristotelian example, a tree can be thought to already exist virtually in the seed
that it will grow from: the seed holds the potential to become a tree; it is the tree’s
20
temporal avatar. Levy abandons Aristotle’s metaphysics of forms to argue more generally
that the virtual is the effect of introducing indeterminacy into the actual, of endowing it
with degrees of freedom. The virtual is not the imagination of arbitrary alternatives to the
actual – it involves more precisely “discovering the general question that (an actual
moment) refers to”
27
; it means uncovering the unfinished aspects of actual things, their
vectors of movement and implicit directions. In the course of the process of
“virtualization”, the concrete object is opened up, its identity is put back into play. It is
transformed into a new individual, but one that emerges in response to what the object
was before.
The corollary of this conception of the virtual as it applies to physical systems is
the phenomenon of emergence. Emergence, simply put, is the effect by which “novel
properties and capacities emerge from a causal interaction…between the component parts
(of a whole)”
28
. Although the mechanism of emergence can be explained – we can
understand how water molecules become agitated as they heat up – the emergent
phenomenon itself is, according to Manuel De Landa, “objectively irreducible”– vapor is
qualitatively different from liquid water
29
. If the virtual is the space of possibilities that
accrues around objects, then emergence is the event of those possibilities coming into
being. It is how the virtual is actualized; it is how the new is produced. The attraction is a
fulcrum of emergent phenomena in this sense. The effects of the attraction – a trick of the

27
Lévy, Pierre. Qu’est ce que le virtuel? Paris: La Découverte, 1995. 15-16.
28
De Landa, Manuel. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. London ; New
York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 1, 3.
29
ibid, 4.
21
light, a concatenation of movements, a composition of objects, a transformation of shape
– physically emerge from the material/procedural mechanism of the attraction. It is
through these effects that the attraction produces the new, that it actualizes the virtual
possibilities of its components. These emergent effects can refer to sensible, spectacular
metamorphoses to which the spectator is perceptually susceptible, but they also refer to,
on a deeper level, the attraction’s power to produce new regimes of material being from
given materials. The affect of astonishment comes from the spectator’s witnessing this
phenomenon of emergence, which, in the spectating act, appears as an affirmation of the
wished-for reality of virtual things.
I discuss19
th
century attractions such as the phantasmagoria, phenakistoscopes,
stage magic automata, amusement park dark rides in the second chapter in terms of their
capacity to produce emergent effects. The automatism of the attraction has largely been
framed as a “fake” substitute for the perceptual apparatus in the context of a discourse
that links modernity to new forms of spectatorship. I argue instead that the attraction, as
the end-result of a technical process, produces more of the material evidence that
constitutes the spectator’s sense of external reality. In doing so, the 19
th
century attraction
effectively creates more of what we perceive as “the world”; it does not replace “the
world” for us or diminish our own perceptual agency.
Emergence already shows that the virtual and the material collaborate intimately
with one another to create the attraction (and to take a larger philosophical perspective,
indeed the world that surrounds us). As Levy remarks, the virtual is by definition “not
there”, intangible. For this reason it is commonly understood to refer to a state of being in
22
categorical opposition to the material – an assumption reinforced by Debord when he
names the secondary reality of the spectacle the adversary of “concrete life”. Others,
most notably Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze in his footsteps, have argued that the
virtual is a fundamental aspect of the experience of our perception of the material world.
Perception is never a straightforward act in which the subject comes to apprehend objects
as they are; instead, they are filtered through our perceptual apparatus, brought into focus
by our very selective attention and expectations. Bergson suggests that this means that
we see and feel objects not as themselves but as “images” of themselves. We construct
them in the act of perception. Far from being solipsistic phantasms, these object-images
are the touchstones by which we navigate the world: they are robust, tangible, real. Our
perception is articulated around this original “virtualization” of the exterior world.
“To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual it would be necessary, not
to throw more light on the object, but on the contrary to obscure some of its
aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of
being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach from them as a
picture.”30
However, this act of virtualization can extend beyond the instrumental, casual exercise of
making sense of the world to encompass a much richer image of the object at hand, an
image whose complexity and depth essentially recreates or rediscovers the actual
thickness of the object
31
. In this act of imaginative perception, the entirety of the object’s

30
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. London; New York: G. Allen & Unwin, 1929. 28

31
Here I use object in a sense that is not employed by Bergson. For Bergson, the spatial, concrete object –
the “objective” – is a mere surface that “is no more than what it presents to us at any given moment”. Only
the durational object, the object in time, is virtual. I treat the object, and concrete materiality in general, as
always being in dialogue with the virtual, partly because of phenomena like emergence, but also because,
as I will later show, pure spatial qualities like texture are fundamental to understanding the virtual
23
embeddedness in its world is revealed both with excruciating specificity, and in an
expansive vista as the senses vertiginously ricochets from detail to detail. The
prototypical expression of this event is the famed passage of “the madeleine” in Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
32
The virtual life of the madeleine unfolds for
Proust, in one continuous sensation that is both a sensation of himself and the sensation
of this unbearably unique object. Through involuntary memory, he is not just tasting the
madeleine itself, but all past madeleines he ever tasted with his aunt, as well as the places
where he was tasting these madeleines, in a sort of endless mise-en-abime in which every
relationship he ever had (or imagined he had) with the object radiates from a single
moment of encounter. This apprehension of the real multiple existences of any actual
thing is at the heart of Bergson’s and Deleuze’s conception of the virtual. Far from being
an agent of disembodiment, the virtual effectively multiplies the object’s sensible
presence. In our daily experience of actuality, the object is diminished, reduced to a

dimension of attractions. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. Reissue edition. New York: Zone Books, 1990. 41-43.
32
The main part of Proust’s description is in this following passage: “And soon, mechanically, dispirited
after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in
which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched
my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was
happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no
suggestion of its origin…And suddenly, the memory revealed itself…as soon as I had recognized the taste
of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give
me…immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach
itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents…and
with the house, the town, from morning to night, and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent for
lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands…And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse
themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then
are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on color and
distinctive shape, become flower or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the
flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park and the water-lilies on the Vivonne…and the whole of
Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from
my cup of tea.” Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove.
Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York, N.Y: Random House, 1981. 48-51
24
useful picture that we can use without dwelling on it, ready to move on to the next point
of attention. However, to consider the object as a process, interconnected with layers of
events outside our immediate apprehension, is to take into account its real virtual
existence. Biting into the madeleine, one plunges into deep perception, into the “past as if
it were a proper element”
33
. The virtual is a tangible, sensuous medium in which we
encounter the many imaginary truths of the objects in our lives.
The attraction opens up the virtual dimension of the object in an analogous way.
The spectacular effect of the attraction sets up a break or fissure in the mundane that
triggers a secondary perceptual mechanism, another way of looking that lets the effect of
the attraction percolate through us and resonate with us. Although it does not
(necessarily) summon involuntary memory, it concentrates and unfolds an imaginary
series of divergent associations, so that the particular effect feels as if it were standing in
for a larger world of similar but also endlessly variable material configurations. To return
to the example of the diorama from the start of this chapter: each sequence of crossfading
landscapes, each diorama, although so intensely specific in itself, is also only one of
many possible dioramas, many unknown landscapes. The spectator of the attraction is
exquisitely sensitive to this phenomenon, and experiences it as wonder – the desire to
know blooming from the center of an awareness of the endlessness of the world. Deleuze
refers to this experience of “divergent series” that “implies great dimensions, depths, and

33
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone
Books, 1990. 56

25
distances which the observer cannot dominate”
34
as a simulation. Like the madeleine, the
simulation appears more real than real because it contains a hidden multiplicity – a
system of internal relationships that generates a coherent effect. In fact, Deleuze goes so
far as to say "simulation designates the power to produce an effect"
35
. Because it stands
out in its completeness and coherence, phenomenological richness and complexity, the
simulation can be more convincing, on an affective level, than the default mode of
perception that Bergson associates with the object-image. In this scenario, actuality is the
pale copy in a human experience that can produce infinitely rich simulations of different
objects and events. Proust’s vertiginous savoring of the madeleine transfigures an
ordinary madeleine into a powerful simulation that approximates the “truth” of the object
better than perception unaided by involuntary memory. The attraction similarly functions
as a simulation, a superimposed reality in which the attraction’s effects determine a new
set of parameters for material expression.
I discuss this specific rapport between the virtual and the material in the first
chapter in the context of the 16
th
and 17
th
century cabinet of curiosities. The cabinet of
curiosities founds the attraction as a system for the sensorial and cognitive processing of
marvelous phenomena, making them available to the spectator for the first time as a
specific structure of experience. In creating a “false” model of the world from an
amalgam of local effects, I argue the cabinet recapitulates Leibniz’s concept of the
material universe as a “plenum”, a state of infinite density, in which bodies are

34
Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” Translated by Rosalind Krauss. October 27 (1983): 45–56.
49, 53.
35
ibid, 54.
26
successively contained in or connected to other bodies and therefore always in a state of
affecting or being affected. In simulating this imaginary totality, the cabinet emerges as a
machine for knowing as much as for seeing spectacular things – a system for questioning
normative categories through a sensorial encounter with material objects.

The attraction, in functioning as a vector of emergence and simulation, draws
these different meanings of the virtual to itself, but it also constructs its own specific
experience of virtuality. The cultural genealogy of attractions is intertwined with, and
indeed driven by, a historically evolving concept of the virtual that has had a far-reaching
effect on the phenomenology of contemporary culture. Ann Friedberg memorably
advanced this argument with regards to the late 19
th
century urban flaneur, whose
peregrinations through the Parisian arcades, adrift in the sights of sounds of bustling
commerce, street entertainment, and strange passerby, gave rise to a type of “mobilized
virtual gaze”. The flaneur superimposed on the physical city through which he/she
impressionistically meandered an “imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen”,
effectively accompanying the journey of his body with a flanerie” of the imagination
36
.
So while the attraction refines the spectator’s experience of the virtual, her newfound
“spectacular” sensibility or spectacular gaze is always searching for a new object of
fixation, and indeed, comes to perceive the spectacle wherever she looks. Michael Saler
similarly draws attention to the development of the “ironic imagination” in 19
th
and 20
th

36
Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994. 2
27
century consumers of fantastical and weird fiction, which he defines as an acquired taste
for simultaneously entertaining multiple contingent “as if” scenarios
37
. Saler uses the
term ironic because the modern aeronaut of the virtual he identifies deploys his
imagination in a self-conscious and disciplined manner, in effect holding
incommensurable worlds in his mind’s eye, a species of phenomenological high wire act.
Both flaneurs and science fiction fans have honed what I call their projective imagination,
the capacity to sensibly inhabit the virtual – in the case of flaneurs, by finding the
spectacle in the mundane; for the later-day world-builders, by conjuring diverging
realities.
The projective imagination draws upon the virtual as both a phenomenon of
emergence and a phenomenon of simulation, revealing that it is also a perfectible
capacity that can be uniquely cultivated by the attraction. As I will discuss in subsequent
chapters, the spectator’s projective imagination builds itself from sensible “clues” the
attraction embeds in its effects and which form a phenomenological armature that she
uses to construct a full-blown illusion. The projective imagination is therefore
instrumental in the creation of the spectacular effect, and can be understood as a
collaborative act between the technical process of the attraction and the spectator herself.

The attraction exploits and refines the virtual’s intimate investment in the material
(and vice versa). In generating new material effects, the attraction not only performs the

37
Saler, Michael T. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford
University Press, 2012. Kindle edition.
28
virtual dimension of objects; it also transforms the spectator’s rapport with materiality as
a whole – or, to be more precise, the spectator’s rapport with her own exteriority, with
what exists beyond the bounds of herself. Materiality is the quality that defines the world
of non-human objects, natural things and artifacts (including the artifact of the attraction
itself) that populate the subject’s exteriority. Materiality is the fact that things are “out
there”, but it is also the feeling of that “out there”. It is not only the tangible presence that
the spectator can see and feel, but also a relationship with the external world that the
spectator carries within herself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes this intimacy with the material as the fleshiness
of objects, a fleshiness perceived as the surface of contact between the sensed and the
senser. The act of perception, Merleau-Ponty argues, is not just the movement of an
(active) observer towards a (passive) object, it is a genuine encounter between entities
that share, above all, a common materiality: a “magical relation, this pact between them
(the things) and me according to which I lend them my body, in order that they inscribe
upon it and give me their resemblance, this fold, this central cavity of the visible which is
my vision”
38
. The spectator or see-er, “seer” (le voyant), projects himself into the concave
topology of the object seen, as if the retina had migrated from one body to another’s, and
the subject, in seeing, is sharing her vision with an object who is looking back, who is not
just touched but touches as well. Merleau-Ponty calls this minute crosshatching between
ourselves and the world the “chiasm” that joins us to objects as parts of a larger

38
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968. 146

29
continuum of sensate materiality or flesh. This embodied condition of the object sheds
light on the meaning of “object” itself, as a palpable thing that has density. This is
reflected in that word’s etymology: the “ob”, the “against”, rubs up against the motion of
throwing – “iacere” – which we feel in the casual bombardment of materiality against our
skin. The chiasm addresses this sensation of resistibility so characteristic of the object
and complicates it: rather than assigning subjects and objects to either side of a glass
barrier through which they mysteriously and incompletely communicate, it re-codes the
resistance of objects as a double-sided openness, as a tessellation of different patterns of
flesh that structure each other. This immersion in the material paradoxically enables our
sensation of exteriority, permitting us to adopt a virtual perspective which allows
“myself (to be) seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of
the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot”
39
. Because we see ourselves in
the midst of the visible (and see the visible in the midst of us, as our body), we can
project ourselves outside of our skin, in a manner of speaking, and experience exteriority.
The attraction exacerbates this chiasmic perception. By introducing new material
effects, new kinds of objects in her field of view, the attraction yanks the spectator
outside her subjective perspective into the larger realm of the visible. The spectator of the
attraction is pleasurably overpowered by the charismatic presence of these new “visibles”,
whose vividness and vitality draw attention to their essential fleshiness – their agency as
material beings. The spectator does not apprehend the spectacular effect as a master-
observer experimentally probing an opaque surface; rather, the effect confronts and

39
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. 134.
30
reveals itself to the spectator in such a way that she has no choice but to observe. The
attraction shows the epistemological relationship for what it truly is: an energetic
encounter between two entities with shared powers of affecting and being affected. This
sudden consciousness of her exteriority (as opposed to her subjectivity) brings the
spectator in an unaccustomed intimacy with the material. This intimacy is enchanting
because it does not take on the habitual aspect and familiarity that characterizes our
normal encounter with objects. Instead, the spectator of the attraction is a spectator
enamored with the visible, and an explorer of its secrets. In her interaction with the deep
texture of matter, she uncovers the new within the known.
Vivian Sobchak, whose phenomenological approach to cinema has consistently
demonstrated Merleau-Ponty’s relevance to the understanding of spectatorship, identifies
in certain films an “existential passion” for the inanimate that refuses the disinterested
gaze of the aesthetic connoisseur. Her description of this affective commitment to the
material sheds light on our intimacy with the spectacular effect:
“Thus, like suffering, passionate devotion is in excess of our volition; but, unlike
suffering, it is within our agency. And, unlike suffering, this devotion is not
passive but rather asserts our corporeal and affective adherence to others and the
objective world. Actively—passionately—expansive, it expresses our desire to
enfold other subjects and objects (and often the world itself), to know their
materiality and objectivity intimately and, indeed, to embrace their alterity as our
own.”
40

The power of the attraction is a reflection of what Sobchak identifies as our passion for
the alterity of the non-subjective, to the sensible enigma of the material. It points us to a

40
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004. 288-289.
31
grand order of things that encompasses non-human perspectives and ways of being that
are unknown to us. In this dynamic system of objects that makes up the world, the subject
is an exploratory mote. The attraction astounds because it brings into focus the infinite
vista of the visible, and concomitantly, releases the spectator into exteriority. The subject
is “let go”, freed to disperse into a larger space.
In the third chapter, I discuss how digital visual effects function as exploratory
arenas that enable these novel encounters with the visible. Like cabinets of curiosity,
these attractions draw out a series of effects as evidence for a larger “plenum” of material
being. These graphic systems go a step further, however, by attempting to reproduce the
self-generated variability found in nature, effectively seeking to reproduce the world’s
phenomenological qualities of exteriority and autonomy. These efforts have resulted in
the discovery of visual objects that are in fact models for speculative points of view –
both artifacts of the algorithmic system that produces them and legitimate investigations
into the textural qualities of materiality itself. In this context, digital images do not simply
function as maximally immersive copies of the external world, as is often claimed – they
function more precisely as a theater for the evolution of matter. As a result, digital effects,
like the 19
th
century attractions before them, showcase technical processes as co-
participants and co-creator in the world.
Consumers of the spectacular are often accused of engaging in a form of escapism.
Like Pascal’s bored monarch, restlessly running from one diversion to the next, they
seem to temporarily escape the unsatisfying conditions of their existence only to end back
in the same place they started, never managing to change the concrete reality of their fate.
32
Emmanuel Levinas, the 20
th
century’s preeminent philosopher of alterity, does not so
easily dismiss the urge to escape. In an early essay, he argues against the assumption that
the subject alone holds the inner resources to fulfill all his needs. The “exteriorizing”
activity of self-expression and agency is not a panacea to this problem, because in the end
they always return the subject back to himself. Escape is the instinctive, almost automatic
movement to find fulfillment “elsewhere” and experience what lies beyond the inherent
limits of the self: “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most
radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself (moi, soi-meme)”
41
.
To reach out for an “other” is not to recuse one’s duty to self-authenticity, it is to
recognize the possibilities of existence beyond the subject’s own naturally restricted
perspective, and to yearn for that undefined openness.
Without escape, the subject remains caught in the “game” of the self, and the
world she perceives is ordered only by its rules: according to Levinas, “the impossibility
of getting out of the game and of giving back to things their toy-like uselessness…defines
the very notion of seriousness”
42
. Attractions counteract this ethos of seriousness by
amusing us and creating images of escape, offering a glimpse of a different mode of
being in which all objects – including ourselves – emerge freely, gratuitously. To malign
or overlook attractions for being “just” about escape is to trivialize those “dreams we
hold most dear”, to use Baudelaire’s expression from this introduction’s epigraph,

41
Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape (de l’Evasion). Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003. 55.
42
Ibid, 52.

33
namely, the vision of ourselves joyously exiting into “the unknown to find something
new”
43
.
The following chapters will show a series of vitrines in which attractions
originating from early modernity to the current day will put on display their unique
effects. Although the collection is far from exhaustive, these selected experiences each
exemplify a different aspect of the logic of the attraction. As we move from early modern
and contemporary cabinets of curiosity in Chapter 1, to 19
th
century attractions such as
the phenakistoscope, the phantasmagoria and the magic show in Chapter 2, to the varied
terrain of visual effects and polysensory ephemera of the digital era we encounter in
Chapter 3, a certain family resemblance will emerge, and progressively resolve into the
concrete picture of a theory of attractions.

43
Baudelaire, Charles. “La Mort”. Les Fleurs Du Mal. Editions Gallimard, 1965. 153. Author’s translation.

34

CHAPTER I. OBJECTS AS SIMULATIONS:
MODELING THE PLENUM IN CABINETS OF CURIOSITIES

The World as Synecdoche:
permutation, artificialia and cabinet architecture

The history of the modern attraction begins in nature, or, more specifically, in a
certain way of looking at nature. Spectacular artifice, from the use of colorful flammable
chemicals and shadow play in the mystery religions of the ancient Greco-Roman world to
fireworks in medieval China, has conveyed wonder and awe since time immemorial, but
the attraction’s unique mode of spectatorship first clearly emerges from other dramatic
types of aesthetic display in the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries, when educated elites embarked on
a project of both systematically questioning the bases of inherited knowledge about
nature and devising methods that would allow them to soundly acquire new knowledge.
In the course of this investigation, natural objects whose nature had been apparently
35
decided once and for all by religion, folklore or ancient authorities
44
revealed themselves
to be incompletely known, and more expertise was sought out to verify the existence of
curiosities now perceived to be insufficiently documented. Sensitive to this state of
uncertainty as to what rightfully existed and belonged in nature, and what did not, early
modern philosophers multiplied their observations and explanations, particularly
“delight(ing) in paradoxes”
45
that seemed to put the finger on the mystery of nature’s
complexity. In this context, the concept of what was considered “marvelous” changed,
from referring to a preternatural phenomenon beyond the pale of rational explanation to a
natural object, that could, if it left concrete evidence, be examined and possibly even
understood, while at the same time retaining its fascinating quality. In fact, Lorraine
Daston argues that such natural anomalies were crucial in developing the observational
and theoretical sensibility of experimental science: “it was just because strange
phenomena posed the greatest challenge to a watertight determinism of causes that they
became objects of special attention in the reformed natural philosophy”
46
. Wondrous
natural objects stood out as hard, particularly obtuse facts whose resistance to easy

44
Although figures such as Aristotle continued to exert considerable influence on scientific practitioners
well into the early modern era.

45
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, California; London, England: University of California Press, 1994. Findlen,
demonstrating the growing “scientific” status of the curiosity at that time, reports how in 1572 Ulisse
Aldrovandi, a famed naturalist, dissected a “dragon” that had been found in Bologna and subsequently
published, with conscientious academic rigor, his theories on the purpose of its bizarre anatomy. Findlen
also remarks on early scientists’ taste for hybridizing competing philosophical systems in order to arrive at
more complete forms of knowledge. 53.
46
Daston, Lorraine J. “The Language of Strange Facts in Early Modern Science.” In Inscribing Science:
Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, edited by Timothy Lenoir. Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1998. 24. Daston specifically contrasts the importance accorded by Francis Bacon to the
study of “deviating instances” in nature with Aristotelian classification schemas that saw scientific value
only in the normative and universal.
36
interpretation called for further explanation rather than credulous belief. Their power of
attraction derived from the scientist’s desire to puzzle out the speculative particulars of
their materiality.
Nor did the exploration of the extraordinary phenomenon stop at observation.
Laura Findlen draws attention to the open exchange of knowledge and ideas that occurred
between these examiners of extraordinary specimens and practitioners of what was
referred to as “natural magic”, which included machines and instruments designed to
coax striking effects from natural phenomena, for example optical and musical devices,
but also experimental, even imaginary mechanisms such as perpetual motion machines
47
.
An early modern scientist such as Giambattista della Porta could place theories and
experiments about animals, metallurgy, magnetism, botany, medicine, geology,
pneumatic machines and mirrored instruments on a continuum of speculative facts
48
.
Natural wonders and natural magic mirrored one another: the man-made artifice, like the
natural curiosity, was perceived to be an exemplary distillation of Nature’s inexhaustible
material complexity.
Starting in the mid-16
th
century, specimens both of nature and natural magic were
assiduously collected by the educated elite – naturalists, scholars, philosophers, religious
institutions and princely courts – and displayed in proto-museums referred to as cabinets
of curiosity. These early Wunderkammern were often housed in rooms cleverly fitted

47
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy.
54

48
Porta, Giambattista Della. Magia Naturalis. Aubrii & Schleichius, 1619.

37
with various cabinets and drawers, as engravings of the collections of natural historian
Ulisse Aldrovandi (late 16th century) and the famous Museum Wormianum (early 17th
century) show. Gathering the greatest amount and variety of wonders in one place, the
cabinet of curiosity represented perhaps the first sustained attempt to systematize the
marvelous and make it available for study and replication. Previously a spontaneous and
elusive effect firmly outside human control, the extraordinary could now be called up at
will, perused at leisure and seriously contemplated without risking the ornery
phenomenon melting into the thin air of hearsay and legend. Liminal objects whose
identity was not yet fixed, from the shriveled skins of mysterious animals to inventions
like “sunflower clocks”
49
– objects without a proper place in the order of nature – could
nevertheless be corralled into becoming objects of knowledge. The cabinet of curiosity
founds the attraction as a process designed to reliably produce spectacular phenomena, to,
in a sense, wrest the anomalous from the fickle variability of Nature and make it
permanently visible and available to experience. That the contents of the cabinet were
viewed as facts (even dubious facts) show the attraction originating at a fecund moment
when the conceptual border between the fictive and the actual was closing, but still
porous, revealing the material world to be both an unexpected mine of undiscovered
truths and the primary fount of the new and unexpected.

49
In the 1630s the Jesuit naturalist and natural magician Athanasius Kircher invented a “clock that was
driven by a sunflower seed”, a type of biomechanical sundial which was meant to “follow the sun just as
the blossom does from sunrise to sunset.” Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and
the Imagination. Princeton University Press, 2014. 16. Though Kircher’s demonstrations of it of course
never worked, the instrument nevertheless illustrates the early scientific method of devising practical
experiments based on observations of nature. The sunflower clock was one of the attractions of Kircher’s
cabinet of curiosities in Rome.
38
The cabinet of curiosity was understood by its contemporaries to be an instrument
of epistemological discovery. This meant that it was perceived as a means of achieving
knowledge, indeed of investigating knowledge itself, rather than as a means of
representing the known. The late 16
th
, early 17
th
century Wunderkammern of Aldovrandi
and Dutch doctor Bernardus Paludanus, for example, did not so much catalog their
objects as itemize them in unbroken lists and grids that simply referenced their name,
place of origin and what they were made of
50
. This serial, “nonhierarchical” structure was
mirrored in the way they were displayed. Aldrovandi’s collection was dispersed in
thousands of pigeonholes, and indiscriminately mixed objects with images, dried
specimens with sketched renderings of plants and animals
51
. By the time Samuel
Quiccheberg, the manager of the cabinet of curiosities founded by Albrecht V, Duke of
Bavaria in Munich in the late 16
th
century, wrote a treatise detailing the organization of
an ideal Wunderkammer, it had become common to institute an elementary division
between naturalia, natural specimens, and artificialia, which encompassed arts, crafts,
toys, and instruments. As Katharina Pilaski Kaliardos demonstrates, however,
Quiccheberg and his contemporaries believed that refusing to strictly define the contents
of the cabinet, which would limit the perspectives that could be brought to bear on an
object, was the entire point of the cabinet of curiosities. At the time, the wunderkammer
proposed a radical break from purely propositional and deductive methods of knowledge,
instead advancing the idea that, in Quiccheberg’s words, “knowledge can only be gained

50

Swan, Claudia. “From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings: Classification and Its Images.” In
Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Paula Findlen
and Pamela H. Smith. New York ; London: Routledge, 2002. 126-127
51
ibid. 111
39
by the frequent viewing and handling of objects.”
52
The viewer was meant to use the
cabinet systematically as an instrument “to search, to arrange, and to observe”
53
, an
intensive visual and tactile process that would allow him to form his own conclusions
regarding the nature of the objects at hand.
The spectacular display of these objects went hand in hand with their erudite
mission, whose aim was more about questioning established categories than about
organizing matter into them. Patricia Falguieres further notices that sometimes the
contents of the cabinets were cross-referenced in competing taxonomies, the effect of
which was for each object to effectively function as a “palimpsest” of hypotheses and
speculations:
“None of these hierarchical principles is assured preeminence, as a result of which
an element can belong to multiple categories at once, or constitute a class by
itself: it is necessary to invent for each object a rule of display that has only a
local relevance.”
54

The cabinet here emerges as system of permutation that relied for its efficiency on the
specificity of local effects. Its aesthetic value was, in a concrete sense, its epistemic
value. Over time, this approach would not only convince viewers to see old objects in
new ways, but encourage the invention of novel types of objects altogether.

52
Pilaski Kaliardos, Katharina. The Munich Kunstkammer: Art, Nature, and the Representation of
Knowledge in Courtly Contexts. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. 57
53
ibid, 58.

54
Falguieres, Patricia. “Foundation Du Theatre Ou Méthode de L’Exposition Universelle: Les Inscriptiones
de Samuel Quiccheberg.” Les Cahiers Du Musee National D’art Moderne 40, no. Summer (1992): 91–109.
100. Author’s translation. See also Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine:
the Kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art, and technology (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers,
1995). Bredekamp, like Kaliardos and Falguieres, asserts that “the arrangement of the genera did not serve
to separate the various areas; instead, it built visual bridges in order to emphasize the playfulness of nature
through the associative powers of sight.” 73.
40
As the practice evolved, cabinets of curiosities became elaborate objects in their
own right, ornate pieces of furniture often referred to as Wunderschrank and
Kunstschrank that displayed not only natural specimens and machines but various curios
valued for their evocative sensorial and/or figurative properties – mineral oddments,
unearthed antiquities, sketches, painted miniatures, perspective boxes, clockwork toys,
the latest scientific instruments, and even personal possessions like inkpots or jewelry.
Many of the crafted objects in the cabinets simulated, in some fashion or another, objects
from the natural world, which were displayed side by side with these ingenious mimetic
works, as if to show the seamless evolution of one into the other – a style Horst
Bredekamp refers to as “rystique”
55
. This arrangement did not so much aim to confuse
the spectator as to which object was authentic, but to display the symmetrical virtuosity
of both nature and the artisan. Under this genre of mimetic artificialia fell a wide range
of hybrid objects that have no real representational corollaries today. These include the
three-dimensional still lifes of Bernard Palissy – casts of shellfish, insects and fossils
mounted in exquisite sculptures – as well as Schüttelkästen, glass boxes in which
miniature environments were re-created, complete with casts of insects, that could be
shaken to simulate a crawling forest floor. In other cases, organic materials and found
objects were used to create fantastical, miniature landscapes. These lapides manuales
frequently worked precious stones, coral, eggs and shells into scenes from classical

55

Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the
Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology. 1ST edition. Princeton: Markus Wiener Pub, 1995. 31

41
mythology. Daston and Park refer to these ambiguous pieces as “objets projetés”
56
–
essentially, projections onto found objects. Like the Ovid-inspired metamorphoses that
they commonly depicted
57
, the lapides manuales
58
artfully welded (rather than collaged)
multiple sources to create a startling object that was half actual and half fictitious.

Fig.1. Artificialia. A carved ostrich Fig. 2. Artificialia. Madonna with a Child in the
carrying a real ostrich egg. Kunst Clouds. Masnago. 1590-1602. Kunst Historisches
Historisches Museum. Vienna. Museum. Vienna.

The marvelous rawness of the rare materials used in these confections is not
viewed as inert or primitive, but the repository of hidden attractions from which a chain
of endless effects could be unwound. The implication was that any haphazard piece of the
world could be decanted into a series of new objects. Sometimes this involved staging the
found specimen in a diminutive theater of metaphorical references: for example, the
artificialia in (Figure 1) has a miniature ostrich carry its own authentic and much larger
ostrich egg, supported by a small tower of coral and gilded platforms. In other cases, an

56
Daston, Lorraine J., and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. 1 edition. New
York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2001. 280.
57
ibid, 274

58
ibid, 277
42
artificial object masqueraded as an actual specimen, as in (Figure 2), a medallion where a
nativity scene has been carved out of agate in such a way as to give the impression that
the image occurs naturally in the stone. Other objects sought to clothe the ideal in matter,
rather than extracting the ideal from matter itself. Ornate puzzles featuring concatenated
geometric solids fabricated using state-of-the-art wood turning technology, such as
Nicolas Grollier de Servière’s “Pièces Excentriques”, investigated the sensual properties
of theoretical abstractions (Figure 3).

Fig. 3. Pièces Excentriques. Nicolas Fig.4. Musical automaton. The ship rolls
Grollier de Servière. 1587. across a table while the tiny musicians
play their instruments. Hans Schlottheim.
1751. Kunst Historisches Museum. Vienna.

Automata, however, constituted the apex of this search for ever more ingenious
and ornate simulations – more than any other work of art, they reproduced life in its
(Aristotelian) essence, by displaying autonomous movement (Figure 4). One of the most
prized pieces of any Wunderkammer, these spectacular technological achievements were
presented as pure feats of creativity, replicating natura naturans (“nature naturing”), the
43
self-causing principle at work in nature that Spinoza also identified as God: “such objects
were primarily lacking any use, insofar as they served as playthings; however, it is
precisely the lack of purpose in their independent movement which emphasized the
demiurgic nature of their production.”
59
Automata themselves were considered part of the
order of nature on display in the Wunderschrank: according to mechanistic philosophy,
they issued from a common self-generating principle at work in both the arts and in
nature. Indeed, the spectacular effects of such machines could not be contemplated
separately from their causes in actual physical processes. According to the famed theorist
of the inductive method Francis Bacon, this principle of equivalence was at the heart of
an empiricist worldview:
“human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not
known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed;
and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
60

Complex attractions such as the cabinet’s automata were conceived as both homage to
natural phenomena and demonstration of the scientist’s mastery of them, which he could
only achieve by deploying a systematic approach to knowledge. In this sense, the
automaton functioned as a concentrated model of the Wunderkammer as a whole, which
was a system both for the production of knowledge and the production of effects.

59
Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the
Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology. 1ST edition. Princeton: Markus Wiener Pub, 1995. 74. In
discussing the kunstkammer collectors’ fascination with automata, Berdekamp emphasizes the importance
of Francis Bacon’s notion in that the continuum between Creation (nature) and works of human creativity
implied that Nature itself could create new forms.
60

Bacon, Francis. Francis Bacon: The New Organon. Translated by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis,
and Douglas Deanon Heath. Ebook. University of Adelaide, 2005.
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/organon/. bk. 1: 3.

44

The cabinet of curiosities displayed successive orders of simulation, passing from
the preserved remains of naturalia to the transfigured objects of the artificialia, to self-
moving automata and other scientifica
61
. At each step of this chain of transformation, the
live-ness, the protean power of the object is demonstrated more vividly. As a result, the
Wunderkammer encouraged an engaged, even passionate mode of spectatorship. Visitors
were struck at first glance by the dizzying complexity of the cabinet’s arrangements,
which, as the practice progressed, evolved into a labyrinthine assemblage of panels,
drawers and secret compartments, as well as by the profuse specificity of its contents.
Daston and Park draw attention to the affect of the Wunderkammer spectator, which
describes succinctly the affect of the attraction:
“Collectors did not savor paradoxes and surprises; they piled them high in
overflowing cupboards and hung them from the walls and ceiling. The wonder
they aimed at by the profusion of these heterogeneous particulars was neither
contemplative nor inquiring but rather dumbstruck”
62
.
On the one hand the cabinet of curiosities turned knowledge itself into a spectacle.
The catalog of known things was offered up to the visitor – it was human curiosity that
was on display, as well as the marvelous objects. On the other hand, the cabinet also
created a pure sensorial experience, in which a great variety of the textures and shapes of
the world were made present at once, energizing and confusing the spectator’s perceptual
apparatus. The overall effect of heightened perception is perhaps best captured by

61
A category which encompassed cutting edge instruments and technology that emerged in the early 17
th

century, in the Prague kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II. See Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity
and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology.
62
Daston, Lorraine J., and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. 273
45
Charles Baudelaire description of the toyshop: “is not the whole of life to be found there
in miniature – and far more highly colored, sparkling, and polished than in real life?”
63
.
The cabinet distilled a sense of possibility from its manipulable mysteries, which
capitalized on their heterogeneity and sheer number. These arrays of objects solicited the
visitor’s sense of fun, a sensual, joyful curiosity that Roger Caillois refers to as paidia,
“an instinctive desire for agitation and turbulence that first manifests itself as an impulse
to touch everything, to handle, to taste, to smell and then to disregard the object.”
64
. Not
only the means for a private immersive experience, the cabinet of curiosities was also a
public show, creating bonds of sociality by instigating international conversations
between interested parties around its contents
65
. Hosts and visitors established
connections of mutual understanding by sharing in the fantastic world conjured by the
contents of the cabinet. Through the publication and dissemination of various cabinet

63
Baudelaire, Charles. "A Philosophy of Toys". In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, edited by
Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1964. 199.

64
Caillois, Roger. Les jeux et les hommes: le masque et le vertige. [Paris]: Gallimard, 1991. 77
65
Waddell, Mark A. “A Theatre of the Unseen: Athanasius Kircher’s Museum in Rome.” In World-
Building and the Modern Imagination, edited by Allison B. Kavey. New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010. 67-68, 70. Wadell mentions that Kircher’s cabinet in the Collegio Romano was a must-see attraction
for foreign scholars and dignitaries visiting Rome. He also emphasizes Kircher’s showman-like relationship
with his audience of visitors, to which he frequently demonstrated the inventions of his own design that
populated his collection. See also Findlen, Paula. “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, Science in the Early
Modern Cabinet of Curiosities.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern
Europe. New York ; London: Routledge, 2002. Findlen draws attention to the commercial networks of
curio and specimen “hunters” that provided famous cabinets with the contents of their collections.
Respected scholars took the practical expertise of these shadowy figures quite seriously, further illustrating
how the wunderkammer could serve as a transactional arena in which the perspectives of individuals with
differing interests came together.

46
catalogs, the Wunderkammer further became the site of an idealized community of virtual
spectators.
The Wunderschrank or curiosity “cabinet” proper, housed its contents in nested
compartments, creating in the owner’s mind a receding chain of sensuous and symbolic
associations. These treasures were secreted away in a maze of deployable drawers, locked
boxes and curiously shaped recesses, each section varnished, enameled, gilded, inlayed
with velour, miniature bas-reliefs carved in gems, ivory or horn, mosaics in wood or
amber
66
, oil paintings or pictures painted on marble.

Fig. 5. The “Augsburg art cabinet”. Philipp Hainhofer. 1632. Museum Gustavianum. Uppsala.
67

A cabinet manufactured in Augsburg, Germany in the 1630s features four successive
levels of nested spaces and contains more than one thousand precious objects (Figure 5).

66
The “Amber Cabinet”, fabricated in Gdansk, Poland, around 1700, is paneled entirely in amber. It is
housed in the National Museum in Liverpool.

67
The Museum Gustavianum has created an animated tour of all the compartments of the cabinet, see
http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/en/exhibitions/regular-exhibitions/the-augsburg-art-cabinet/
47
A list of the later reveals an uncategorizable array that lends itself to chance discovery
and the acute pleasure of the unexpected: bundled snake skins, a mechanical peep show
box with automatized painted backdrops, curling tongs for the beard, a pitcher made of a
translucent nautilus shell adorned with gilded scrollwork, calipers, dried lizards, a table
clock that displays a calendar and the phases of the moon, illusion spectacles, a set of
slide rulers, a jug in the form of a lobster, a mummified young Nile crocodile,
embroidered red velvet pontifical gloves, playing cards illuminated with intricate figures,
an Egyptian funeral statuette, a pair of mechanical dolls, spiders cast in silver, a marbles
game played on a velvet board inscribed with black and white roman numerals, an
anamorphic mirror, a many-sided gilded box used to store dice, and a glazed earthenware
frog, amongst other things
68
. The cabinet even has miniature board games etched or
drawn on the interior face of certain panels as well as a player-piano type keyboard
mechanism dissimulated in a drawer underneath the lid, which is topped with an artful
arrangement of coral, shells and sculptures of marine vegetation. The variety of the
collection is hyperbolic in and of itself, but as each object is also a collection of smaller
objects still, one gets the sense of a vertiginous chain of material fragments, all either
contiguous with or contained within one another. The Augsburg cabinet is a microcosm,
but one that is too vast to hold in the mind’s eye.
The act of unfolding the cabinet and handling its contents created a puzzle-space
that incited intellectual exploration by enticing its user on both a perceptual and an
affective level, provoking a correspondence between epistemic and tactile desire. As such,

68
Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala, Sweden. Catalogue of the list of objects in the Augsburg cabinet.

48
the Wunderschrank gave its owner the opportunity to feel around a highly personalized
69

topology of metaphor and juxtaposition, thereby becoming what Barbara Maria Stafford
calls a medium for inner travel, a synesthetic system of reference for the “construction
and communication of alternative worlds”
70
situated across space and time. All these
symbolic threads, materialized by the spectator’s sensitive manipulation of these precious
objects, converged in the embodied perspective of the cabinet’s owner, who found herself
in physical control of a virtual web of analogical associations.

Fig. 6. Kunstkammer and contents. Museum of Fine Arts. Boston.

The recursive organization of the cabinet assimilated the visual layout of the labyrinth to
the tactile delectability of the objects housed within the cabinet, so that the
Wunderschrank as a whole evoked a vast imaginary playroom whose extensive

69
Collectors had cabinets custom built to house their collections, which themselves would change over
time. Daston and Park note that the emphases on different types of objects – naturalia, paintings, clocks,
even anatomical “monstrosities” – that characterized different princely collections were meant to reflect the
personal taste and erudition of their owners. Daston, Lorraine J., and Katharine Park. Wonders and the
Order of Nature, 1150-1750. 266

70
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box
to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. 15.
49
proportions were folded into the comparatively diminutive physical space of the piece of
furniture itself (Figure 6).

The display strategies employed by the cabinet of curiosities are better understood
in the larger context of the Baroque as a historical moment that is identified with certain
fundamental shifts in the way perception was habitually experienced and conceptualized.
From the late 16th to the mid 18th century, the Baroque allied a taste for virtuosic excess
in the arts and literature to a series of spectacular scientific discoveries. These revelations,
the fruits of the “New Science” that revolutionized mathematics, optics and astronomy
and of Europe’s encounter with the New World, compounded, one after the other, the
growing consciousness of a previously unsuspected vastness and overwhelming diversity
in the world’s contents. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris argue that the multitude of new
objects uncovered by the application of innovative mathematical methods to physical
phenomena, as well as by instruments such as the telescope and microscope, awed and
confounded the artists as well as the scientists of the era
71
.
A renewed curiosity for the material world expressed itself in a desire to immerse
oneself in its minutiae, often in the form of elaborate representations in painting, theater
and sculpture. Alongside the cabinet of curiosities, a 17
th
century spectator could sample
any number of Baroque attractions with similarly convoluted and spiraling effects. These
included exceedingly verisimilar still lifes by Dutch and Flemish mannerists of edibles
and flowers glistening temptingly against null backgrounds, sculptural tricks by artists

71
Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. Baroque Science. London, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013.
Kindle edition.
50
such as Bernini that surreally folded marble into soft flesh and fabric, confounding the
habitual perception of stone, the layered spaces of Italian galleries that featured multiply
beveled panels and mirrors, newly discovered wallpaper whose dizzying patterns and
shimmering colors, at first imported from China, absorbed the eye, the ingenious
mechanisms of theatrical engineers Inigo Jones and Giacomo Torelli ( titled “il Gran
Stregone”, “the great sorcerer”)
72
, which allowed the stage to multiply itself in a series of
stylized permutations. These aesthetic manifestations of early modernity seem to express
a passion for objects that results in their uncontrolled proliferation and metamorphosis, a
quality that led Nietzsche to refer to the Baroque as art’s “cornucopia”
73
.
Heinrich Wölfflin read into baroque art an impulse towards limitlessness and openness
which frees composition, light and color to take on a life of their own that seems to
exceed the human perspective, an effect almost of second life that Henri Focillon likens
to a monstrous vegetal growth that “punches through space, espousing all of its
possibilities”
74
.
This appetite for extravagant simulations was closely linked to the new role
played by scientific instrumentation both in the scientific discoveries of the age and the
day-to-day lives of the wealthier strata of the population. Often the new knowledge,
whether in optics or astronomy, was conveyed to a wider public in the form of attractions

72

Crabtree, Susan, and Peter Beudert. Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools, and Techniques. Oxford,
UK: Focal Press, 2005. 380
73
Nietzsche, Friedrich, R. J Hollingdale, and Richard Schacht. Nietzsche: “Human, All Too Human”: “A
Book for Free Spirits.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 246.
74
Focillon, Henri. Vie des formes: suivi de, Eloge de la main. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
17.
51
that were also workaday scientific instruments. One example of these was the orrery, the
ancestor of modern planetaria, which featured a model of the solar system whose
mechanism was based on the most up to date calculations of celestial orbits. The orrery
was sometimes displayed by a traveling showman-scientist in the salons of merchant and
aristocratic families – one of the many miniatures and models of a newly understood, but
still mostly uncharted and fascinating cosmos. Like the orrery, the cabinet of curiosities
was a model of the cosmos – but one that modeled a vision of the cosmos as a generative
process, as a tireless producer of the new, rather than delivering an accurate picture of its
structure or contents. It collected fragments of the world as a means of re-creating its
original, marvelous complexity – to display nature not in its typical state but at “peak
intensity and creativity”
75
.

Fig. 7. Recursive cabinet architecture. Herman Doomer.
1640–50. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York.

75
Daston, Lorraine J., and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. 272.

52

Fig 8. Miniature enclosures.
1660 -1670. Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam.

In order to do this, the Wunderschrank followed a synecdoche logic that allowed
its user to explore a vast quantity of materials that appears to exceed the scale of the
cabinet itself. The cabinet itself has a recursive structure, like a Russian Doll, with spaces
containing ever-smaller spaces inside them (Figure 7 and Figure 8). This effect is
mirrored in the tangled chains of association created by the cabinet’s contents, which
stand in for the connections between the competing bodies of knowledge that contain
them. To apply a description by Gilles Deleuze regarding Baroque art, the
Wunderschrank seems to conjure its own series of microcosms in which
"matter…offers an infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without
emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small,
each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages"
76
.

Deleuze here is embroidering on Leibniz’s original concept of the material universe as a
“plenum”, a state of infinite density, in which a body is connected to all other bodies
through the successive action of series of bodies upon one another. Mirroring the

76
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 5
53
structure of the universe, the Baroque logic of the cabinet of curiosities re-creates the
plenum in miniature, unveiling each object as merely the visible skin enclosing entire
worlds:
"Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants, or as a pond
full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every part of the animal, and every drop
of its vital fluids, is another such garden, or another such pool"
77

Through an act of imagination that allowed her to assemble the cosmos from a collection
of apparently contingent objects, the spectator of cabinet could reconstruct the
metaphysical vision of the plenum. This vision summons her to obsessively excavate the
materiality of the world, whose density would otherwise remain impenetrable to the
naked eye.

Fig. 9. Reconstituting the plenum.
“Augsburg art cabinet”. Philipp Hainhofer.
1632. Museum Gustavianum. Uppsala.

As in the scene depicted in this top piece from the Augsburg cabinet (Figure 9), she can
place herself in the midst of texture, her gaze travelling through its roughness rather than
seeing it as a surface from a distance.

77
Leibniz, G. W. Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. Edited by Albert R. Chandler.
Translated by George R. Montgomery. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. Kindle edition.

54
Seduced by the synecdoche logic of the Wunderschrank, the subject is invited to
see herself as a synecdoche, a fragment of the totality represented by the cabinet of
curiosities. Deleuze suggests that the Baroque subject is not “in” the world but “for” the
world
78
, not existing for himself as a stand-alone consciousness but as a speculum for the
external things that her consciousness allows her to enclose and turn around within
herself. The world according to a Baroque perspective finds itself infinitely reflected in
the subject, as if both were mirrors caught in the face to face of a dizzying mise-en-
abime. The more our perception unfolds the object before us, laying out its inexhaustible
wealth of detail for our consumption, the more we fold ourselves into it, until the object
seems to balloon, to grow beyond us into a world in which we are then enclosed and
which becomes our stage. Walter Benjamin describes this exact phenomenon of
“interpolating into the infinitely small, of inventing, for every intensity, an
extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fullness, in short of receiving each
image as if it were that of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breadth
and flourishes, in its new expanse, the beloved features within it”
79
.
As such, the cabinet of curiosities can be simultaneously virtual and tangible, allowing
the spectator to glimpse new worlds multiplying within the tiny anfractuosities of matter,
in the play of light on the reflective surface of an instrument, or the pitted edge of a bit of
fossilized coral (Figure 10).
This hall of mirrors, in which objects and the cortege of mental representations
that they evoke endlessly ricochet off each other, is what makes the cabinet such a

78
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 27.

79
Benjamin, Walter. “One-Way Street.” In Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter. New York, N.Y: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. 75.
55
powerful simulation. Like other Baroque illusions – the virtual spaces constructed by
quadratura or the clockwork stages of 17th century theatre – this simulation creates a
sensation of depth. Henri Focillon describes this effect vividly in a passage on the
Baroque ornamental line:
“inside the labyrinth, where the gaze walks along without recognizing itself,
rigorously led astray by a caprice of the line that slips away in order to find its
secret aim, a new dimension takes shape that is neither movement nor depth but
that procures the illusion of both”
80
.

Fig. 10. The tiny anfractuosities of Fig. 11. The cabinet as a labyrinth. Jacques de Lajoue.
matter. Sculpted piece of silver ore. Le cabinet de physique de Bonnier de La Mosson. 1734.
1556-62. Kunst Historisches
Museum.Vienna.

Here the sinuous image of the maze rejoins the folds of Benjamin’s fan. The labyrinth,
particularly in the Romantic tradition of 18th and 19th century English gardens, has often
been interpreted as a map of the soul. Its expressive geometry anchors a system of ideas
and images, encouraging the visitor to follow the contours of her reverie as she navigates

80
Focillon, Henri. Vie des formes: suivi de, Eloge de la main. 22.
56
its folds. The cabinet of curiosities, however, is also a selective map of the world,
concentrated and miniaturized. If its labyrinthine structure externalizes and unfolds the
space of the mind, it also internalizes and folds up the spaces of the cosmos (Figure 11).
The labyrinthine complexity of the cabinet and its contents thus conjures the illusion that
they are more than the sum of their parts. Instead each of the Wunderschrank’s
mismatched curios becomes a passage to a virtual cosmos, re-created by the imagination
of the spectator, through which these objects acquire their mysterious weight and
meaning. The cabinet’s power as an attraction resides in this ability to unfold the mind
while simultaneously folding up the world. In doing so, it allows the spectator to
apprehend these material and virtual realities on an equal footing as perceptual objects
that can be reduced or inflated to the same order of magnitude.
The Wunderschrank in this sense functioned as an antidote to the perceptual
malaise that Gal and Chen-Morris trace to the disquieting discoveries of the New Science
– not the least of which was the fact that the world could no longer be conceived of in
finite terms, as the result of a one to one correspondence between the senses and reality.
Instead, instrumental mediation uncovered successive levels of material density and
organization, whose complexity could only be grasped but never fully represented
through mathematical approximations
81
. Simulations like the cabinet of curiosity

81
Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. Baroque Science. Gal and Chen-Morris specifically compare early 17
th

century astronomer Johannes Kepler’s belief in the divine order of the laws of nature, which he recognized
in the mechanism of celestial orbits, with Isaac Newton’s late 17
th
century understanding of physics as a
system of phenomena whose truth can only be approximated through mathematics. For my part, I would
also argue that Newton’s own invention of calculus, a mathematical method for managing infinities
(concurrent with Leibniz’s), arguably informs a new, distinctly Baroque intuition of the world’s irreducible
complexity.
57
addressed the knowledge gap that now separated the spectator from his hitherto familiar
universe by offering an experience of virtual exploration, a universe in a box, but one
purposefully populated with the unfamiliar. By exercising a leap of imagination into the
aesthetic heart of these new and mysterious objects, the spectator, like the savant, could
speculate about the unknown, secret connections that knitted the cosmos together.
Anke te Heesen points out that in the later 18th century cabinets of curiosity, as a
way of representing scientific knowledge, fell out of favor, and were largely replaced by
two-dimensional depictions, tables and schemas
82
. Concurrent with this de-emphasis on
the marvelous object as a method of education, it was forgotten that spectacle is so often
concerned with the creation of new dimensionality and depth, notwithstanding its later
association with superficial pleasure. The Baroque’s wholehearted embrace of the
uncertainty on which these new-found depths are built – metaphysical as well as
perceptual trompe-l’oeil – is the mechanism that drives all simulations. This logic is
evident in the quintessential Baroque art of the theatre:
"In a theatrical world the seeker is constitutively rent by appearances, and
appearances promise an unspoiled ground that is only ever encountered as yet
another theatrical space; or rather, the ground on which we stand, so sure of its
reality, is revealed again and again to be yet another of illusion's snares, to be
explained away yet again in the service of an ever receding truth. The theatre
cannot solve this problem, nor does it try to. Instead, it enjoys it. It makes use of
it."
83

82
Heesen, Anke te. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia.
Translated by Ann M. Hentschel. 1 edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002. 140
83
Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2009. 52
58
The layers of appearance that constitute the attraction also reveal a receding ground. This
allows for an expansion of both imaginary space – the illusory depth in Baroque art, the
concatenated compartments of the Wunderschrank – and space for the imagination. The
attraction’s capacity to create an illusion of depth reveals an actual depth, as we see in
the cabinet of curiosities. In promulgating a systematic approach to the marvelous, in
creating a “false” model of the world based on its most extraordinary elements, the
cabinet realizes the metaphysical vision of the plenum. It succeeds in encompassing the
world in its entirety without seeking to formally represent it or to finalize it. In doing so,
it gives the inquisitive spectator the degrees of freedom necessary to question the idea of
a normative truth, and instead, in Baconian fashion, to seek knowledge in that which is
most local and specific. In doing so, it functions as a translator between a certain
imaginative visualization of the world and the world’s material being.

The heyday of the cabinet of curiosities as a social and cultural phenomenon
passed with the Enlightenment, and its neat separation between the marvelous realm and
scientific rationality– a divide articulated and formalized by Immanuel Kant in the
Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), the
later positing the imagination as a separate faculty from analytic reason. However, I
argue that the Wunderkammer persists as an attraction schema, while taking on new
attributes, presenting new variations of itself, as it moves through different incarnations,
including different media. In the following sections of this chapter I will present two such
59
contemporary cabinets of curiosity: The Museum of Jurassic Technology, an institution
qua artwork in Los Angeles, and Jem Cohen’s essayistic film Lost Book Found.

Theatre of Mirrors: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology was founded by the experimental filmmaker
David Hildebrand Wilson in 1987. This illusory institution to a certain extent re-creates
the cabinet of curiosities’ game of permutations between object and fiction, in effect
realizing an idiosyncratic conception of knowledge that understands truth in terms of
variations in personal perspective. There are many exhibits in this “museum”, which
presents itself as a compendium of memorabilia from forgotten branches of knowledge.
These memorabilia are “marvels” that time has passed by, their extraordinary quality
revealing itself only with sustained attention on the part of the spectator. Each display
glimmers somberly in dim, chiaroscuro lighting, solemnly elevated on dusty plinths and
pedestals that rise out of pools of shadow: they appear both forlorn and seductive, openly
offering a meaning whose intelligibility is nevertheless just out of reach. The exhibits are
tucked away from casual view in a labyrinthine enfilade of small, almost claustrophobic
60
rooms – a display aesthetic that makes the spectator feel lost in a hidden domain
metaphysically disconnected from the bright sunshine of the Los Angeles street outside.
Organized according to a looser, more metaphoric system of associations than is
usual in contemporary museums, the Museum of Jurassic Technology appears to re-enact
museums’ own historical origins in the Wunderkammer. It relies on the spectator’s
curiosity and personal knowledge (or lack of) to make sense of the objects in the exhibits.
Potential connections must be actualized by the inquirer’s own ability to visualize unseen
relationships. Foucault connects this type of imaginative spectatorship with the practices
of early modern taxonomy:
“taxinomia…implies a certain continuum of things (a non-discontinuity, a
plenitude of being) and a certain power of the imagination that renders apparent
what is not, but makes possible, by this very fact, the revelation of that
continuity”
84
.

The Museum’s “catalog” is by definition open-ended: new objects can always be
revealed to fit into its shifting taxonomy. In doing so, the Museum questions the
boundary between objects of knowledge and objects of speculation. It immerses the
spectator in a Baroque worldview, according to which a “marvel” is that which is
unknown, but knowable (empirically, scientifically), and the unknown is itself marvelous.

This perspective is on display in one of the first exhibits visible upon one’s
entrance into the museum: “The World is Bound with Secret Knots”. “The World is
Bound with Secret Knots” uses a heterogeneous array of toy models, stereoscopic

84
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Reissue edition. New
York: Vintage, 1994. 72
61
dollhouses, as well as a minuscule cabinet theatre, to explore the various facets of the
17th century Jesuit scholar and practitioner of natural magic Athanasius Kircher. The
exhibit in fact recapitulates or recalls the Museum Kircherianum, Kircher’s own vast
cabinet of curiosities at the Collegium Romanum in Rome. Kircher’s museum was deeply
informed by the Jesuit pedagogical method of communicating spiritual truths through
vivid spectacles, a tradition the Museum of Jurassic Technology pays homage to in a
series of puzzling attractions whose contents purposefully fail to give all the information
necessary for understanding what they are supposed to represent. The visitor is treated to
a walkthrough of Kircher’s polymathic curiosity. His theory of musicology rings out
from the propeller-powered chimes of an Aeolian harp. His incursions into Egyptology
and Sinology are on display in glass boxes containing eerie dioramas. When the visitor
peers through the copper spectacles attached to the cases, translucent figures appear to
people melancholic papier-mâché landscapes. Wilson’s stereoscopic projection
mechanisms, invented for the purpose of creating the spectral effects in his displays,
reference Kircher’s own fascination with the magic lantern, which he built multiple
versions of that he also displayed in his own cabinet of curiosities. The peregrination
culminates in a curtained alcove, in which a soft velvet ottoman invites the visitor to
watch a series of stereoscopic images projected onto a glass screen, while two
superimposed voices, one in English, one in German, narrate a dizzyingly complex
poetical interpretation of the scholar’s work.
Kircher’s research into magnetism is illustrated with a circle of seductively
iridescent, water-filled orbs, depicting a theoretical “magnetic hydromancy” device he
62
describes in Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica (Figure 12). Kircher designed many devices
whose goal was to decipher the cryptic correspondences that natural objects exchanged
with one another by directly “reading” their magnetic effluvia. One such hydromancy
machine depicted in Magnes
“consists of a series of bottles, each stoppered by a well-lubricated magnet, the
magnets all strong enough and near enough to attract or repel one another. When
the stopper on the far left of the series is twisted, causing an attached pointer to
indicate a letter of the alphabet, the remaining magnets one by one spin in
“sympathy”, so that the last of the series, also fitted with an alphabetic label and
pointer, will give a readout corresponding to the first.”
85

Fig. 12. A “reconstruction” of Kircher’s magnetic hydromancy device.
Museum of Jurassic Technology. 1996. www.mjt.org.

This rather disingenuous but spectacular effect relies on a simple physical phenomenon
that appears obvious to contemporary spectators. However, it shows how the Museum’s
corresponding attraction, which simulates Kircher’s device, is intimately invested in a
staging of materiality that draws the spectator into reflecting on the complex

85

Saussy, Haun. “Magnetic Language: Athanasius Kircher and Communication.” In Athanasius Kircher:
The Last Man Who Knew Everything, edited by Paula Findlen. New York, N.Y: Routledge, 2004. 255.
63
epistemology of appearances and the act of appearing. The divinatory message spelled
by the magnets definitely appears, and yet it doesn’t actually exist. Kircher devised his
own instrument based on a sincere belief that the materials he built it with were
themselves animated by a silent intelligence, an intelligence to which the clever and
imaginative engineer could give a voice. “The World is Bound with Secret Knots”’s
hydromancy attraction suggests that the spectator should speculatively see the Museum’s
exhibits through Kircher’s eyes – a gaze the blurs the distinction between what the
spectator imagines and what the object actually manifests.

Another of Kircher’s philosophical toys, his theatrum catoptricum or “theatre of
mirrors”, can be understood as an operational analogy for the spectator’s gaze in “The
World is Bound with Secret Knots”. The theatrum catoptricum was a marionette theatre
whose walls were paneled with a hundred mirrors. Opening the device caused light to
incessantly bounce around the inside of the box, so that one could from a few trees or
flowers planted in the tiny proscenium “create an immense forest or… an endless
garden”
86
. Mark A. Wadell remarks that Georgio de Sepibus’ 1678 catalog of the
Museum Kircherianum claims that one of the purposes of the theatrum was to “separate
reason from the senses, or at least so that whomever you please is struck dumb by this
instrument"
87
. Confronted with this device’s convincing depiction of the concept of

86
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box
to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. 261.
87
Waddell, Mark A. “A Theatre of the Unseen: Athanasius Kircher’s Museum in Rome.” In World-
Building and the Modern Imagination, edited by Allison B. Kavey. New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010. 83.
64
infinity, the spectator’s ability to process visual impressions is disrupted. The theatrum
forces her perception to represent the unrepresentable, to imagine the world in its
dimension of pure extension, a boundless space populated with serial objects.
The exhibits that compose “The World is Bound with Secret Knots” produce a
similar effect of virtual multiplication, stimulating the mind’s eye to envision the unseen,
mystical natural forces that Kircher described in his opus
88
. The knots of the title are the
secret correspondences that link the separate displays, as well as Kircher’s own multiple
domains of inquiry, together. These individual attractions are placed in a configuration
that allows the ideas and associations contained within each of them to reflect off each
other, creating an infinite series of imaginary permutations. The exhibit’s two narrators
simultaneously explain that “The World is Bound with Secret Knots” is a reference to
Kircher’s theory of the magnetic interconnection of all material forms, described in his
work on the subject, Magneticum Naturae Regnum. In a quote attributed to Valentine
Worth (a possible pseudonym for pulp fiction writer Thomas P. Kelley), one of the labels
of the exhibit appears to encapsulate the Leibnizian spirit at work in the cabinet of
curiosities:
“all of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensibility is in the end
interrelated – worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen – the
physical and the immaterial are all connected – each exerting influence on the

88
Kircher, like many scholars of his day, was heavily influenced by Hermeticism, a philosophical tradition
that traced its origins in the esoteric cults that arose in Antiquity around a deity of writing and magic,
Hermes Trismegistus. One of its principle tenets was the interconnection between different levels of being,
such as the earthly and celestial realms. It was one of the main belief systems around which the
Renaissance practice of alchemy was built, and many prominent Baroque scientists, including Isaac
Newton, subscribed to it.

65
next – bound, as it were, by chains of analogy – magnetic chains. The world is
indeed bound with secret knots.”
89

The attractions of The Museum of Jurassic Technology exert a magnetic pull on
the spectator because, like the objects staged in the theatrum catoptricum, they extend out
of the here-and-now. They exist simultaneously alongside themselves in a virtual space.
They are both present and imaginary. Deleuze’s image of the Baroque fold expresses the
way in which the material and the virtual constitute the two sides of a same perceptual
and affective experience: they are different and yet coextensive with each other. Deleuze
derives this idea from Leibniz’ monad, an entity that folds within itself all its potential
predicates, its past and its future, which include all of its relationships to every other
entity
90
. Like Kircher’s “theatre of mirrors”, the monad’s physical and virtual existences
are not distinct but reinforce one another to create the effect of presence. As a result, for
the Leibnizian spectator of the exhibit there is no privileged viewpoint that can allow her
to circumscribe or look over the world, thus dividing reality between the interiority of the
subject and the exteriority of objects. Instead, like the visitor of “The World is Bound
with Secret Knots”, she becomes an inhabitant of the objects she encounters – and
conversely, the objects themselves are revealed as functions of her point of view. Leibniz
compares this effect of subject/world mirroring to our experience of a city, which

89
“The World is Bound with Secret Knots: The Life and Work of Athanasius Kircher”, Museum of Jurassic
Technology, Los Angeles.

90
Leibniz, G. W. Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. Edited by Albert R. Chandler.
Translated by George R. Montgomery. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. Kindle edition.
66
although it is one, “is variously represented according to the various situations of him
who is regarding it.”
91
.
This virtual manifold is evident in another attraction of the museum that calls
upon visitors to peer through a series of dusty microscopes to contemplate the “micro-
miniature” mosaics of one obscure 19th micrographer Henry Dalton: delicate and
iridescent pictures of flowers, plants and birds allegedly composed from the individual
scales of butterfly wings (Figure 13). The spectator’s perception, mediated through an
instrument, has to be translated to the scale of these impossibly small objects that are
hidden from the naked gaze. Invisible and yet perceptible, the microscopic mosaics feel
resplendent, marvelous inhabitants of their own proprietary universe. They also behave as
reflections of the flowers and plants that populate the macroscopic scale, simulating one
world within another. The mosaics are brought into perceptual existence by the
adjustment of the spectator’s point of view, which in turn allows her to immerse herself
in the enclosed, self-sufficient reality of these “impossible” reproductions. The attraction
here includes not only the mosaics themselves but crucially, the microscope set-up as
well. In order to experience the attraction, the spectator must modify her perceptual
apparatus. This means embracing, on a phenomenological level, the virtual image in the
microscope as co-extensive with and even equivalent to the material reality she perceives
unaided. The Henry Dalton exhibit invites us to gaze over the edge of the “horizon of
things”, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it”
92
. In this case, the object itself is

91
Leibniz, G. W. Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology.

92
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. 152.
67
invisible – a potential object – until the spectator probes beyond her perceptual horizon to
uncover a hidden layer of visibility.

Fig. 13. The micro-mosaics of Henry Dalton. Museum of Jurassic Technology. 1996. www.mjt.org.

The technological mediation of the microscope, an important impetus for Baroque
science, extended not only the realm of phenomena that could be interrogated and known,
but questioned the commonsensical relationship between perception, materiality, and the
virtual. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia in particular, published in 1665, demonstrated for
a learned audience the alien spectacle of nature observed under the microscope: detailed,
realistic renderings of insects and flora pointed to the existence of “Terra-Incognita” and
“New Worlds” in matter itself
93
. According to the New Science, what was material was
not necessarily perceptible, and a virtual object could be brought into perceptible focus.
In a context in which the epistemological status of objects – virtual or material, real or
unreal? – is ambiguous, the simulation grants a privileged, controlled access to

93
Hooke, Robert. Extracts from Micrographia or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made
by Magnifying Glasses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912. 22.
68
phenomena. Unlike Leibniz’s pond full of fish, the Henry Dalton micro-mosaics do not
exist “in the wild”: they are multiply framed, by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, by
the design of the exhibit, by the apparatus, by the eye-piece of the microscope, by the
glass plate on which they are placed. The visitor uncovers a new object in each
successive frame. What she is looking at is in fact less an identifiable object than a series
of perspectives: the object itself, glimpsed only at the end, is less than verifiable, perhaps
even impossible (how did the artist compose on so small a scale?). The attraction presents
not so much a “real” thing as an array of potential objects, a protean apparition that is by
turn a microscope on a dusty pedestal, a circular, almost blurry image, a butterfly wing.
The attraction here creates a higher order of simulation that extends beyond the
re-presentation of an object in a new medium – otherwise we might assume that the
primary epistemological operation of the Dalton exhibit is the straightforward translation
of flowers into micro-mosaics. Instead, the exhibit proceeds circuitously, taking us
through perceptual detours. It encapsulates the plenum that enchanted Leibniz: the
manifold in the pond or in the madeleine – the many-sidedness of the world – is distilled
in the dim, quiet room of the Museum. In a striking anecdote that he draws from an
interview with Wilson
94
, Lawrence Weschler recounts how a visitor, emerging after
meandering for a while amongst the exhibits of the Museum, spent an equally long time
studying the pencil sharpener on Wilson’s desk. In a reversal of our expectations, the
attractions of the Museum do not distract the spectator. They compel her to immerse

94
Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast,
and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Reprint edition. Vintage, 2013. Kindle edition.
69
herself more deeply in material evidence, evidence Wilson’s cabinet of curiosities has
gathered and re-assembled into a simulation of the dynamic, fluid identities of inanimate
objects.
Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image in Cinema 2 describes this higher-order
simulation specific to the cabinet of curiosities. The crystal-image is anchored in the
phenomenology of cinema. However, Deleuze also uses it as a general image to represent
what Levy calls the Möbius-like relationship between the virtual and actual, a system of
seamless exchange between what is and what could be
95
. Cinema produces the crystal-
image because it is a spectacle, a phenomenological simulation capable of delivering a
“shock to thought”
96
, a sudden reflexive awareness of the act of perception. The crystal-
image makes its appearance not in the diegetic space of the film, but specifically when
the moving image is experienced “for itself”, as the index of a larger reality that is neither
the filmic narrative nor the “actual” from which the image has been produced. In this
spectacular moment the material world makes itself present in a way that is somehow
fuller, more luminous, more urgent than in ordinary life. Like Proust’s madeleine, it
focuses our attention to an exquisite degree, initiating a spiral of flickering
correspondences. In short, the crystal-image occurs when the moving image functions as
an attraction. The crystal-image doubles as both an actual and virtual image, which does
not mean that a fiction superimposes itself on the real, but a telescoping of time and space

95
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. “The Actual and the Virtual.” In Dialogues II. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007
96
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 156.
70
occurs that gives the impression that is it the inarticulable entirety of an object/figure’s
“life” that is revealed in the image:
“The actual image and the virtual image coexist and crystallize; they enter into a
circuit which brings us constantly back from one to the other; they form one and
the same 'scene' where the characters belong to the real and yet play a role. In
short, it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become
spectacle…”
97

Deleuze further defines this sensation as the feeling that the image is not showing things
in movement, “action itself”, but instead shows the movement of things, “the movement
of the path on which action takes place”
98
. It’s as if the crystal-image were collapsing the
series of all possible movements, past and future, related to the movement shown on
screen, into a singular, highly specific instance that thereby acquired a shining, pregnant
quality that made it feel larger than life. The exhibits in the Museum of Jurassic
Technology have a similar effect, quietly radiant with the trop-plein of their multiple
identities, the traces of unseen connections with other, guessed-at objects that orbit
around them.

97
ibid, 83.

98

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 59.

71
Fishing For Ruins: Lost Book Found

The ontological weightiness of the object(s) of one’s attention is the pivot of Jem
Cohen’s film Lost Book Found (1996)
99
, a meandering essay in the cinematic tradition of
the “city symphony” genre of the 1920s. Like the cabinet of curiosities, Lost Book Found
is a montage of attractions. Here Sergei Eisenstein’s original use of the term is literalized
– Cohen shows a series of images that do not appear organized in any diegetic structure.
Their sequence seems to unfold according to the logic of an eccentric collector, for whom
cinematic montage becomes a proxy for a montage of objects. The “marvels” that the
film puts on display, however, are those objects rendered extraordinary by the camera’s
(and the spectator’s) gaze – not only forgotten and resuscitated, as in the exhibits of the
Museum of Jurassic Technology, but invisible until they coalesce under the attention of a
viewer. They are unique because they are utterly ordinary – it is the fact that these objects
are part of the background of urban life that makes the incongruity of their
phenomenological signature, as revealed by Cohen’s camera, so surprising. Lost Book
Found finds that in a fully chartered and mapped place, the unknown can still find harbor
in the heart of the known. There ceases to be a category of marvels separate from typical
objects: in the film, the more “objective” an object is, the more impersonal and stubborn,
the greater its secret part of mystery, the more luminous it becomes.

99
Can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/63141083.

72
Jem Cohen walks his camera through the streets of New York in an effort to
remember the contents of a book he once almost purchased from a man who made a
living “fishing” for objects dropped by passerby in sidewalk grates. This book contains
lists of references, names of the things that populate the city, variously grouped under
enigmatic headings. In trying to reconstruct the fantastical indexical system at work in
this lost book, the narrator embarks on his own project to “fish for” the overlooked
contents of New York – displaced or misplaced items, the unique, accidental
configurations of material being – and classify them according to his own cryptic logic of
poetic association (Figure 14). A faded, yellowing bouquet of artificial flowers gathers
dust in the window of an abandoned shop. The keypad of a payphone, smudged with
fingerprints, gleams dully. Sodium streetlights bathe a trash heap in a timeless orange
glow. Half-legible graffiti emerges fitfully from the grime that covers the wall of an
unidentified building, an artificialia figure of sorts appearing from a found piece of urban
nature. At times the narrator interrupts himself to rattle off lists of concepts or things
over a succession of captured scenes: for example, a slow motion shot of an old woman
riffling through a heap of discounted underwear will have a voice-over label of
“museum”. At other times the narrator will “recall” a category from the lost book such as
“raining coins” and show us successive shots of passerby stopped in the street, staring at
the sky.
73

Fig. 14. Pseudo-accidental configurations of material being. Jem Cohen. Lost Book Found. 1996.

This game of simulated chance between image and caption draws attention to an
“opening, the fault line between namer and named”
100
that points to a curious slippage
between the material and the virtual identity of the objects examined. Writing in the
context of the neo-Baroque movement in Latin American literature, Severo Sarduy
qualified this slippage in terms of an “ellipsis” that obfuscated the sources of a thing’s
meaning. For Sarduy, this ellipsis was foundational to the Baroque’s perspective on the
world. As a figure of speech, the ellipsis echoes the New Science’s discovery of

100
Sarduy, Severo. “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation,
Transculturation, Counterconquest, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010. 273.
74
troubling ambivalences in the material world. Johannes Kepler discovered in the early
17th century that planets move along elliptical orbits, forcing astronomers to abandon the
notion that nature could only be explained in terms of perfect geometries like the circle,
which, unlike the ellipse, has only one focal point. Also lacking a centre, the Baroque
work connotes via “a chain of signifiers that progresses metonymically and that ends by
circumscribing the absent signifier, tracing an orbit around it, an orbit whose reading –
which we could call a radial reading – enables us to infer it”
101
. This occluded center is
the material object itself. Its satellites are the signifiers, the virtual copies of itself that our
efforts of perception generate in the object’s wake.
Jem Cohen’s lost book suggests that the “real” object can only be approximated
through its virtual emanations. Obeying a logic of phenomenological obsession, the film
turns into an examination of the narrator’s own geographic desire, an obsessive hunger to
scrutinize the material world. Significantly, the narrator introduces himself as a street
vendor, noticing that his occupation has allowed him to abandon the position of a subject
and immerse himself in the content of his gaze: ‘as I became invisible, I began to see
things that had once been invisible to me’. This new perspective in media res reveals a
perceived depth to the material world that is literalized in the framing of the camera. The
film shows us scenes whose contents are arranged in layers or stacks, such as plastic toys
displayed on shelves and shop windows, or the electric interior of a subway train car seen
through the windows of the train’s black shape melting in the night of a tunnel (Figure
15). Vision encounters obstructions and so does the viewer in her attempt to grasp the

101
ibid.
75
meaning apparently encoded in each visual association. The camera butterflies over the
surface of the city, searching and never finding, but occasionally picking up on certain
signifying symptoms that disappear with a second glance, like all the shots of street
surfaces (walls, telephone booths) inscribed with decaying messages that can only be
half-read, not so much partially decoded as more achingly mystified.

Fig. 15. Objects stacked in indecipherable layers. Jem Cohen. Lost Book Found. 1996.

In this sense, Cohen’s camera functions as a veil as much as a lens, mapping an
intermediary zone between what it shows and what eludes it: to quote Michel De Certeau
on the poetics of trajectories, a “fence that is an ensemble of interstices through which
76
one’s glances pass”
102
. The space of the frame mimics the three-dimensional properties of
real space, reproducing the pleasure we find in the vicissitudes of travel. The film
functions as a compendium of the kind of micro-trajectories that the attentive or perhaps
“detective” observer traces in traveling through the texture of a place. Abandoning the
informational clarity of linear perspective with its distant vanishing points, this Baroque
style of looking transforms the window of the picture frame into a dense mesh of
possibilities. Meanings superimposed, scrambled information – in this exercise of hyper-
focused perception, “objects lose their stable, fixed identity and move around us like the
stars”
103
. The film’s narrator taps into the poetic chains of association elicited by each
fragment of the mundane, associations multiplied by the intensity of his scrutiny.
In the imagination of Lost Book Found’s narrator, the city constitutes a monumental, un-
chartered database organized according to a simultaneously opaque and omniscient
classification system that indexes each object to another object. The narrator-navigator of
these drifting ephemera does not so much set out to find the primer that can decode the
book, but to put himself through the twists and turns of the search for signification, to
lose himself assiduously in the hermeticism of the code. For the narrator, the book
becomes an endlessly overwritten palimpsest, a container for and recorder of everything
that is possible:
"Parts of the book come back in flashes, bits and pieces. Sometimes the listing
was just triggered for reasons I couldn't guess, certain places, things, incidents
that seemed to fit like words in a crossword puzzle with a shape that was always
changing, whose subject I was never sure of in the first place."

102
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 128.
103
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2013. 34.
77

The city in the book, according to the Baroque logic of the film, “is simultaneously a
mirror of mirrors, a book of books”
104
. It is an image of all images, a thing that
encompasses all other things – in short, a plenum. The degree of material density is such
that, in order to be intelligible, the city has to slowly unfold in the imagination, become
virtual. It is impossible to fully apprehend in its actuality. With visibility remaining a
problem – the book, the map of the database that would allow the narrator to look ahead,
to know his way in advance is lost – reading/looking becomes a much more haptic
exercise, “a palpation of the eye”
105
. Each object discovered by the camera – a gutter, a
piece of wall, a telephone booth – is potentially a crystal-image, a double of itself in the
mysterious book.
Jem Cohen has stated that Lost Book Found is an homage to Walter Benjamin
106
,
and to his project on the Paris arcades and One-Way Street in particular. At times the
film does feel like a contemporary translation of Benjamin’s vignettes of early 20th
century material culture, whose chapter headings include “manorially furnished tea-room
apartment”, a “standard clock”, and “doctor’s night-bell”. Lost Book Found perhaps bears
a more subconscious relationship to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin’s
work on the Baroque in 17th century German art. According to Benjamin, the Baroque

104
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. 150.
105
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. 133.
106

Koehler, Robert. “Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours.” Cinema
Scope 52 (2012). http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/wandering-in-vienna-jem-cohen-and-
the-adventure-of-museum-hours/.
78
work is an allegorical construction of “highly significant fragments”
107
that, like the
urban flotsam in Lost Book Found, hold the promise of a universe of meaning that would
unify these lost pieces of material existence into a larger whole. The city reconstructed in
Lost Book Found is a mosaic composed of these remnants of sense, what Benjamin
evocatively calls “ruins”. Ruins derive their aura from an invisible past that nevertheless
weighs on the landscape as if it existed still. This virtual presence traces the real shape of
the ruin. In Lost Book Found, all objects are ruins of the plenum – that unimaginable
totality in which all objects dwell. The montage of these ruins happily fails to come
together into a narrative, evoking instead a broken allegory, all the more powerful for
remaining incomplete. The film is distilled into a virtual gaze that, adhering so closely to
the phenomenological texture of urban space, fuses with the surfeit of detail it is meant to
observe.
The ruins of Cohen’s shots are collected in their own cinematic cabinet of
precious detritus. Like the objects in a surrealist collage, they are torn from their “home”
in the city, and in the film are made strange. Art historian Werner Spies remarks that the
individual fragments for display in a collage are characterized by a “troubling equality”
amongst themselves, according to which “no element plays the role of a concept that
would generate and organize the relation that others would have with it”
108
. Like the
consumer mesmerized by a storefront in which each object offers itself indiscriminately,
emphatically, the viewer of Cohen’s collage is transported to a world where objects are

107
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. Verso, 1998. 178.
108

Spies, Werner. Max Ernst : Les Collages, inventaire et contradictions. Translated by Eliane Kaufholtz.
Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984. 55

79
sovereign. According to Spies, the signification of the collage is overdetermined,
appearing to flicker between a multitude of compositional arrangements and possible
interpretations. In Lost Book Found, the gesture of surrealism emerges forcefully, not just
as an aesthetic of dreams or of the unconscious, but as “the possibility of diverting
(détourner) the real in order to confer more complexity to the concept of reality”
109
,
which echoes with certain gestures of the original cabinet of curiosity, specifically the
genre of mimetic artificialia that staged found objects and substances in imaginative
compositions. In the film, however, we see the proprioceptive organization of the
kunstkammer give way to an organizing logic of “reconstructed” haphazardness, as if
Cohen wanted to emphasize the impossibility of sustaining order in his city’s state of
perpetual decay. The film functions as a cabinet of curiosities whose catalog has
absconded, but whose spectator is still trying to discern though its individual objects the
ghostly contours of vanished compartments.

109

Spies, Werner. Max Ernst : Les Collages, inventaire et contradictions. 185.

80
The Crystal-Object

In attractions, the simulation of the “crystal-image” extends outside the time-
based, two-dimensional medium of the screen to take hold of tangible objects. As
Weschler’s anecdote about the visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the
pencil sharpener make clear, any object, when presented as an attraction, has the power to
transform the “whole of life” into a spectacle. A pencil sharpener might be just a pencil
sharpener, or it could be something altogether more mysterious and open-ended, worth
lingering over. In the context of the cabinet of curiosities, we might speak of the Museum
of Jurassic Technology’s miniature flora, stereoscopic phantoms, esoteric instruments,
and unintelligible voice-overs as “crystal-objects”: three-dimensional simulations. Like
actors in a film, these attractions draw attention to the fact that all objects play a dual role
– they are simultaneously material presences and characters in the drama of our
imaginations.
One of the museum’s more understated exhibits, “Rotten Luck: the Decaying
Dice of Ricky Jay” displays sets of dice in various stages of crumbling decomposition
(Figure 16). Are these real dice in actual states of decay or are they artistic reproductions?
Is the difference important? The label of the exhibit further confuses the matter by
introducing an unreliable narrator, Ricky Jay, an actual magician who resides in Los
Angeles:
81
“These cellulose nitrate dice, the industry standard until the middle of the
twentieth century (when they were replaced with less flammable cellulose acetate),
typically remain stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically
decompose. The crystallization begins on the corners and then spreads to the
edges...The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode. Unpaired electrons or free
radicals can abet the deterioration. The light and smog of Los Angeles, where my
dice have resided for many years, are likely accomplices.”
110

Fig. 16. “Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay”. The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Copyright
Museum of Jurassic Technology and Adam Elliot 2013.

The slippage between fact and fiction at work in the exhibit grants the dice an uncanny
existential status. The dice could be copies created by Wilson; they could be authentic;
they could be authentic but not belong to Ricky Jay; they could be real dice belonging to
Ricky Jay but not be made of cellulose nitrate and be deteriorating for an entirely
different reason, they might not come from Los Angeles. Are we dealing with a single
object, or with a series of homologous objects whose temporal and spatial trajectories
intersect only in the virtual space of the exhibit? The dice function as crystal-objects,
evidence, like Deleuze’s crystal image, of the “simultaneity of incompossible

110
“When A Die Dies”, http://mjt.org/exhibits/rickyjay/rjay.html
82
presents”
111
. The Ricky Jay attraction draws out and interweaves the fate of different
possible dice – some slowly deteriorating in the smog of L.A., some fresh out of a mold
and skillfully chipped away – giving the impression that the object is the sum of a
multitude of virtual existences. This effect of “virtual fractalization”
112
gives the object
its substance and its weight. “Rotten Luck” draws attention to the indeterminacy that can
take the ground out from underneath even the most common objects – an effect the theme
of broken luck alludes to, as if our everyday encounters with objects were played out all
with all the risks and thrills of a game of chance.
The Museum’s dice are objects that are experienced as simulations of themselves,
like the marvelous curios displayed in a Wunderkammer. They acquire their extraordinary
status by virtue of their participation in a catalog of possible objects. In the context of the
artwork, Arthur Danto refers to this process as “bracketing”
113
. Danto uses the example
of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to explain how a readymade – an artwork that is physically
indiscernible from an ordinary object – can suspend actuality. As part of Warhol’s oeuvre,
the Brillo boxes, so solid and nakedly unremarkable outside of it, are virtualized:
suddenly, their identity is put back into play; their meaning is questioned. The material
bluntness of these objects is excited into a new plasticity; they have the potential to

111

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 131. “Incompossible” is a term from Leibniz’s
philosophy; in this context it means “mutually exclusive”.
112
Guattari argues that sensory affect in general emerges from a fundamentally unresolved relationship to
objects. He uses Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, Bottle Rack, as an illustration of the ambiguous,
hetereogenous affective responses that habitual objects elicit. Félix Guattari, Juliana Schiesari and Georges
Van Den Abbeele, "Ritornellos and Existential Affects," Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1990): 69,72.

113
Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Reprint edition.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. 28-29

83
evolve in unanticipated directions. Taken out of their contexts of usage, the destinies of
Brillo boxes and dice become open-ended. The ruins and fragments of Lost Book Found,
bracketed, isolated by Cohen’s camera, reveal a low-lying but persistent life.
But these “readymades”, displayed and exhibited in the filmic space, also retain
an “air” – air refers to both appearance and melody in French – a signature feel that arises
from a history of past and the expectancy of future encounters, which also always
includes imaginary or hypothetical encounters. Guattari speaks of objects’ ritournelles,
perceptual refrains like bird-song whose rhythms constitute an embodied structure of
sense for their spectators
114
. This cortege of virtual encounters that trail each
photographed object in the film connect the filmmaker, the spectator and the ghost of
New York past together. Their perspectives merge in the crystalline space where one can
also find Wilson’s pencil sharpener, and all the other “marvels” that have detached
themselves from the background of life, if only for a moment.
Cabinets of curiosity like the Baroque Wunderkammern, Lost Book Found and the
Museum of Jurassic Technology establish an epistemological technique for the processing
of marvelous content. This technique involves destabilizing the marvelous object by
taking it through a mechanism of epistemological detours – as evidenced by the recursive
architecture of the Wundershrank, the tricky staging of appearance at work in the
theatrum catoptricum and the magnetic hydromancy exhibit in the Museum of Jurassic
Technology, the nested framing devices of the Henry Dalton micro-mosaics exhibit, and
the decayed index of object names in Lost Book Found’s vanished catalog. This

114
Félix Guattari, Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den Abbeele, "Ritornellos and Existential Affects"
Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1990): 73.
84
epistemological technique allows the spectator to imaginatively explore the marvels in a
way that directly interrogates and challenges the limits of our phenomenological
encounter with the material, whether this involves de-naturing natural specimens by
embedding them in artificial environments, as with the Wunderkammern’s mimetic
artificialia, making images of flowers invisible to the naked eye, or revealing items by
showing them hidden in layers and stacks. In this process of spectatorial engagement
these marvels become what I call crystal-objects, instances of a plenum that stages these
marvels as part of a larger totality of creative and dynamic materiality.
If the “marvel” is the original point of focus of the spectator’s “spectacular”
attention, the cabinet of curiosities is an attraction proper, because it articulates,
systematizes, and defines that attention as a mode of spectatorship. It functions as a
system for the production and display of marvels, and, in that process, emerges as a
machine for seeing and knowing spectacular things. As we move forward to explore the
19
th
century attraction, we see the attraction develop into an actual machine. Using
techniques of automation and instrumentation, 19
th
attractions will produce their own
imaginative visions of material agency.

85

CHAPTER II. PROCESS AND PERCEPTION:
MATERIAL AGENCY IN THE 19
TH
CENTURY ATTRACTION

The 19
th
century attraction shifts its emphasis from systematically staging the
marvelous and the spectacular to inventing processes that produce the marvelous and the
spectacular (although, as we have seen with the cabinet of curiosities, the technique of
staging marvels effectively produces their identity as marvels as well). The 19
th
century
attraction produces the spectacular by experimenting with perceptual effects – as such,
attractions enter into popular culture as generators of novel experiences.
Accorded a central cultural significance during the Baroque age by developments
such as the cabinet of curiosities, the attraction emerges from the 17
th
century onwards as
a phenomenon increasingly associated with modernity and urban life. Modern spectators
were exposed to an extension of the experience of the virtual ushered in by the
introduction of new objects of perception into everyday life. As the speculative
instruments of Athanasius Kircher, the Wunderkammern luminary, demonstrate, one of
the stakes of the attraction is how we imagine and visualize the affordances of the
86
material – how we move from the appearance of an object to a felt sense of what the
object can do
115
. Attractions reveal the existence of a gap between our phenomenological
experience of the world and our epistemological interpretation of it. As evidenced by the
privileged presence of scientific instrumentation and mechanical marvels within the
system of the Wunderschrank, the technical process plays a central role in midwifing this
passage from ordinary sight to a form of enhanced vision. Automation in particular
emerges both as a process through which extraordinary objects can become perceptible,
and as a disruptive, singular manifestation of materiality in its own right. In the course of
the 19
th
century, the attraction becomes an intentional response to the practice of
technology – increasingly valued as a creator of the new, but also, by virtue of its
uncanny autonomy from the subject, a source of anxiety. As such, the attraction becomes
instrumental in paving the way for a modern sensibility towards material agency.

115
I use “affordance” in the sense defined in 1979 by the psychologist James J. Gibson to mean the
physical features of an object that allow you to do things with that object. As Gibson stresses, affordances
relies as much as the user’s imagination about how the object can be used as on the properties of the object
itself: “an important fact about affordances…is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike
values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But actually, an
affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. And
affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its in adequacy. It
is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An
affordance and points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. Gibson, James J. The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception. New York, N.Y: Taylor & Francis, 2015. 121

87
“Disappearing in a Homogenously Happening Universe”:
attractions and the discourse of shock

Vanessa Schwartz, in an analysis of fin-de-siecle entertainment in Paris
116
,
evaluates the central role of the attraction as a purveyor of extraordinary experiences,
from the public morgue to the wax museum and large-scale illusions such as panoramas
that immersed the public in verisimilar representations of current events. By initiating
their visitors into the circuit of novelties or “actualités” that fueled the dynamism of city
life, these exhibitions helped define the experience of modernity. Attractions themselves
were defined as “anything that draws a crowd”
117
, points of intensity that focalized the
energy of the street. They held out “the possibility that the everyday could be transformed
into the spectacular and the sensational”
118
, framing life itself, and urban life in particular,
as an attraction.
In this context, late 19
th
and early 20
th
century cultural commentators increasingly
began to frame modernity as a phenomenological reality, a quality of experience in
addition to a specific social, intellectual or economic order. Modernity was associated
with a wholesale transformation of the parameters of perception, manifesting itself as the

116
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. 1st edition.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
117
Strauven, Wanda. “Introduction to an Attractive Concept.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded,
edited by Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 18
118
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. 1st edition.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 16

88
“dissolution of the boundaries between self and spectacle”
119
. According to Mary Ann
Doane, the advent of cinema marked a privileged moment when the quality of emergence
that defined the modern experience of the everyday came to be prized over the familiarity
of fixed values. She argues that early actualités films like What Happened on 23
rd
Street
(Edison, 1901) which recorded crowds of passerby on a street corner walking in front of
or even dodging the camera, and even capturing serendipitous micro-dramas like a
subway vent blowing up the skirt of a woman walking over it, staged the contingency of
modern life in a way that drew attention to its meaning-producing capacity
120
.
Scholars such as Charles Musser draw attention to the fact that even the most
contingent-looking and surprising filmed scenes were often presented as part of a
montage (in a lecture, for example) that incorporated narrative structure
121
. However, the
presence of narrative and editorial discretion does not by itself exclude the aesthetic of
the contingent, as one might call it, that Doane identifies in early film. A film like
Grandma’s Reading Glasses (G.A. Smith, 1900)
122
, which shows the perspective of a boy
looking through a pair of “glasses” (a circular matte) and seeing close-ups of the
“accidental” contents of a room - an eye, a bird in cage, a kitten, a newspaper – stages a

119
ibid, 132.

120
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003. 180-181

121

Musser, Charles. “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship,
Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda
Strauven. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 172-176. Musser specifically discusses
Vitascope’s film program at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in 1896-97.
122

This film is originally mentioned, though in a different context, in Hansen, Miriam. Babel and
Babylon : Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

89
narrative about film’s marvelous ability to represent the contingency of daily life. In a
similar way, one can see the narrative of modernity as a phenomenon that privileges the
experience of the contingent and the surprising – a narrative in which the attraction plays
a central role – play out in the larger turn-of-the-century cultural discourse. Within the
context of this narrative, the cinema is only one of many automatic processes through
which reams of “accidental” content –digesting ducks
123
, travel lectures illustrated by
magic lantern slides, trains arriving at platforms – were processed and displayed to the
consuming public.
This almost compulsive fascination with the actual – which, as in actualités,
refers both to the reality of the present and its rupture from the past, its essential newness
– went hand in hand with enjoyment of the attraction, which was viewed as a kind of
epicenter for the violent disruption of perception. Modern perception was increasingly
framed by cultural commentators as having transitioned from a state in which moments
were connected to each other through habitus into a state of perpetual alert and
expectation of the new. Benjamin in particular contrasted an earlier “lyrical”
consciousness with the cycle of affective impoverishment at work in the formation of the
modern sensibility:
“the greater shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant
consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the
less these impressions enter long experience.”
124

123
Riskin, Jessica. “The Defecating Duck, Or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” Critical Inquiry
29, no. 4 (June 2003): 599–633. Le Canard Digérateur, Jacques de Vaucanson’s famous automaton, which
could quack, drink and “digest” corn, was first displayed in 1738 in Paris alongside android musicians that
could play the pipes and flute.
124
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1938-1940. Harvard University Press, 2003. 178
90

According to this interpretation, perception is no longer an open and active process, in the
manner of de Condillac’s statue whose senses, like intelligent rays of light, discover the
contours of the world, but a defensive reaction against stimuli, whose fierceness and
uncanny independence from the traumatized subject signal a kind of epistemological
inversion. This new understanding of perception had been, prior to Benjamin, theorized
at length by Freud: “for a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more
important than the reception of stimuli…the protective shield must above all
strive…against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world”
125
.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch ties this conception of “shock” to a 19
th
century culture of
acceleration that was most literally embodied in the novel phenomenon of the railway
and the railway accident. In post-railway and later, in post- world war parlance, shock did
not simply signify violence per se, but the violence inflicted upon human bodies by a
spectrum of machines and mechanized processes
126
, from electric trolley traffic systems
to machine guns
127
.

125

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by C.J.M. Hubback. London; Vienna: The
International Psychoanalytical Press, 1922. 31
126
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th
Century. University of California Press, 1986. 158. Schivelbusch draws attention to Freud’s analysis of the
phenomenon of shell-shock in soldiers during World War I. Freud interpreted shell-shock as a nervous
reaction to traumatic stimuli encountered battle. The force and excess of the stimuli overwhelmed the
soldier’s psychological defenses.
127
Singer, Ben. “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” In Cinema and the
Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Chamey and Vanessa R. Schwartz. University of California Press,
1996. Singer analyses a variety of turn of the century newspaper illustrations and cartoons sensationalizing
the haphazard violence of urban transportation, specifically the danger of tramway traffic collisions to
pedestrian crowds. Singer argues these popular responses participate in an urgent cultural conversation
going on at the time about the trauma and shock of everyday life in the modern city.
91
The attraction, for the public invested in this specific discourse, becomes another
purveyor of shock, albeit one that takes the guise of a distraction. Benjamin, for example,
equates amusement park rides with the alienating automatism of factory work, unveiling
a troubling “connection between wildness and discipline”
128
. He is arguing that the lack
of control experienced on the roller coaster is an illusion, but also perhaps expressing a
subtext that would have resonated in a troubling fashion during the interwar years in
which he was writing: are amusement park visitors being trained to enjoy a lack of
control?
In Edwin S. Porter’s movie Rube and Mandy at Coney Island (Edison Films,
1903), filmed on location at the massively popular New York amusement park, a couple
runs from attraction to attraction, their stilted Victorian silhouettes becoming
progressively more humorously undone as they “shoot the chutes”, nearly fall while
crossing a rope bridge, get swept up by the crowd, ride camels and slide down a giant
slide until they end up in a pile on the ground, legs in the air, with other visitors. The
couple endlessly cycle through a circuit of similar but distinct experiences, unable to
desist, as if the machinery of the park had seized control of their bodies, and they were
enjoying a vacation from the responsibilities of directing themselves. Coney Island did
not really enable its patrons to lose control – as the film shows through its happy-ending
narrative, the amusement park is a place where the couple can pretend to lose control of
their bodies, where they can enact a fantasy of “undoing” themselves.

128
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1938-1940. Harvard University Press, 2003. 192.
92
An observer like Maxim Gorky takes this fantasy of dissipation for an actual loss
of control over one’s perceptual apparatus, describing Coney Island as a veritable
kaleidoscope, a maze for the senses. The overwhelming buzz of activity, especially at
night, when all the facades of the buildings, wired with electrical bulbs that traced
animated patterns of spins and whirls, revealed a skeletal city of light, with fountains,
minarets and bridges that seemed to float like a phantom above the crowd (Figure 17):
“everything whirls and dazzles, and blends into a tempestuous ferment of fiery
foam…The people screw up their eyes, and smiling disconcertedly crawl along
the ground like the heavy line of a tangled chain…The visitor is stunned; his
consciousness is withered by the intense gleam…an amazement in which there is
neither transport nor joy.”
129

Fig. 17. Luna Park at night. “Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views”. n.d.
New York Public Library. New York.

For the spectator subscribing to the discourse of shock, Coney Island is an excruciating
experience in which the saturation of the visual landscape completely incapacitates the
mind and numbs all feeling. Detached from the spectator’s conscious performance of his

129
Gorky, Maxim. “Boredom.” The Independent, August 8, 1907, 63 edition. 311-12
93
agency, fulgurated impressions merge and morph in a prolonged and colorful
disorientation. In a way that embodies the essential ambivalence of the era towards the
attraction as a double symbol of the aesthetic of the contingent and the trauma of shock,
Gorky intensely admires the spectacle while feeling enslaved to his own fascination. He
feels he is no longer capable of selecting the object of his attention; he believes his
attention has been hijacked. Both his and Benjamin’s accounts express a fear that the
attraction both produces and is produced by a specifically modern mode of perception
that is, paradoxically, at once excessively intense and un-free. The reason behind this
double-bind, for Gorky, is that the fascinated spectator does not genuinely find
transcendence or fulfillment in the attraction, but instead overcompensates with a false,
“surface” excitement that is, in the end, simply an automatic response to stimulation.
An observer’s investment in the discourse of shock did not necessarily imply his
rejection of the experience of the amusement park – on the contrary, it could lead to
something akin to aesthetic ecstasy. The poet e.e. cummings wholeheartedly indulges in
the fantasy of dissipation depicted in Edwin Porter’s film. For him, tuning his attention to
what he understands as the manic punching of his sensorial buttons results in an ecstatic
state in which the texture of reality seems to melt, up can no longer be recognized from
down, and the physical world ceases to make sense.
“The IS or Verb of Coney Island escapes any portraiture. A trillion smells; the
tinkle and snap of shooting galleries; the magically sonorous exhortations of
barkers and ballyhoomen; the thousands upon thousands of faces paralyzed by
enchantment to mere eyeful disks, which struggling surge through dizzy gates of
illusion; the metamorphosis of atmosphere into a stupendous pattern of electric
colors, punctuated by a continuous whisking of leaning and cleaving ship-like
shapes; the yearn and skid of toy cars crammed with screeching reality, wildly
spiraling earthward or gliding out of ferocious depth into sumptuous height or
94
whirling eccentrically in a brilliant flatness...the intricate clowning of enormous
deceptions, of palaces which revolve, walls which collapse, surfaces which arch
and drop and open to emit spurts of lividly bellowing steam - all these elements
disappear in a homogenously happening universe, surrounded by the rhythmic
mutations of the ocean and circumscribed by the mightily oblivion-colored rush
of the roller coaster."
130

According to cummings’ imaginative interpretation, the amusement park short-circuits
the conscious mind, to the point where it escapes language and simply puddles in an
undifferentiated “IS”. In this maelstrom, the spectator is reduced to a “mere eyeful disk”.
This turn of phrase suggests that, as Gorky notes, he has to “screw up his eyes” to protect
himself from the glare of the attractions; but it also implies that his entire body has been
reduced to an open eye. This eye has hardened into a mirror reflecting the radiant
pandemonium without and can no longer act as a window to the soul. It is the physical
world that has become too transparent, omni-seen, and the eye of the viewer that has
become opaque. Cummings chooses to embrace what he interprets as the dissipation of
his subjectivity – which actually results in the writer’s act of self-expression.
Gorky’s and cumming’s accounts surmise a widely circulated vision of the fate of
the aesthetic in the industrial regime of perception, a fate embodied by the attraction.
Severed from art’s privileged relationship to a Hegelian spirit, the attraction is imagined
as a souless agent of the automatic processes that regiment the time and bodies of city
dwellers. Siegfried Kracauer, writing about the mixed vaudeville show popular in 1920s
Berlin, which featured movies alongside theatrical acts, acrobatics and comedic skits,

130
cummings, e.e. “Coney Island.” In A Coney Island Reader: Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion, edited by
Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola. Columbia University Press, 2014. This is an article
cummings wrote in 1926 for the magazine Vanity Fair.

95
describes the attraction as “a total artwork of effects”, one that replaces the lofty spiritual
ambitions of the gesamtkunstwerk with a clever system that reproduces a specific set of
predictable sensations:
“This total artwork of effects assaults all the senses using every possible means.
Spotlights shower their beams into the auditorium, sprinkling across festive
drapes or rippling through colorful, organic-looking glass fixtures. The orchestra
asserts itself as an independent power, it's acoustic production buttressed by the
responsory of the lighting. Every emotion is accorded its own acoustic expression
and its color value in the spectrum – a visual and acoustic kaleidoscope that
provides the setting for the physical activity on stage: pantomime and ballet. Until
finally the white surface descends and the events of the three-dimensional stage
blend imperceptibly into two dimensional illusions.”
131

He draws a connection between what he perceives is the “addiction of distraction” that
has ‘taken hold’ of the working class and the fundamental “lack” of meaning or substance
that characterizes the mind-numbing routines of the workers’ daily life. The attraction in
this context functions as a siren, a mirage that preys on the impoverished interiority of the
modern worker. By locking the masses in a psychological boom and bust cycle –
entertainment or boredom – it also mirrors the capitalist system’s logic of endless
accumulation and consumption in its most naked form. The attractions of the vaudeville
show:
“…serve one sole purpose: to rivet the viewers’ attention to the peripheral, so that
they will not sink into the abyss. The stimulations of the senses succeed one
another with such rapidity that there is no room left between them for even the
slightest contemplation. Like life buoys, the refractions of the spotlights and the
musical accompaniment keep the spectator above water.”
132

131
Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” In The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. 324
132
ibid, 326

96
According to this model of the distracted spectator, the attraction diverts the viewer’s
cognitive faculties away from a sustained reflection on his own condition, thereby
allowing the conditions that alienate him to persist. The attraction is seen to rely on
physiological stimulation as opposed to intentional thought – for the consumer (assumed
to lack self-awareness) it functions as an antidote to the responsibility of agency. The
attraction corresponds not to a thing but to a lack, to an absence of presence. It can only
imitate something real, and in doing so, takes away the foundations of habit and belief
that made “the real” feel real.
Kracauer goes on to argue that, in a way, it is more authentic to worship this
illusion than to continue affirming “cultural values that have become unreal”
133
. In the
context of Weimar Germany, this nihilistic tone strikes a troubling, even anguished note.
In a post World War worldview, the attraction becomes the locus of modernity’s
apocalyptic end-game: the old world is swept away into nothingness, while its survivors
cling to the glittering fragments of their shattered consciousness. Kracauer, however,
does not so much mourn passé cultural forms as he questions the sustainability of the
attraction as a meaningful affective experience. Interestingly, what disturbs both
Kracauer and observers such as Gorky is not the content of the amusements themselves –
on the contrary, cummings finds Coney Island too gorgeous to bear, Kracauer derides the
bourgeois’s critique of the picture palace on the grounds of bad taste – but that they

133
Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” In The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays. 326

97
operate in the mode of “pure externality.”
134
The attraction seems to reject the exercise of
subjectivity and inwardness, instead forcing the spectator to march to its own alien
tempo, to harness himself to a rhythm that exceeds his capacity to understand and derive
meaning from what he is looking at.
Contemplating the matter from the other side of the world war, the futurist
manifestoes of Filippo Marinetti find the apparent perceptual trauma of the attraction, and
even its possible underpinnings in a brutal social order, to be a source of celebration and
transformative potential. The violence stigmatized by the discourse of shock is embraced
as a positive. In the “Variety Theatre” (1913), Marinetti envisions a new “Futurist
marvelous produced by modern mechanics”
135
, a vaudeville show that employs cutting
edge theatrical effects to juxtapose a dizzying, “ridiculous” (in Marinetti’s words) array
of attractions:
“clowns, magicians, mind readers, brilliant calculators, writers of skits, imitators
and parodists, musical jugglers and eccentric Americans…the greatest
competitive forces of different races, the greatest anatomical monstrosity, the
greatest female beauty”
136
.

Human performers are subsumed in a riotous gallery of fascinating things, reduced to
prototypes. Gender, race, deformity, nationality, physicality are displayed in their most
extreme stereotypes to become objects of fun, in the tradition of P.T. Barnum’s

134
ibid.

135
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Variety Theatre (Sept. 1913).” In Modernism: An Anthology, edited
by Lawrence Rainey. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 34
136
ibid. 36, 37.

98
“American Museum”
137
. Marinetti straightforwardly embraces the violent subtext of this
type of show; its manic energy seems to herald the advent of a new spectator, a spectator
liberated from all social and creative restraints. The Futurist theatre employs rather brutal
avant-garde strategies of audience participation towards this end, “forcibly drag(ing) the
slowest souls out of their torpor and forc(ing) them to run and jump”, enjoining them to
participate in a collective frenzy of unhinged affect.
“The Variety Theatre is destroying the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious and the
Sublime in Art with a capital A. It is helping along the Futurist destruction of
immortal masterpieces by plagiarizing and parodying them, by making them seem
commonplace in stripping them of their solemnity as if they were just another turn
or attraction.”
138

Here the attraction represents the limit of the authoritative aesthetics of fine art: lowly
entertainment exchanges places with high culture in this renewed system of values. Only
by doing violence to the status quo, Marinetti suggests, can new types of creative
production emerge. Like Kracauer, Marinetti sees the attraction as an anti-humanist
proposition that “mechanizes feelings”
139
. The futurist variety theater simultaneously
aims to relinquish the control of art to automatic processes and to process the
performative, human elements of art as mechanical elements. In this vision, the
traditional master-slave relationship between man and industrial technology is reversed,

137
P.T. Barnum’s “American Museum” in New York (1841-1865) is widely credited with popularizing the
freakshow in the 19
th
century. Barnum’s performers included Charles Stratton a.k.a General Tom Thumb,
the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, and African-American William Henry Johnson a.k.a ‘Zip the
Pinhead’, who was marketed to the public as an evolutionary “missing link” and performed in a cage while
wearing a hairy suit. In this type of attraction, the pleasures afforded by the disruption of expectations with
regards to the human form undoubtedly reinforce the threat of violence latent in existing social hierarchies.

138
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Variety Theatre (Sept. 1913).” In Modernism: An Anthology, edited
by Lawrence Rainey. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 37

139
ibid, 36.
99
but is not genuinely put into question. The intellectual fascination with the attraction, if
not the experience of the attraction itself, remains predicated on violence.
Even outside of the historical bounds of the intellectual preoccupation with
“modernity” as it is understood in the context of late 19
th
century urban culture, the
discourse of the attraction has continued to draw attention to the apparent violence of the
spectator’s response. The explosive blend of antipathy and enthusiasm that she
experiences supposedly reflects the viewer’s own visceral recognition of the attraction’s
re-enactment, in the way it assaults our senses, of the violence perpetrated by the
automatized processes that have produced the modern, and later “post-modern”
infrastructure of contemporary life.
Jean Baudrillard’s essay in Simulacra and Simulations (1981) on the then recently
built Centre Pompidou in the Beaubourg neighborhood of Paris expresses the almost
existential conflict elicited by contemplation of the attraction. The Centre Pompidou,
which houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne, was an architectural sensation that
broke with the conventions of what constituted the appropriate aesthetic “container” for a
cultural institution. Instead of presenting a façade to the public, the building turned itself
inside out, showcasing an enormous maze of bright, color-coded pipes, ducts and wires –
the material evidence of its electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems. What seemed
to have disturbed Baudrillard so much was the loss of intelligibility that such a vision
entailed, as if the irreducible complexity of the system on display, enhanced by the bright
colors that confused while attracting the visitor, constituted a threat to the production of
meaning in general. Baudrillard goes on to compare the building to a “carcass”, a “black
100
hole”
140
that actively destroys the signification of its contents. The exhibition of the
building’s internal processes, of its automatized life, in a sense draws attention to the
technical and material structure that articulates the informational flows that produce
contemporary reality. In contrast to the intentional and expressive work exhibited inside
the building, the building itself revealed what was mindless and mechanical about the
(post)modern condition:
“What, then, should have been put inside Beaubourg? Nothing. Emptiness would
signify the complete disappearance of a culture of meaning and of aesthetic
sensibility. But even this is too romantic and agonizing; this empty space might
have suited a masterpiece of anti-culture. Perhaps a spinning of strobe lights and
gyroscopes, streaking the space whose moving pedestal is created by the
crowd?”
141

For Baudrillard, the proper interpretive mode for this exercise in non-meaning that is
Beaubourg is the attraction. The attraction is “nothing but” a series of sensorially
stimulating processes, a mechanism that is itself an analog of the crowd of cultural
consumers that visits the building.
However, although Beaubourg is a “mere” attraction, it puts on display its own
unique procedural logic, a logic that exists independently of the subjectivity of the
spectator. Baudrillard intimates that the rationale behind our experience of the building
might be the impression of our own contingency as spectators: “If Beaubourg really had
to contain something it should be a labyrinth, a library of infinite permutations, a game or
a lottery for the chance reparcelling of destinies – in short, a Borgesian world, or better

140
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.” In Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach. New York: Routledge, 1997. 211, 213
141
ibid, 211.

101
still, a circular ruin...”
142
As a working system, Beaubourg offers itself up at a glance –
without establishing itself as an organic totality. Its many effects do not coalesce into an
intelligible form, which is another way of saying that at any given moment the spectator
is not face to face with a finished object, but instead is sampling a process capable of
generating a series of configurations or “effects”.

The Liveliness of Automation:
from the phenakistoscope to the Fleischers

Cultural theorists such as Benjamin and Kracauer were responding to a
widespread belief, noticeable from the late 19
th
century onward, that to live and work in
an urban environment was to become an element in a system of concatenated
automatisms. The routines of the worker, the consumer, the commuter and increasingly,
the spectator interacted with one another in complex ways, necessitating that the urbanite
be proficient at navigating competing flows of information. This sensibility reflects a
deep anxiety around the increasing prominence of industrial technology in daily life, and
in particular the fear that automation was replacing what had previously constituted
domains of bodily agency. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, for example, notes that the
burgeoning culture of speed in the second half of the 19
th
century, born of the widespread

142
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.” 212.
102
use of railroad travel, was concomitant with the much-discussed sensation of a drastic
compression of space and time for commuting city dwellers. As space, under the impetus
of the railway schedules, was converted into an abstract grid of points of departure and
arrival, the sensation of the passage of time gave way to a series of discrete instants.
143

Reacting to the role of automatic processes in restructuring the casual exercise of
perception, commentators feared that their own subjectivity was being invaded by
exterior mechanisms and made unfamiliar or unrecognizable to themselves. Writing at
the turn of the century, the sociologist and critic Georg Simmel memorably described this
transformation of interiority, widely perceived to be the result of a repeated exposure to
the “the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is
grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli”
144
.
Underlying this discourse of shock was a certain skepticism as to value of the
exciting sensations afforded by modernity, which seemed to mask the irretrievable loss of
the pre-industrial texture of experience with an indiscriminate enthusiasm for the “new”.
This pre-industrial texture of life, of course, was itself a construct whose hypothetical
attributes were understood in terms of their antithesis to those new experiences, such as
rapid transport and mass urban entertainment, made possible by the increasing
automatization of the logistical processes that regulated production, consumption, and
labor. This process of technological rationalization of human activity was famously

143
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th
Century. University of California Press, 1986.
144
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903).” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by
Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. 11
103
described by the influential sociologist Max Weber as an “iron cage” that deprived
subjects of their ability to live according to self-determined values.
145
The growing
presence of the machine was felt as a corresponding evacuation of individual freedom. As
we saw in the commentary of Benjamin, Gorsky, and Kracauer, the attraction, as a
conspicuously automatized experience, was strongly identified with the sensation of this
loss of agency. Even proponents of the attraction, such as cummings and Marinetti,
defended its pleasures and aesthetic value in catastrophist terms, as the brutal erasure of a
system of values or the dissolution of a coherent reality. Through the lens of this
discourse of shock, the attraction is an automatic process that exists in a state of
fundamental adversity towards the subject. This adversity expresses itself in the form of
an ultimately self-destructive affect of painful pleasure that results from what is perceived
as the spectator’s submission to and abdication in favor of the automatism.
This specific interpretation of the attraction has been very influential from a
critical standpoint, and continues to persist in subtle forms even though the theory that
modernity is phenomenologically constructed through a Pavlovian stimulus-response
model has fallen out of favor. As we saw, a postmodernist commentator like Baudrillard
sees an attraction like Beaubourg’s naked exhibition of its own processes of automation
as evidence of a larger rejection of the subject’s intentionality. Fifty years later, his
argument essentially recapitulates Kracauer’s view that the attraction destroys the shared
cultural values that are supposed to provide a foundation for our sense of reality.

145

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003.
181-182.
104
A persistent association between the attraction and modernity’s presumed loss of
duration – the spectator’s interior sense of the passage of time – has led to the privileging
of certain forms of automatic entertainment over others in media discourse. Cinema,
particularly, is seen as a form of automatism that in contrast to other attractions, plays a
salutary role in “consoling” the subject for the supposed disappearance of his interiority.
According to this theoretical strand, the modern spectator’s inability to hold anything
within “one’s glance”, to retain and process the content of perception as a memory rather
than automatically registering it as a shock (identified by Simmel) led to a rising demand
for methods that would allow one to arrest the flow of impressions, or at least, to permit
one a ‘second glance’. Mary Anne Doane, for example, argues that there exists a
correlation between the technologically enabled process of space-time compression
identified by Shivelbusch and the growing popularity of mechanisms that could produce
surplus “instants” – notably the panorama, photography and eventually, cinema
146
. The
consumer of these ever-more immersive automatic images is engaged in a process of
“remembering” the present, of reaching out for a feeling of duration and embodiment that
has become difficult to grasp.
In this context, technologies of immersion – with cinema representing the apex of
this immersive media teleology – acquire a double role in the quotidian of modern life:
they produce the surfeit of perceptual instances that destabilizes the subject, but they also
allow the subject to recover a certain depth of experience by simulating a (new)

146
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.
105
phenomenological totality. According to this theory, the attraction substitutes the
forgotten sensation of experience with an ersatz memory of experience.
At the turn of the century Henri Bergson had already theorized a similar
substitution as the mechanism by which we processed perceptual information in general,
independent of our reaction to any excessive inflow of images generated in modern life:
“An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to speak, passes
before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say,
differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our
view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless…Such is
the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge.
Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves
outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take
snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the
reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and
invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate
what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.”
147

Our inability to take in the “infinite multiplicity” of the visual and auditory feast that
surrounds us necessitates a procedure of abstraction, which Bergson compares to the
apparatus of the cinematograph, which allows us to recognize the evolution of difference
over time. A reconstituted present is stitched together from the most salient
characteristics of a subconscious flow of impressions. In this context, the actual
cinematograph operates not only at one degree of removal from authentic experience, but
as a third-degree simulation, mimicking the automatic system of filtration and reduction
that already constitutes our perception. We are, in a sense, already alienated from our
own perceptual apparatus, and the automatic sensations offered by the attraction simply

147
Bergson, Henri. “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion.” In
Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Camelot Press, 1911.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm#Page_298. 304, 306
106
reflect back to us the unintelligibility of the hidden processes that produce our own
consciousness.
This interpretation of the attraction as a fake, defective or reductive model of the
perceptual apparatus is even more evident when we turn to discourse relating to moving
images that antedate the cinema, even within the critical tradition of the “cinema of
attractions”. Nicolas Dulac and Andre Gaudreault describe pre-cinematic optical devices
like the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope as exhibiting a kind of temporal circularity that
stands in sharp contrast to our own natural (cinematic) experience of the arrow of time
148
.
The phenakistoscope, a parlor toy wildly popular in the 1830s, was a paper disc,
perforated with slits, on which a series of images was printed. The viewer held the object
in front of a mirror, and stared through the slits while spinning the wheel manually – it
functioned like a flip-book, the phenomenon of what was then known as persistence of
vision causing the figures to appear animated. The zoetrope operated in a similar fashion,
using a rotating drum with slits instead of a horizontal wheel, and a printed scroll instead
of a disk. According to Dulac and Gaudreault, in manipulating these toys, the
spectator/user enters a form of automatic as opposed to a human, durational time – one
that, mimicking the repetition of frames, presents the viewer with a cycle of discrete
instants, endlessly repeated in a frozen actualité. The impression might be that of a
broken version of Bergson’s cinematograph, with the attraction becoming analogous to a

148
Dulac, Nicolas, and André Gaudreault. “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical
Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
107
malfunctioning perceptual apparatus that condemns the spectator to continuously
experience more of the same.

There is a different way of interpreting the automatism of the attraction that does
not fall back on thinking of the attraction as a substitute apparatus for the perceptual
apparatus. In this context, the technicity of the attraction is not connected to a
corresponding lack in the subject or the subject’s phenomenological agency. Instead, it is
linked to an excessive – in the positive sense of abundance or bounty – expression of the
subject’s exteriority, her sense of the “happening” of the world beyond herself. It strikes
me in this sense that e.e. cumming’s poetic turn of phrase “a homogenously happening
universe” to describe Coney Island’s trop-plein of activity, even though elsewhere in his
essay he interprets the attraction as an annihilating force for the subject, is in fact
strangely felicitous. As we saw in the first chapter regarding the cabinet of curiosities, the
attraction is deeply invested in the expression of material agency. The “surplus” of
material agency exhibited by the automatic mechanism of the attraction is not, contrary to
what the proponents of the discourse of shock believe, an engine of default in subjective
agency. On the contrary, as the privileged site of spectacular phenomena of emergence,
attractions’ technical processes in fact add to the substance of what we experience as
external reality. It makes more of what we perceive as “the world”; it does not
catastrophically or inefficiently replace “the world” for us.
In this context the fantasy of dissipation or loss of control that Benjamin
worryingly identifies and that is joyfully conveyed in Edwin Porter’s early film on Coney
108
Island does not represent a fantasy of psychological auto-violence. Rather than a
wounding of interiority, it expresses a legitimate desire to turn ourselves outward. The
spectator of the attraction experiences the sensation of dissipation as a quickening, an
intensification of her engagement with the exterior material environment. The vividness
of the spectacular effect in fact acts as a focal point for the spectator’s imaginative
projection into the mechanism or process of that effect’s production. As a result of this
virtualizing movement, the spectator is able to experience a new variety in the
phenomenological affordances of the physical objects she encounters in day-to-day life.
Attractions like the phenakistoscope that automatically animate images
demonstrate a power – one might say a “virtue”, in the ancient sense equating virtue to
potency to virtualis or virtuality - to reproduce difference or change. One of the things
that bothered Bergson about the cinematographic logic behind the unexamined exercise
of our perception was that it derived knowledge of change from a succession of static
images. This did not adequately represent our phenomenological experience of
movement, which was one of indivisible duration. Re-constituting movement from a
quantity of immobilities forces us “to eliminate from the real a great number of
qualitative differences...and to weaken our concrete vision of the universe."
149

The phenakistoscope and the zoetrope present us with an automatism that
produces the qualitative essence of movement that Bergson wanted us to recover from
deep perception. These attractions reverse the process of reification that decomposes

149
Bergson, Henri. “The Perception of Change.” In Henri Bergson: Key Writings, edited by Keith Ansell
Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York, N.Y; London: Continuum, 2002. 250
109
motion into a series of snapshots, instead pulling motion out of a sequence of printed
illustrations like a rabbit out of a hat. Notwithstanding the straightforward physiological
explanation behind this phenomenon, the effect produced is nonetheless surprising and
unexpected. These simple machines do not reduce time to an automatism; rather,
inversely, they create the illusion of life. Set in motion by the spin of a finger, a scattered
mouse pattern transforms into a horde of mice crawling over the edge of the disk,
apparently escaping the boundaries of the object to spread out into the physical world
(Figure 18). Although the mechanism is exceedingly simple, the illusion creates a
powerful feeling of immersion, linked to the perceptual actualization of the virtual
“mouse horde”. Peering through the slits of the instrument at the metamorphosizing
frames like a metaphysical voyeur, the viewer feels on quite a visceral level that moment
when, as the spinning reaches a certain speed, the flat, static image becomes a moving
figure.

Fig. 18. Animated gif of a phenakistoscope disk. “The Richard Balzer Collection: Phenakistascopes.”
Accessed April 6, 2015.

The surreal, carnivalesque motifs often featured on the rolls – acrobats, slapstick
action, circus animals, morphing faces, angels and devils
150
– illustrate the excessive

150
see “The Richard Balzer Collection: Phenakistascopes.” Accessed April 6, 2015.
http://www.dickbalzer.com/Phenakistascopes.604.0.html. See also “La Cinémathèque Française: Collection
- Catalogue Des Appareils Cinématographiques -.” Accessed April 6, 2015.
110
liveliness of the effect. The optical toy offers up the possibility of a world imbued with
the potential for spontaneous transformation. The literal movement of the technological
apparatus and the virtual movement it produces together create the new, illustrating a
paradoxical correlation between automatism and creation. The phenakistoscope –
literally, “deceptive view” – toys with our commonsensical attitude towards the exercise
of perception: in the sudden passage from the static picture of a mouse to a leaping mouse
horde movement appears out of nowhere. When watching a film the motion of the figures
on screen is not startling in the same sense, because the apparatus only always presents a
moving image; the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope, on the other hand, bring to our
attention the transition between the inanimate and the animate. This startling passage
constitutes a phase change, a phenomenon of emergence – not a progressive
transformation from one state to the other.

Fig. 19. Reve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel.
Max Ernst. 1930.

http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/catalogues/appareils/collection.html?search=%22%20ph%C3%A9nakistico
pe%22.
111
Max Ernst’s surrealist zoetrope, Reve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au
Carmel, illustrates this phenomenological switch, when a representation seems to literally
fly out of the device into the exterior world (Figure 19). This fantastical attraction
subverts the logic of Jules Marey’s chronophotographic studies of the flight of birds from
which the image takes its inspiration
151
. Instead of obediently reproducing the illusory
movement of Bergson’s enfilade of static moments, the photographically captured bird
escapes into unbounded existence – negating the experimenter’s attempt to tame and
deconstruct movement, or vision itself, for that matter. Like the phenakistoscope, Ernst’s
attraction confutes the apparent predictability of its automatism. Its movement is an
emergent effect, an index of liveness that, in the end, is in excess of the apparatus that
produces it.
Tom Gunning’s research into cinema’s first decade uncovers a similar effect
intentionally put to work in the practice of early film exhibition. Far from being
credulous dupes of the cinematograph’s unprecedented realism, the audiences of early
cinematographic funfair attractions were sophisticated viewers with expectations honed
by the elaborate illusions of stage magicians like Georges Méliès. The fashion in which
the first films were exhibited drew the spotlight on the cinematograph as a sort of
mechanical prestidigitator: the projectionist first showed a static image on screen, then
progressively cranked up the speed of the reel, achieving, like the phenakistoscope, a

151
see Krauss, Rosalind. “The Impulse to See.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay
Press, 1988. 54-55. Krauss traces the origin of Ernst’s collage to an illustration in the 1888 issue of the
magazine La Nature, which depicts a sculptural reconstruction of Marey’s serial snapshots of birds in flight.
112
startling effect of the inanimate come to life
152
. Knowledge of the process by which the
mechanism of the apparatus made the image move did not prohibit suspension of
disbelief in the magical effect; on the contrary, it deepened the mystery, rendering it more
marvelous and complex: "its visual power consisted of a trompe l'oeil play of give and
take, an obsessive desire to test the limits of an intellectual disavowal – “I know but yet I
see”... What is displayed before the audience is less the impending speed of the train than
the force of the cinematic apparatus. "
153
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the pivot
of the attraction is in the homology between the effect of speed in the projection and the
speed of the cranked projection mechanism. The speed of the train is the virtual image of
the gearing of the cinematograph. It carries over the liveliness of the machine’s material
being, its capacity to function as a dynamic system with emergent effects.
The 19
th
century attraction of spontaneous motion demonstrated the power or
virtue of the spectator’s perceptual apparatus just as much as it demonstrated the
mechanism’s – the power of both the cinematograph and the phenakistoscope to produce
movement was predicated on the spectator’s capacity to produce optical phenomena. The
physicist Joseph Plateau invented the phenakistoscope in 1832, following his doctoral
thesis on the phenomenon of the persistence of vision. At the time, the leading theory
behind this effect was that images retained their impression on the retina until they were

152
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” In
Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1994.
153
ibid. 116, 118
113
displaced by subsequent images
154
. Jonathan Crary argues that this theory of the
afterimage represented a shift in the understanding of perception, effectively
disassociating vision from its referent in reality and re-transcribing it as a stream of
physiological information whose source was no longer the external world, but the subject
himself. For scientists pushing for a more objective categorization of visual activity,
“there was no such thing as optical illusion: whatever the healthy corporal eye
experienced was in fact optical truth”
155
.
The notion of optical or perceptual truth, different from the more abstract
knowledge Bergson believes we derive from our cinematograph-like inclination to isolate
and reassemble events, is inherent to the successful effects of attractions like the
phenakistoscope. The phenakistoscope works because we perceive movement, even
though the figures on the disk don’t move (independently from the movement of the
disk): we, in fact, produce the impression of movement. And yet, the observer of the later
19
th
century also clearly experienced the phenomenon of the animated image as the
startling effect of the image’s autonomy – as evidenced by theorists’ articulation of the
afterimage as the imprint of past perceptions on the body (the retina). This theory,
apparently demonstrated by the operation of the phenakistoscope, offered a ready
explanation for the visceral, bodily connection that the spectator experienced between
himself and the visual effect, the sensation of being physically marked by “perceptual

154
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. 109
155
ibid, 98.
114
data”
156
. As such, the phenakistoscope’s “deceptive view” possesses its own
phenomenological truth: its effect is an optical truth and an illusion, an emergent
phenomenon that has both a material existence and a virtual dimension. As the body’s
projection into the “element” of the virtual, it actually recalls Bergson’s notion of
duration, the sensation that change, temporality, movement operate as a continuously
connected totality (much like space), rather than as a series of chopped up instants. The
phenakistoscope, for the spectator, creates more duration – it does not deprive the
spectator of duration. Mice emerge into existence and run off the spinning disk: a new
moment buds, grows, and floats out of view.
This open passage between the virtual and the material defines a specific mode of
spectatorship – one that calls upon the viewer to accept, and increasingly to expect, the
disruption of prosaic sensorial engagement with the world. The sensation of
astonishment, as Gunning refers to it, that is delivered by the attraction is generative, not
violent, implying that the phenomenology of the attraction cannot be reduced to a surface
effect of excitation and overstimulation of the sensorium. Or, more precisely, the surface
effects characteristic of an attraction such as the phenakistoscope are, in and of
themselves, creative – they conjure animated objects, in defiance of everyday intuitive
and empirical knowledge, revealing an aggressive liveliness in the most anodyne
phenomena.

156
It is easy to see how the theory of the afterimage lent itself to the subsequent slippage articulated in the
discourse of shock, which imagined flocks of disembodied stimuli bombarding/attacking the subject’s
sensory apparatus.
115

Fig. 20. Phenakistoscope disks. “The Richard Balzer Collection: Phenakistascopes.”
Accessed April 6, 2015.

The metamorphosis of the figures on the printed disks and scrolls of the
phenakistoscope and the zoetrope drew attention not only to the astonishing event of their
motion, but also depicted an uncanny capacity for change in general: a beautiful woman
turning into a monstrous hag, faces squeezed together until they share multiple eyes and
mouths, circles becoming a bewildering machine of spinning cogs, hopping corpses
(Figure 20). These images celebrate a violation of the ordinary boundaries of objects,
suggesting that the material characteristics of different identities can be exchanged at will
by employing a simple optical trick. The art of animation that developed after the
introduction of film directly inherited this fascination for the elasticity of the moving
image. Sergei Eisenstein, in his unfinished work on Disney’s films, remarks on the joyful
projection, even liberation that animated figures evoke:
“…The rejection of the constraint of form, fixed once and for all, freedom from
ossification, an ability to take on any form dynamically. An ability which I would
call “plasmaticity”. Here we have a being represented in drawing, a being of a
definite form, a being which has attained a definite appearance, and which
116
behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a "stable" form, but
capable of assuming any form...”
157

The plasmatic figure undergoes transformations that dissolve its identity, but that also
charge it with protean potential. Preceding by a decade the plastic Steamboat Willie that
Eisenstein admired so much, the character of Koko the Clown epitomized the “rubber”
style of New York-based animation during the silent film era. Invented by Max Fleischer
in 1919 by rotoscoping photographs of his brother Dave, who worked as a clown at
Steeplechase Park in Coney Island
158
, Koko the Klown expressed the formally
transgressive possibilities of the medium. Inspired from the Fleischers’ background in
vaudeville theatre, Koko was often rotoscoped over footage of the jazz singer Cab
Calloway
159
, performing surreal dance routines while changing into different objects or
merging with portions of his environment. In Snow White (1933), Koko accidently steps
into a magic mirror that strips him of his clothes and skin. Now a grinning, long-legged
ghost, he continues to perform a sliding, liquid dance routine that eventually twists him
into a living knot, which then morphs into a wailing chain. Eventually, his head turns into
a wine bottle that he tips into a glass, which his neck (or possibly his waist) then drinks
from (Figure 21).

157
Eisenstein, Sergei. Eisenstein on Disney edited by Naum Kleinman, translated by Alan Upchurch. New
York: Methuen, 1988. 21

158
Goldmark, Daniel Ira, and Keil, Charles. Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era
Hollywood. University of California Press, 2011. 41
159
Specifically in the Betty Boop cartoons Minnie the Moocher (Fleischer Studios, 1932) and Snow White
(Fleischer Studios, 1933).
117

Fig. 21. Koko the Clown seamlessly transfigures into a ghost, a chain, and a bottle of wine/a glass.
Fleischer Studios. Snow White. 1933.

The attractive and astonishing property of these successive revolutions is that they
articulate a system through which these kinds of transformations are made possible. We
are mesmerized not by any one the many forms assumed by the figure, or even by the
totality of them, but by the process by which one figure becomes another – Koko could
turn into a walrus instead of chain (as indeed he does in Minnie the Moocher) and the
118
spectator would experience the same effect, if not the same content. As with Baudrillard’s
Beaubourg building, we are taken in by the fact that we are confronted with an open
object, or rather with a hypothetical series of objects. As with the phenakistoscope, the
metamorphosis is not limited by the arrow of time: Koko turns into a ghost and then turns
back into a clown – the order of transformation is incidental and plays no particular role
in the narrative of the cartoon, except as a reverse proof that Koko can turn into anything.
The Fleischers consciously adopted a style that foregrounded metamorphosis as
an automatic, autonomous property of the animated image, an event that always occurred,
independently of any particular narrative instantiation
160
. According to Norman Klein,
this aesthetic was based in a desire to showcase and display the techniques and
procedures of animation: “much of the difference came from the Fleischers’ love of
technology. The tricks that for Disney revealed the "illusion of life" (a caricatural
naturalism) were for the Fleischers scientific marvels on display. That meant less
commitment to hiding how animation was done.”
161
Rotoscoping in particular, a method
that Max Fleischer invented, introduced a new way of automatizing the previously
exclusively manual technique of drawing figures by tracing photographs or even film
footage. Rotoscoping was a process for translating mechanically recorded animation into

160
This analysis of animation as an attraction is not meant to disregard the importance of narrative content
in the spectator’s experience of the medium of animation in general. As I will later do in chapter three
when discussing visual effects in cinema, I am “bracketing” the perspective of medium specificity. My
focus is not on the affordances of individual media platforms, which would indeed mean having to account
for important experiences like narrative that occur in time-based media like animation and film. My focus
is on different mediated experiences insofar as they are also attractions – insofar as they exhibit the
specific operationality and mode of spectatorship I associate with the attraction.

161
Klein, Norman M. “Animation and Animorphs.” In Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the
Culture of Quick-Change, edited by Vivian Sobchack. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
26
119
a more plastic form of animation, of capturing and merging two different sources of
liveness to achieve an excessive, supercharged expression of vitality.
Crucially, this vital property is not limited to representations of the living, but to
objects as well. In Snow White, it is difficult to find a frame in which no feature of the
background or a character’s body is either singing, screaming, laughing or detaching
itself from its surroundings to take the stage with its own skit. When Betty Boop enters
the evil queen’s palace, the icicles hanging from the doorframe start a chorus. When the
evil queen condemns Betty Boop to die her pointing hand turns into a pair of scissors that
ends up chopping off her thumb. The suit of armor in which Koko the clown is hiding has
to wrestle with a tree stump that has suddenly, angrily come to life. The head of a dragon
sprouts quacking ducks (Figure 22).

Fig. 22. Total plasmaticity. Snow White (Fleischer Studios, 1933).

In this context, animation, once initiated, is a process that cannot be stopped. As an
effect, it is omnivorous, performing its operation on everything that crosses its path – a
self-sustaining mechanism that bends mutilation backwards until it becomes regeneration
and flips the inanimate into the animate. Einsenstein celebrated this plasmatic effect as an
unparalleled attraction, calling it “omni-appealing.”
162
The single-mindedness of its

162
Eisenstein, Sergei. Disney. Edited by Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth. PotemkinPress, 2013.
Back jacket.
120
application and the exuberant fashion speak to the fantasy of dissipation that we also see
at work in amusement parks such as Coney Island. In Fleischer’s cartoon, an autonomous
process analogous to the kinetic machines that manipulated the bodies of Coney Island’s
visitors opens up a space of freedom for the spectator, who is encouraged to visualize the
perspective of flexible material forces whose possibilities of transformation exceeds her
own.

An Aesthetic of the Operational:
Stage magic and the theatre of machines

The effect of automated animation, as exhibited by the phenakistoscope and
certain technical and aesthetic strategies in early animated films, provoked astonishment
by making the hard identities of subjects and objects appear contingent and
interchangeable. A menagerie could leap out from a roll of paper, only to return to being
paper once the drum of the zoetrope stopped spinning; a living jazz musician could be
faithfully translated into a dancing ghost. This effect, which effectively opened up for the
spectator a fictional space in which the impossible could become suddenly, tantalizingly
possible, was perfected in the 19
th
century by the practice of stage magic. A synergistic
mélange of engineering, virtuosic physical performance, and set design, magic reached its
apogee in the extreme displays of technical imagination achieved by practitioners such as
121
Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin and John Neville Maskelyne. Houdin became successful in
Paris through his invention of stage devices that relied on newly discovered scientific
phenomena, such as electromagnetism, that were not yet familiar to the general public.
One of these illusions called on audience members to lift a chest; their ability to do so
depended on whether the magnets that glued the chest to the stage were turned on or off.
However, what was certainly Houdin’s most poetic and metaphysical
performance, “The Orange Tree” (1845), employed a much more elegant apparatus, in
conjunction with seamless sleight of hand. The magician started by borrowing a
handkerchief from a member of the audience, and then rolled it into a tiny ball with his
hands, until he somehow made it disappear. He explained it had been transferred to the
inside of an egg, which he then also picked up, rolled in his hand, and made disappear,
this time inside of a lemon. He repeated the process with the lemon, which vanished and
entered an orange
163
. When the orange had been reduced to a fine dust, an assistant
brought onto the stage an intriguing object:
“Houdin's orange tree, that blossomed and bore fruit in sight of the audience, was
a clever piece of mechanism. The blossoms, constructed of tissue paper, were
pushed up through the hollow branches of the tree by the pistons rising in the
table and operating against similar pistons in the orange-tree box. When the
pedals were relaxed the blossoms disappeared and the fruit was gradually
developed - real fruit, too, which was distributed among the spectators. The
oranges were stuck on iron spikes affixed to the branches of the tree and hid from
view by hemispherical wire screens painted green and secreted by the leaves.
When these screens were swung back by pedal play the fruit was revealed. In
performing this illusion Houdin first borrowed a handkerchief from a lady in the
audience, and caused it to pass from his hand into an orange left on the tree. When
the disappearance was effected, the fruit opened, revealing the handkerchief in its

163
Steinmeyer, Jim. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to
Disappear. Da Capo Press, 2004. 139.
122
center. Two mechanical butterflies, exquisitely made, then took the delicate piece
of cambric or lace and flew upwards with it. The handkerchief of course was
exchanged in the beginning of the trick for a dummy belonging to the
magician.”
164

Houdin’s orange tree seemed to grow and bear fruit before the spectators’ very eyes, a
breathtaking vision of accelerated time that must have been even more impressive, given
the dimensional, concrete aspect of the device, than the fast-forward effect the
cinematograph introduced to audiences half a century later. The inclusion of real oranges
in the routine created a (theoretically) flawless continuum between the geared operation
of the artificial tree and the organic process it was meant to mimic.
By displacing a piece of the ordinary world inhabited by the audience – the
handkerchief – and incorporating it into the heart of the mechanism, Houdin, for a brief
moment, blurred the ontological division between a fictional universe in which trees can
bloom on command and the realm of the everyday, in which they never will. As Tom
Gunning demonstrated with regards to spectators’ reaction to trains and other moving
objects in the first films of the 1890s
165
, the magic trick was not perceived as a literal
intrusion of the supernatural or the fantastical. The sophisticated automaton delighted the
crowd not because it provided a perfect substitute for the action it was meant to represent
(the flowering of the tree) but because it showcased the perceptual sleight of hand at
work in the suspension of disbelief.

164
Hopkins, Albert Allis. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography.
London: Munn & Company, 1901. 17-18. Hopkins was an editor of Scientific American.
165
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” In
Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1994.

123
The use of automata as technologies of affect has been documented since
antiquity. Philo of Byzantium and Hero of Alexandria (second and first century B.C.E)
harnessed the mechanical potential of air and water to construct pneumatic parerga,
ornamental devices such as singing birds, instruments and even mechanical stages that
could operate autonomously
166
. Throughout the 17
th
and 18
th
century automata
experienced a boom in popularity as clockwork mechanisms became significantly more
advanced, thanks to early experiments in genuinely programmable devices such as the
writing automata of Pierre Jacquet Droz (1768)
167
and Leibniz’ mechanical digital
calculator, the “Stepped Reckoner” (1694)
168
. The imaginative vision that underwrote the
construction and design of automata made possible the conceptual breakthroughs in
engineering and computing that they achieved. Like the Fleischer cartoons and the
phenakistoscope, they conjured a metaphysical fantasy – that the inanimate could be
animated and the vector of transformation from life to death could be reversed
169
.

166
Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000. 40-47. See also Berryman, Sylvia. “The Imitation of Life in Ancient Greek Philosophy.” In Genesis
Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin. Chicago, Ill: The
University of Chicago Press, 2007.
167
Sivan, M.C. “L’exposition historique d’horlogerie a Nuremberg.” Journal suisse d’horlogerie. Société
des arts de Genève: classe d’industrie et de commerce, 1906. 377-379. Jacquet-Droz’s automaton The
Writer could write a number of different texts by dipping a quill in a pot of ink. Sequences of letters could
be selected by activating different combinations of wheels and escapement mechanisms hidden inside the
writer, effectively creating a rudimentary working memory that made it possible for the device to be
programmed.
168
Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly. New Media: A Critical
Introduction. Routledge, 2008. 365
169
At the same time, mechanistic philosophy and early modern science increasingly understood living
beings as sophisticated automata. Des Chene explores this in a discussion about how the operation of
muscles in the body was literally identified with the operation of mechanisms such as pulleys. Des Chene,
Dennis. “Abstracting from the Soul: The Mechanics of Locomotion.” In Genesis Redux: Essays in the
History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago
Press, 2007.
124
Through the exploits of these monstrative machines it was technology also that was
exhibited as an attraction: “a discourse of wonder draws our attention to new technology,
not simply as a tool, but as a spectacle, less as something that performs a useful task than
as something that astounds us by performing in a way that seems unlikely or magical”
170
.
This aesthetic appreciation of the technical process proceeded from the pleasure of
imagining what new machines could one day achieve. Automata and other advanced
devices evoked an unchartered realm of unknown effects; by reflecting on them, one
could conjure a future of differences.
This aura of wonder around technology can be traced back to the Baroque
tradition of the “theatres of machines”, a genre of engineering manual popular from the
end of the 16
th
to the mid-18
th
century. These books feature detailed illustrations of
various mechanical devices with text explaining how they were supposed to function
(Figure 23). They were destined for the entertainment and edification of both scientists
and curious laymen. In examining whether these manuals actually described working
mechanisms as opposed to imaginary machines, Luisa Dolza and Hélène Vérin conclude
that they represented an intermediary – these were series of hypothetical prototypes,
sketches that offered iterations on different solutions to a specific technical problem
171
.
As such, they served the dual purpose of transmitting a broad knowledge of mechanics

170
Gunning, Tom. “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in
Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century.” In Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of
Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge (Mass.); London: The MIT Press,
2003. 45

171
Dolza, Luisa, and Vérin, Hélène. “Figurer La mécanique : L’énigme des théâtres de machines de la
Renaissance.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51, no. 2 (2004): 7–37.

125
and encouraging readers to apply their own imagination to the resolution of engineering
puzzles.

Fig. 23. A Theatre of Machines. Fig. 24. Illustration of a magic lantern. Athanasius Kircher. Ars
Jacques Besson. Theatrum Magna Lucis et Umbra. 1671.
instrumentorum et machinarum.
1578.

Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et Umbra (1671), an inventive and
exhaustive, if not always correct, treatise on the “natural magic” of dioptrics (projection
effects) and catoptrics (mirror effects), thus served to disseminate the principle of the
magic lantern to the educated public of his time, even though his illustration of the
apparatus was clearly inaccurate. The sketch gets the positions of the slides and the lens
wrong (the lens is supposed to be placed in front of the slides, to focus the image), and
fails to invert the images on the slides to ensure a right-side-up projection
172
(Figure 24).
At the time working lanterns of various designs, realized by the astronomer Christian
Huygens and the mathematician Thomas Walgenstein, were already being exhibited in

172
Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art Of Light And Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Translated by
Richard Crangle. 1 edition. Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 2000. 58
126
scholarly circles. However, the general idea of what a magic lantern is comes through in
a forceful way in Kircher’s illustration, embellished by the baroque checkered floor, the
ornate lamp, and the suggestive vision of a damned soul burning in hell, which actually
proved to be a realistic portraiture of the morbid and supernatural themes that were
subsequently favored by travelling magic lanternists at the close of the 17
th
century. Even
if its actual operation is somewhat obscure, the theatrical mise-en-scene of the device
guides the imagination, so that even if a reader does not really understand what is
depicted on a technical level, he can form an intuitive impression of what the machine
can accomplish and to what possible uses it might be put.
The lyrical theatre of machines and the uncanny automaton provided a gateway to
the mechanical imagination for the consumer of attractions. They suggested to the
spectator that they could personally test and productively engage different aspects of the
material world. Davis Baird refers to this instrumental mindset as a “pragmatic
conception of knowledge as effective action…(as) "working knowledge.”
173
Working
knowledge corresponds to an intuitive sense of how objects can be articulated, how they
can be linked together to perform a process. Mechanical toys can act as powerful
mediators for this type of operational thinking. Seymour Papert’s account of his
childhood experience playing with erector sets sheds light on this point:
"I remember there was feeling, love, as well as understanding in my relationship
with gears...As well as connecting with the formal knowledge of mathematics, it
also connects with the "body knowledge", the sensorimotor schemata of a child.
You can be the gear, you can understand how it turns by projecting yourself into

173
Baird, Davis. Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. 1 edition. University of
California Press, 2004. 12

127
its place, and turning with it. It is this double relationship – both abstract and
sensory – that gives the gear the power to carry powerful mathematics into the
mind..."
174

Papert’s gear solicits the kind of creative attention that enables its user to project herself
into the object and work with it, to “turn with it”
175
. In the course of this identification
with the apparatus, “the surface (of the object) stops being a window on the world and
now becomes an opaque grid of information”
176
that the user can read and use. The
discovery of the gears’ intelligibility is a function of the gears’ sensory legibility. This act
of heightened perception, of intense, fully engaged spectatorship precedes and facilitates
the more sustained exercise of agency and knowledge. It is in this continuum between the
affective and instrumental resonances of the attraction that the attraction’s nature as an
animated, “spiritual” machine becomes clear.
In the context of the magic show, such instruments of amusement as the
automaton, magic lanterns, optical toys and other theatrical machinery, were the linchpin
in the magician’s stratagem to fascinate his audience. Their attraction resided in the fact
that they both revealed and obfuscated the inner workings of the phenomenon they
produced. As “the trick” unfolds over a series of steps, the thrill of perceptual novelty

174
Papert, Seymour A. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. Basic Books, 1993. Preface
to the first edition, xx.
175
See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Tome 2, Mille plateaux. Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1980. This idea of turning with the gear bears a certain resemblance to Deleuze and
Guattari’s idea of “becoming” an object. This turn of phrase refers to the process by which living beings
tend to pattern themselves onto each other, “capturing code” from one another, in order to achieve an
information-enriching metamorphosis. Deleuze explains this through the example of wasps and orchids,
who over generations of mutually beneficent, accidental collaboration have evolved similar physical traits,
therefore progressively “becoming orchid” or “becoming wasp”. Papert’s encounter with the gears
similarly suggests a “becoming gear”.
176
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 40
128
phases into a sense of curiosity and mystery. The spectator desires to investigate further,
to discover the mechanism behind the effect while simultaneously reveling in its
unintelligible opaqueness, which makes the slippage or discrepancy between what is
actually happening and the material evidence presented by the illusion seem all the more
elusive. This manipulation of the audience’s attention, a seduction that baited their
curiosity while in the last instance refusing to grant them any definitive knowledge, was a
ploy widely used in 19
th
century attractions. The showman, huckster and later circus
impresario P.T. Barnum used the venue of his American Museum, New York’s premier
dime museum and freak show, to perpetrate a series of hoaxes, including the infamous
“Feejee” Mermaid, a taxidermied fabrication with the head of a monkey and the tail of a
fish. According to Neil Harris, the crowds were not drawn to these fraudulent curiosities
out of a belief that they were truly miraculous specimens, but rather because of their own
prankish interest in the quality of the hoax, in the degree of verisimilitude that had been
achieved. The audience was captivated not by the object itself, but by the opportunity to
investigate it, as connoisseurs: “Barnum's elaborate hoaxes trained Americans to absorb
knowledge. This was an aesthetic of the operational, a delight in observing process and
examining for literal truth"
177
. This “aesthetic of the operational” approached any novel
process as an attraction in and of itself, and approached attractions themselves as
technical challenges. 19
th
century stage magic refined this general tactic into a
collaborative performance between human actors and machines.

177
Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. University of Chicago Press, 1981. 79.
129
The use of instruments to transform a spectator’s perspective and introduce a
thrilling epistemic disjuncture between what was being shown and what was actually
being seen has earlier antecedents. Among these, the anamorphic mirror illustrates best
the concept of the aesthetic of the operational as it applies to the logic of the magic trick.

Fig. 25. Diagram of an anamorphic mirror.
Mario Bettini. Eye of Cardinal Colonna. 1642.

Anamorphosis is a technique by which an image is distorted, requiring the spectator to
position herself from a specific angle relative to the picture in order to restore the image’s
proper perspective; it was devised in response to the development of a science of optics
in the 17
th
century and the implementation of that new knowledge in novel painting
techniques. The anamorphic mirror is a parlor toy that consists of a cylindrical mirror
placed at the center of a drawing. The image of the drawing that is reflected in the mirror
allows the viewer to recognize what is being depicted (Figure 25).
“By substituting the reflected angle in place of the visual angle, by adding a
lateral point of view to a frontal one, anamorphosis breaks up the coherence of
space: seen from a certain angle, a portrait is only pieces - deformity, dislocation -
but from another, unity is reconstituted and the initiated spectator recognizes the
130
laws of a rigorous science behind the optical aberrations…confusion and the
irrational are resolved.”
178

If anamorphosis can serve to unveil the hidden symmetry, the truth behind optical
phenomena, it can also just as easily conceal it. Hungarian artist and animator Istvan
Orosz’s artwork, Jules Verne / Verne Gyula (1983) has the mirror reveal a figure that is
completely invisible in the drawing of the landscape being reflected (Figure 26). In this
case, which is the true image – the head in the mirror or the landscape on the paper?

Fig. 26. Jules Verne / Verne Gyula. Istvan Orosz. 1983.

It is not clear which can claim an epistemological primacy over the other. Orosz’
anamorphosis illustrates, in Deleuze’s words, “not a variation of truth according to the
subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject”
179
. The
landscape and the head are equally there, from different points of view. In the same
fashion, the magic show proposes different interpretations to the spectators about what it

178
Melchoir-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Routledge, 2014. 237
179
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 21. Deleuze
is comparing Baroque visual techniques, whose goal was to represent objects from multiple points of view,
to the single, magisterial viewpoint characteristic of Renaissance perspective.
131
is they are seeing, and it is not immediately clear which one of these is the fiction and
which one is the “truth”. What exactly are the “butterflies” that flutter out of Houdin’s
orange tree? Is the handkerchief that reappears in the orange at the end of the
performance the same handkerchief that was handed to the magician at the beginning?
How were the egg, the lemon, and the orange made to disappear? The answers to these
questions are hidden in plain sight. As with an anamorphic picture, the spectator has to
observe the trick from just the right angle to understand what is really going on, and this
angle is not the same as the one the magician is presenting from. More than ever, the
audience enjoying the vision of the orange tree is compelled to “observe (the) process and
examine for literal truth”.

Fig. 27. Trompe l’oeil ceiling at the Palazzo Pitti in
Florence. Copyright Ben Littauer 2012.

More frequently remembered nowadays than the anamorphic mirror, the anamorphic
trompe l’oeil, a standard Baroque painting technique, was employed to create the
impression of dimensionality through forced perspective, allowing painters to artificially
extend and modify the architectural interiors of churches through painted domes, frames
and recesses (Figure 27). Just like these trick spaces, Houdin’s artificial tree is a trompe
132
l’oeil – it feels real, even though the audience knows it isn’t an actual tree. By switching
on the spectators’ “anamorphic gaze”
180
, Houdin succeeded in creating a radically new
object, a time-travelling orange tree, which, in spite of its dubious ontological status, was
exquisitely visible to the senses. By asserting the “truth of a variation”, the reality of a
fiction, Houdin opened up the audience to a fresh imagination and understanding of what
was possible.

Instrumentation as Fiction:
the phantasmagoria

The showman’s goal of making the impossible perceptible could be sold to
audiences already equipped with a cultural expectation that the invisible could, and
indeed had already been made, perceptible. As with the development of automata, the
Baroque period, beginning in the 17
th
century, witnessed a revolution in instrumentation
– in the invention of new perception-enhancing devices in particular, including the
anamorphic mirror. The microscope and the telescope brought to light invisible realms
that existed beyond the human scale, vast and as yet unexplored territories of material
being which, as we mentioned earlier, enchanted the likes of Robert Hooke. In the 1680s,

180
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. 1 edition. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2013.
133
the technically inclined monk Johannes Zahn conceived of using the magic lantern to
project the enlarged images of living creatures, a feat which proved to be of pedagogical
value as well as immensely engaging. According to Laurent Mannoni, Zahn replaced the
slides in the magic lantern with thin glass boxes in which he inserted insects, worms and
other small creatures; their magnified bodies, which featured organs and limbs that were
previously indiscernible, squirmed vigorously before the audience’s eyes
181
. This
animated spectacle was subsequently improved with a hybrid of the microscope and the
magic lantern, the solar microscope (1739-1768)
182
, a device that could project objects
from a scale even further removed from the naked eye.
These technologically mediated marvels were conducted in the context of a
continuous stream of invention of new apparatuses, whose operation sometimes revealed
the tantalizing existence of entirely new entities, which, thanks to the reliability of the
devices that produced them, could then be exhibited at will. Robert Boyle’s air pump
experiments, which demonstrated the existence of a vacuum separate from the “vacuum”
of air, were repeatedly staged throughout the 18
th
century. The itinerant showmen who
brought the experiment to Europe’s salons and bourgeois homes raised the stakes of the
scientific method to an excruciating level: a bell jar, in which a bird was placed, was
progressively deprived of air, while the audience watched aghast as life slowly left the

181
Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art Of Light And Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Translated by
Richard Crangle. 1 edition. Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter Press, 2000. 65
182
ibid, 126.

134
animal
183
. Eventually, more sophisticated, if less intuitively graspable experiments
identified the evacuated vital gas as oxygen. Both scientific entertainment and
entertaining science shared a public mission to make the unknown known by first of all
making it accessible to the senses – and therefore intelligible.
The increasing importance of the instrument as a knowledge producing
technology placed it at the center of the public’s expanding vision of the material world.
Davis Baird discusses how instruments whose function is to engender a specific effect
“exhibit a sense of material agency”
184
. They cause objects to happen. Baird includes in
this category Boyle’s air pump alongside more advanced apparatuses such as Michael
Faraday’s electric motor or the cyclotron (the first particle accelerator)
185
, but one can
also count the solar microscope and even Zahn’s magic lantern modification. This type of
apparatus does not simply implement abstract knowledge, it opens up a domain in which
a set of distinct, alien, phenomena can occur, effectively “revealing and creating a new
part of the world”
186
. While scientific instruments brought forth natural objects that
existed independently from them and could be verified by different means, other kinds of
technical equipment generated effects that were pure artifacts. For the audiences that
understood the distinction between these two types of devices and these two types of
objects, the pleasure lay in speculating about which belonged to which category. At stake

183
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
Education. Cambridge (Mass.); London: The MIT Press, 1996. 99
184
Baird, Davis. Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. 1 edition. University of
California Press, 2004. 43

185
These, respectively, produced electromagnetic and subatomic phenomena.

186
ibid, 49.

135
in this epistemic game was the picture of the world – what it contained, what belonged to
it, and what could legitimately or wishfully be conjectured about it. In the 1790s, a new
machine was causing a furor by promising interaction with another category of invisible
phenomena – the dead.
The fantascope brought to life the realm of the immaterial by producing what
were perhaps the first genuinely convincing projections of animated images.
“Fantascope” literally means “instrument for viewing ghosts”, but of course “phantasm”,
even at the time, was also interchangeable with dream and fantasy
187
, so that the device
can equally be understood as an instrument for visualizing the imagination. Etienne
Gaspard Robertson premiered it in 1797 for his phantasmagoria show
188
, an extravaganza
of attractions that was to remain popular, over the course of many iterations, throughout
the 19
th
century. The fantascope improved on the original magic lantern design by
introducing a dolly, thanks to which the fantascope could be wheeled forward and
backward to change the size of projected images, as well as a rack mechanism that made
it possible to change the focal length of the lens to keep the image in focus
189
(Figure 28).

187
“Online Etymology Dictionary.” Accessed May 18, 2015.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=phantasm&allowed_in_frame=0. This double use of
phantasm dates from the 12
th
century in France.
188
According to Mannoni, Paul Philidor, not Robertson, staged the first phantasmagoria in 1793. Complex
magic lantern shows that experimented with some of the phantasmagoria’s effects are recorded from the
1780s onward. Mannoni 2000, 137. Erkki Huhtamo in particular mentions the advances in theatrical
lighting, sound effects and stage machinery devised by the scenic artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg,
who pioneered a new genre of “mechanical theatre” in elaborate spectacles on Drury Lane in the 1780s.
Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles.
The MIT Press, 2013. 119-126
189
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box
to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001. 88. Mannoni. The Great Art Of Light
And Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. 154
136
Other modifications to the magic lantern that the fantascope exploited included a system
of levers, gears, and rotating shutters that manipulated the positions of the painted slides
placed behind the lens
190
. By applying black mattes to these transparencies and making
the images slide over one another in a deliberate sequence at varying speeds, the
lanternist could mechanically animate projections.

Fig. 28. Schemata of the fantascope. Etienne Gaspard Robertson.
Mémoires récréatifs. 1831. p. 326.

In his Letters on Natural Magic (1843), David Brewster, the physicist famed for
inventing the kaleidoscope, proposed a number of subsequent improvements to the
device, including introducing water, alcohol and other liquids of varying densities in
glass compartments with the painted slides, which would allow the slides to float up or
down into different layers of liquid. This would create distortion and dissolve effects in
the projected images, as well as animate their movement in a way that looked more fluid

190
Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art Of Light And Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. 118
137
and natural
191
. Elaborating on tricks like Johann Georg Schröpfer’s projections of faces
on smoke
192
, Robertson sought to abolish the framing effect of the screen by shining his
images on mirrors and translucent scrims, thin gauzes that he saturated in wax,
presumably to achieve a pearlescent sheen for the specters
193
. To the audience, it seemed
that luminous ectoplasmic figures hovered above the ground, sank into the floor, or even
more terrifyingly, swooped down from the darkness above. As masked performers
mingled with the guests and solid objects were illuminated to appear indistinguishable
from the projections, spectators could never be entirely sure if they were face to face with
material reality or with an illusion. Robertson staged the phantasmagoria in the ruins of
the Convent of the Cappucines In Paris, creating a gothic décor for a consummate
immersive experience that involved dramatic atmospheric elements, including rain,
strident sound effects, incense, as well as electrical sparks that illuminated vapor clouds
to simulate a thunderstorm. The “plaintive and funeral” tones of a glass harmonica
floated over the scene, putting the final touch on the aura of otherworldliness
194
. Before
entering the room where the phantasmagoria was staged, visitors were invited into an
exhibition of “scientific” curiosities to ratchet their sense of anticipation. The attractions

191
Brewster, David. Letters on Natural Magic. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843. 80
192
Grau, Oliver. “Remember the Phantasmagoria! Illusion Politics of the Eighteenth Century and Its
Multimedial Afterlife.” In MediaArtHistories, edited by Oliver Grau. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press,
2007. Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. 99. Apparently
Schröpfer genuinely believed he was conjuring spirits; he ended one of his performances by committing
suicide, promising to resurrect himself afterwards.
193
Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century.
Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 148
194
Robertson, E. G. (Etienne Gaspard). Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-
aéronaute E.G. Robertson. Paris : Chez l’auteur et à la Librairie de Wurtz, 1831. 211-212, 282
138
of this chamber included anamorphic paintings of fantastical subjects, deforming mirrors
(Figure 29), optical toys and an empty glass box that answered visitors’ questions with a
disembodied voice, courtesy of a concealed ventriloquist
195
. In this antechamber
Robertson also performed morbid experiments in “galvanism”, electrocuting the bodies
of recently dead animals to make them jerk and twitch in a parody of lifelike
movement
196
.

Fig. 29. Rear and frontal projection, using two fantascopes, to make a figure
appear to grow in a mirror. Etienne Gaspard Robertson. Mémoires
récréatifs. 1831. p. 343.

For a public still reeling from the extreme violence of the French Revolution,
contemplating thus the thin line between life and death must have been particularly
poignant. To further salt the wound, Robertson would bring back such victims and
executioners of the Terror as Marat, Robespierre and other prisoners judged by the
revolutionary tribunals, and have them terrorize the audience as blood-soaked ghouls
197

(Figure 30). At other times, beloved figures of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire and

195
Mannoni. The Great Art Of Light And Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. 160

196
Robertson, E. G. (Etienne Gaspard). Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-
aéronaute E.G. Robertson. 285.

197
ibid, 217, 219, 283.

139
Rousseau were granted a poetic apotheosis: "the shades of the great men crowded around
a boat and crossed the river Styx; then, fleeing the celestial light a second time,
imperceptibly wandered away to lose themselves in the immensity of space."
198
These
visions seemed to throw certain spectators in an ecstatic trance where religious sentiment
mixed freely with a mystic flavor of Cartesian skepticism. As one observer reports of his
experience in an article reviewing the show:
"O world! What are you? Have I touched you or are you but a shadow? When will
our senses learn to judge from their own illusions? Here I fall in an indefinite
dream, while all these changing ghosts, mobile, aerial, pass in front of my gaze;
and so it is that everything passes, will pass, and has passed."
199

Fig. 30. Robertson’s phantasmagoria. Fulgence Marion and Charles
William Quin. The Wonders of Optics. 1869.

Operating at the intersection of political spectacle, traumatic memory and
existential awe, the phantasmagoria was a medium in both the aesthetic and supernatural
sense, adept at using the shades of the dead to establish a direct communication with the
spirits of its audience. In his memoir, a picturesque apologia of his career at the border
between science and entertainment, Robertson argued that the phantasmagoria

198
ibid, 282-283. Author’s translation.

199
ibid, 306. Author’s translation.
140
predisposed the spectator to accept the truths of experimental science, by impressing
upon her mind the incontrovertible, spectacular force of unusual physical phenomena.
The supernatural was a pretense that served the purpose of improving the suggestibility
of the audience’s imagination, all the while tendering an admonishment to the spectators
not to let their imagination lead them astray into false belief.
"Has one understood...that it is possible to realize these illusions, and that the
progress of science seems to defy the caprice of the most fecund imagination?... It
is thus with the demonstration of all phenomena seized in nature; to accustom the
public to them, first accustom their eyes to them; do not claim that they are easy
to produce, show them, and you will be understood... It is in fact a useful
spectacle for man which can instruct him of the bizarre effect of the imagination,
when it unites vigor with disorder"
200

This curious argument in the end professes a belief in science’s capacity to uncover new
aspects of material existence that in their wondrous nature can equal or surpass the
debunked miracles of faith and occultism. As Robertson explained in his “prologue” to
his audience, solemnly declaimed once he had them captive inside the convent: "the goal
of the phantasmagoria is to familiarize you with extraordinary objects."
201
The new laws
that governed perception, Robertson seemed to promise, had not impoverished the texture
of experience; on the contrary, it had been newly enchanted, imbued with a potential that
exceeded even the powers of the imagination. The Enlightenment audience at the close of
the 18
th
century, scarred by the Terror, readily recovered a supposedly de-legitimized
spirituality in the principles of science that made possible the optical engineering at work
in the fantascope. In dubbing his oeuvre a “science of effects”, Robertson himself

200
ibid, 146, 147, 278. Author’s translation.

201
ibid, 282. Author’s translation.
141
theorized the alchemy he was achieving between belief and sensory immersion. The
fantascope appeared an omniscient machine, a sort of telescope for the imagination, a
“device that re-presents representation itself”
202
. With it, the phantasmagoria justified the
presence of the fantastical in the real and made fantasy a reality; in the words of Deleuze,
“neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion
itself…tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces."
203

The phantasmagoria shifted away from its tone of credulous skepticism in the
course of the 19
th
century, as new technologies emerged that appeared to reach, beyond
the domain of the invisible, into the realm of the immaterial. After the invention of the
telegraph in the 1840s, it seemed materiality was gifted with a plasticity whose limits
were as yet unknown. If electricity enabled a message to be transmitted almost
instantaneously across vast distances, what other physical forces might be discovered
whose powers transcended time and space? In his analysis of the relationship between
telegraphy and the Spiritualist movement, Jeffrey Sconce remarks, “the spiritual
telegraph’s contact with the dead represented, at least initially, a strangely “logical”
application of telegraphy consistent with period knowledge of electromagnetic
science”
204
. The medium herself was envisioned as a human lightning rod, channeling
metaphysical currents through her body. In the 1850s, the talented escape artists William

202
Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media. 1 edition. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. 75. Kittler is
more precisely referring to the magic lantern.
203
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 143
204
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. 2nd edition.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2000. 29
142
and Ira Davenport exploited this new imaginary iteration of the perceptible imperceptible
by staging exuberant spiritualist séances. The brothers would have audience members tie
them in complicated knots and lock them in two cabinets. Then, instruments and other
objects coated in phosphorescent oil would appear to float about and wreck havoc
amongst the patrons.
"In the darkness, the glowing streaks of light were seen to rise in the air and move
through the room in weird, luminous curves. As the instruments moved past the
spectators they ruffled their hair, bumped their noses, or created a sudden draft...A
sort of controlled bedlam haunted the dark room. Hats and coats were pulled away
from guests…”
205
.

This case of the fraudulent séance reflects the spectacular culture of the time, which, pre-
figuring the anxiety around modernity’s shocks to consciousness and the increase of
violent stimuli, evinced a new concern for the body’s vulnerability vis a vis unseen
energies.
If Robertson’s phantasmagoria made visible a hypothetical scenario in which the
living could observe the dead, later phantasmagorias tended to present situations in which
either an audience member or a performer was attacked or even effaced by the dead.
These scripts were facilitated by a new trick in the show’s arsenal of illusions, the
Pepper’s Ghost effect, invented by John Pepper and Henry Dircks in 1863. It essentially
consists of placing a brightly illuminated subject (or object) in an otherwise darkened
room adjacent to the stage and reflecting them in a half-silvered mirror placed at a forty
five degree angle in front of the audience. Since the mirror is transparent as well as

205
Steinmeyer, Jim. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to
Disappear. Da Capo Press, 2004. 51-53
143
reflective, this creates the impression that a hovering, translucent figure is appearing on
stage.

Fig. 31. Cabaret du Néant. Albert Allis Hopkins.
Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions. 1901.

In the performance of the “Cabaret du Néant” (the Cabaret of Nothingness), guests were
invited to lie down in coffins, which were placed in a darkened restaurant in lieu of
tables, then wrapped in white sheets (Figure 31). There, before the eyes of the rest of the
diners, they faded away and in their place, in the coffin, skeletons gradually emerged
206
.
This uncanny superposition of dead/alive proceeded back and forth, entangling the
unwitting performers in a kind of metaphysical ping-pong. The stage magician Henri
Robin’s routine “The Demon of Paganini”, on the other hand, created pleasurable frissons
by subjecting the body to ectoplasmic invasion. Tapping into the romantic sensibility the

206
Hopkins, Albert Allis. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography.
London: Munn & Company, 1901. 55-56. Nadis, Fred. Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and
Religion in America. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 15

144
phantasmagoria had been so instrumental in defining
207
, it delivered an affecting
metaphor for the “mad genius” of Niccolo Paganini, the virtuoso violinist who died in
1840. An actor portraying Paganini, “tall, gaunt, with flowing locks, and dressed in
shabby black”
208
reclined on a couch. A devil dressed in red slowly appeared, climbed
onto his stomach, and there began to play a demented violin solo. In spite of the desperate
Paganini’s attempts to evade him, the devil kept gleefully dancing on top of him.
Ensconced in the Pepper’s Ghost apparatus, a second actor was in fact performing as the
devil out of sight of the audience, while a third played the violin that was actually
producing the melody.
Like electricity earlier, x-rays, after their discovery in 1895, also proved amenable
to a spiritualist interpretation. One performance mentioned in a catalogue of magic
illusions published in 1901 revives the phantasmagoria’s roots in scientific
instrumentation. It involved employing an induction coil to produce x-ray illumination in
order to transform spectators into ghosts (Figure 32). Porcelains, enamels and other
materials when coated in certain chemicals become luminous under the action of x-
rays
209
. By having an audience member come onto a pitch-black stage and sit at a table
laid out with glowing dinner plates, glasses and cutlery, the remaining spectators could
enjoy watching an invisible diner cutting his meat, pouring wine, and lifting food that

207
Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical
Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26–61. Castle analyses the phantasmagoria as literary symbol, tracing its popular
use in the 19
th
century as a term that evoked a specifically undisciplined and creative interiority.
208
Evans, Henry Ridgely. The Old and the New Magic. Open Court Publishing Company, 1909. 98
209
Hopkins, Albert Allis. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography.
London: Munn & Company, 1901. 99

145
disappeared into an invisible mouth. The spectral effect was made even more convincing
by the fact that the rays, of course, can pass through solid objects: any figures or props
placed behind the diner that were adequately treated to reflect them would also be visible.
In the course of this experiment, the subject was both metaphorically annihilated and
literally placed in physical danger – though that later fact would not have been
recognized at the time.

Fig. 32. The X-ray séance. Albert Allis Hopkins.
Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions. p. 97-98

These phantasmagorias played with the audience’s expectations of spiritualist
séances, titillating their guests by showing subjects crossing to “the other side”. What if,
these shows implied, instead of merely communicating with the dead, one could follow
them into the unknown, beyond the unbridgeable demarcation that divided the animate
from the inanimate? What would the spectator see there? In the x-ray illusion and the
“Cabaret du Néant”, the spectator’s absence from the perceptual horizon of his fellows
146
testifies to his ability to visit and observe a sensorial elsewhere. Perhaps – if we follow
the script of the “The Demon of Paganini” – it is to the unmapped spaces of the
imagination that he is being transported; it is into his own interiority that he is being
pulled.
As in the case of Robert Houdin’s orange tree illusion, these spectacles summon a
phenomenological alterity for the spectator, allowing her to entertain the thought that she
is experiencing profound transformations in the ontological fabric of space and time.
They enact a sensible fiction that the audience can step into as if it were Alice’s Looking
Glass country
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. The devotee of the phantasmagoria is transformed into an
interdimensional voyager, able to cross back and forth between different, even
incommensurable perceptual realities. While the subjects in these performances are
pushed or vanished from the stage, the objects that surround them behave with an eerie
autonomy. Just as the spectators have stepped into the jurisdiction of the inanimate, the
inanimate have crossed over into the domain of the living. Silverware uses itself, the
Davenports’ instruments play with the audience instead of being played – the great
attraction of the séance and the late 19
th
century phantasmagoria is the opportunity to see
objects move under the volition of “spirits”. But isn’t the phantasmagoria’s ghost the
same unseen pretext that animates other self-moving objects, like the automaton?

210

For the exploration of the reader’s experience of an alternate or virtual reality cultivated by science
fiction and fantastical literature, beginning in the mid 19
th
century, see Saler, Michael T. As If: Modern
Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford University Press, 2012.

147
The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland achieves a synthesis of the phantasmagoria’s
capacity to project an extra-sensible domain of experience with the aesthetic of the
operational that characterizes stage magic and animation. The Haunted Mansion is a
“dark ride” – a type of attraction in which visitors ride railcars that are threaded through a
enfilade of spaces originally populated with costumed actors, decorated sets, props,
mechanisms that disburse a panoply of pyrotechnic and kinetic effects, and often
included either panoramic paintings or projections. The original dark ride, “A Trip to the
Moon”, premiered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. It was
re-located to Coney Island when Luna Park opened in 1903. In “A Trip to the Moon”
passengers boarded a fanciful airship called the Luna III modeled after the spacecraft in
Jules Verne’s story, and traveled through the skies to a lunar cave inhabited by singing
and dancing “Selenites”
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. As the genre took off, other such rides eventually built at the
Coney Island parks included “The Harem”, the intimate “Tunnel of Love”, the religiously
themed “Hell's Gate”, and “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea”, in which visitors
encountered mermaids and other freakish sea creatures, glided beneath ice bergs, and
glimpsed the aurora borealis
212
. Lauren Rabinovitz refers to Coney Island’s attractions as
“Erector Set worlds”
213
, and these mechanized microcosms do seem to actuate the same

211
Immerso, Michael. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. Rutgers University Press, 2002. 61
212
Immerso, Michael. Coney Island. 64. Rabinovitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland. 101. Ironically, the
Dreamland park actually burned down in 1911 after carnival workers accidentally ignited a fire in the
Hell’s Gate ride.

213
Rabinovitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity.
Columbia University Press, 2013. 62
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procedural logic and materially expressive interface Seymour Papert recognized in his
childhood toy.
This is particularly true of the Haunted Mansion, a much more technologically
integrated dark ride that opened in 1969, fifty years after Coney Island’s heyday. The
Haunted Mansion was an early implementation of the “Omni-mover” system, family-
sized vehicles capable of tilting in every direction and performing 360 degree turns, that
Disney introduced at the 1964 World's Fair in New York
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. These “Doom Buggies”
whisk visitors through the tenebrous spaces of the Mansion with seamless, spectral
effortlessness, instilling the impression that the spectator is being weightlessly conveyed
in a transparent bubble. In fact, the Doom Buggy only allows the spectator to observe in
the direction it has been programed to face at any given moment – in this manner the
infrastructure of the illusion is hidden from view and the integrity of its fantasy is
maintained.
The Haunted Mansion is a process-based object. Propelled through the
information space of the dark ride machine, the visitor encounters a local animus that
enters in dialogue with her, addressing her not only through the deep-voiced barker and
the pandemonium of cackling, singing ghosts, but through the silent speed of the
omnidirectional Doom Buggy, and the darkness which completely hides the shape and
extension of the rooms she traverses. This precisely articulated, dizzyingly complex
system is strikingly analogous to Deleuze’s concept of the “ideal” Baroque machine,
namely a machine so complex that it is “composed of parts that are themselves

214
Ndalianis, Angela. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. McFarland, 2012. 68
149
machines.”
215
This effect is compounded by the fact that this roboticized phantasmagoria
eschews human participants in the real-time creation of its effects: all of its performers
are digital automatons.
As a result, the spectator feels herself processed – in a metaphorical as well as a
logistical sense – by this animated machine, the track of the Omnimover with its
ambulant queue of Doom Buggies recalling a mechanical digestive track. The Haunted
Mansion is a system that animates objects and that, conversely, turns subjects into
functional parts of itself, summoning the specter of an infinite artificial organism. The
spectator is playing out an engineer’s fantasy of observing an automaton from the inside
– of entering it rather than standing at a distance. She is not only accompanying in
imagination the turning of Papert’s erector set gears, she is physically moving with the
gears. It is a radical perspective that it would be a mistake to simply equate with the
image of the assembly line worker of the type encountered in Charlie Chaplin’s famous
sequence in Modern Times (1936), when he is caught in a giant mechanism and twirled
through a series of cogs like a human bicycle chain (although in that particular visual gag
the astonishing expressiveness of Chaplin’s body certainly meets its match in the
expressiveness of the whimsical and cartoonish machine, and they appear to be partners
in crime as much as mortal foes). The spectator “trapped” in the Haunted Mansion is a
witness to the machine – even one might say, a witness to the interiority of its
automatism.

215
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 8

150
This interiority is pleasurably other, in a way that deconstructs the familiar
domestic trope of the house and turns it into a space of phenomenological disorientation.
Like the house containing an infinite maze in Mark.Z. Danielewski’s experimental novel
House of Leaves (2000), this haunted machine is an inside divided from (and larger than)
its outside. The ride actually exists in a soundstage situated beyond the borders of the
Disneyland berm, which the visitors enter through an underground passage masquerading
as a moving room. The New Orleans-styled colonial façade, tucked in a disquietingly
silent zone in the otherwise music-saturated landscape of the park, is the visible entrance
meant to conceal the real location of the ride.

Fig. 33. Inside the Haunted Mansion: a confusing, omni-directional space.
Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion Trailer. 2010.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWQK6S9hYSo.

Once inside, the visitor is not in a house but rather at sea in a jumble of house fragments,
where hallways, staircases and rooms are assembled in a faux-Dada fashion
216
,
disappearing into overhead gloom, or breaking off at strange angles (Figure 33). Room
after room, over mezzanines and down twisting tunnels, the dark ride presents an

216
Of course, the layout of the space in the Mansion serves a rigorous purpose in the technical
infrastructure of the illusion.
151
accordion-like iteration of picturesque scenes, dislocated but tessellated tableaus that
progressively come together to sketch an impressionistic afterimage in the visitor’s mind.
Often the décor of decaying furniture gives way to an underground grotto or an “outdoor”
location such as a cemetery where all walls become invisible, before re-materializing as
an interior, troubling the spectator’s mental schema of “inside” and “outside”.
Before they step into the Doom Buggies, visitors are herded into a claustrophobic
elevator – an invisible voice chortles, “this chamber has no windows and no doors” – that
starts to stretch downward, revealing that the smiling subjects depicted in portraits on the
wall are in fact about to be snatched by the jaws of death (Figure 34).

Figure 34. The stretching elevator at the entrance of the Haunted Mansion.
The ceiling is actually a projection on a scrim screen that, once the “elevator” has
arrived, reveals a hanged man swinging in a flash of lightning.
Copyright davelandweb.com 2009.

This plastic transformation of what initially feels like a solid wood structure announces to
the spectator that she should expect further simulated violations of the laws of physics.
She is sealed inside the illusion as in a tomb, compounding the sensation that she has
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crossed over into a different ontological realm. As she moves deeper into the labyrinth,
the Pepper’s Ghost illusion is multiplied ad infinitum. This includes a “grand ballroom”
peopled with whirling specters: hanging off chandeliers, drinking from glasses, and
playing the organ, cavorting with a bedlam intensity in every direction. Spaces are tricked
to appear vertiginously open-ended or disconnected from the others. The ride’s “endless
hallway”, for example, uses a scrimed mirror placed at the end of a corridor to make the
far wall disappear entirely, while a lone candelabrum (its side that faces the mirror
painted black to avoid being reflected) floats down the hallway into oblivion. The
“Madame Leota” set reproduces the Davenport brothers’ scripted séance mentioned
earlier, as instruments and mementos float around the talking head of the medium,
imprisoned inside a crystal ball. Surreal vignettes flicker by: dead monarchs playing on a
see-saw, busts bursting into song, and, as the Doom Buggies suddenly turn to face a trick
mirror, ghosts sitting on the laps of the guests, blowing balloons like children at a
birthday party (Figure 35).

Figure 35. The Haunted Mansion phantasmagoria. The specters are a mix
of Pepper’s Ghosts and projections mapped on animatronics. www.pastemagazine.com.
153

These translucent apparitions interact convincingly with the solid objects and
even the guests in these amusing tableaux vivants, an effect realized by having
animatronic props programmed to coordinate with the movement of the projected figures.
This effect actually contradicts our phenomenological expectation of how different orders
of matter ought to interact with one another: “dispersed gas” should not be able to “lift”
solid plates. This lack of physical verisimilitude has the effect of shoring up the illusion
instead of weakening it: according to the fantasy logic of the attraction, as spectators we
know that ghosts “can” lift cutlery, and if they failed to do so, we would deduce that were
not “real” ghosts – that they were not convincing illusions. The spectator of the attraction
has very concrete expectations for the behavior of something that does not actually exist.
By placing the visitor at the center of an projective machine that overturns the
physical parameters of conventional space – erasing sharp edges with judiciously-placed
shadows, vaporizing mass with projection effects – , the Haunted Mansion realizes the
phantasmagoria’s ambition as an attraction, to define a “…principle of co-extensive space
– (as) a space that illusionistically connects with and infinitely extends from our own"
217
.
The voluble ghosts, trailing as they do visual, aural, and almost tactile evidence, achieve
a degree of phenomenological depth that blurs the line between their status as objects of
fantasy and their status as physical objects in space. The superimposed, alive/not alive
figure of the ghost is a mirror image of the automata that also populate the attraction, a
machine endowed with soul, realizing the 19
th
century literary trope of the mad scientist’s

217
Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, Mass.;
London: The MIT Press, 2005. 361. Ndalianis is actually referring to Baroque art, whose practice of spatial
illusion she argues is continued and refined in the theme park.
154
laboratory or even the toymaker’s workshop, whose magical dolls become animated at
night
218
. Together the specter and the automaton evoke the protean potential of
materiality’s textural aspect – from improbably plastic and dispersed to improbably dense
and complex, but both equally animate. This effect, in concert with the spectator’s radical
perspective from the interior of the Haunted Mansion machine, which unfolds into the
unheimlich/unhomely spaces of the dark ride, demonstrates a virtuosic articulation of the
attraction’s language of material agency.

The 19
th
century attraction capitalized on the spectacular aspect of technological
innovation. Automatic mechanisms specifically became purveyors of unprecedented
effects that opened up new possibilities for the actualization of the imaginary. In this
sense fantascopes, phenakistoscopes, stage magic automata, amusement park dark rides
are instruments, apparatuses whose purpose is not to reveal or measure scientific
phenomena, but to produce “impossible” fictions. Their alchemical operations include
conjuring phantoms from thin air, life and motion from paper figures, and the
manipulation of time, gravity, and the physics of texture. That these illusions in no way
duped viewers on an epistemological level reveal the philosophical force of these

218
see Kuznets, Lois R. When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and
Development. Yale University Press, 1994. Kuznets discusses the trope of the magical automaton in the
tales of the fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann. See also Mulvey’s discussion of the uncanny and the automaton in
Hoffmann’s The Sandman in Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.
Reaktion Books, 2006. 47-51

155
apparent transformations – these mechanisms sensibly realize a hypothetical vision of
material being, in the process enjoining spectators to imaginatively project themselves
into a domain of ontological alterity.
In the next chapter, we will examine the evolution of digital visual effects. Within
this constellation of experiences, we will see the machine that is the attraction adopt a
mode of flexible re-configuration that will offer increasing options in terms of its ability
to process and organize visual information. The different technical choices involved in
the systematization of the production of the spectacular image have a domino effect on
the aesthetic structures of the cinematic illusion. In the course of this attraction’s
historical exploration of its own technical process, it will develop procedures for the
generation of entire worlds of heightened material complexity, and in doing so deepen the
spectator’s phenomenal knowledge of the material world, as well as refine her curiosity
for the possibilities of “otherness” latent in the material imagination.

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CHAPTER 3. ALGORITHM AND WORLD:
THE DIGITAL ADVENTURE OF VISUAL EFFECTS

The Power of Unreality:
cinematic illusion and the red herring of the immersive interface

The crowds that flocked to judge the quality of Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid hoax or to
see how convincingly the cinematograph animated actualités enjoyed a sophisticated
connoisseurship of the logic of such attractions: they came to be amazed, but they also
critically evaluated the attraction to determine whether it was, in fact, genuinely amazing.
In order to astound, the attraction had to propose first a beguiling fiction, one that broke
sufficiently with the laws of everyday experience to provoke the requisite emotional
intensity: the artificial life of Houdin’s orange tree, Robertson’s communication with the
dead, the infinitely elastic limbs of Fleischer’s characters. Secondly the attraction had to
preserve the integrity of the fiction by constructing a masterfully executed illusion. The
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success of the illusion depended on obvious factors, like the proper functioning of the
technology involved, but more importantly, on the design of the sequence of steps that,
bit by bit, assembled the fiction and established its sustainability in the mind of the
viewers. Houdin’s growing mechanical orange tree would not have impressed without the
legerdemain with the handkerchiefs and the eggs that established the performance’s
theme of reversal of natural laws. The phenakistoscope would not delight the way it does
without the spinning mechanism that allows for the gradual acceleration of the still
images, which makes the moment when they suddenly animate seem unique and
inexplicable. The Haunted Mansion would not feel adequately phantasmagorical if the
spectator were not enfolded in a glowing darkness that made it impossible to understand
how space in the dark ride was physically articulated, thereby heightening her sensation
of becoming trapped inside a place that had no physical connection to the outside world.
In this sense, the phenomenological verisimilitude that undergirds the effectiveness of the
19
th
century attraction is not based on representational fidelity or even spatial
immersiveness, although both can certainly play a vital role in the facilitation of make-
believe, as shown by the diorama or the Coney Island amusement park. It is more directly
dependent on the compilation and execution of a technical process that sets up the
necessary conditions for the illusion to be convincing, conditions that are specific to the
imaginary material transformation the attraction purports to accomplish.
This conclusion runs counter to a common assumption that pervades the discourse
around the teleology of media spectatorship, namely, that spectatorship and the media
platforms that typically construct the experience of spectatorship are defined by a quest
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for complete sensorial immersion, a degree of simulation that would effectively dissolve
the boundaries between real life and illusion. André Bazin brought this idea to the fore in
relation to film, by proposing that the moving image naturally tended towards the
realization of an ideal of “total cinema”
219
. If cinema is a record of reality that
reproduces certain salient features of being in the world (movement, sound), then total
cinema represents the medium’s next logical step, which is to become experientially
indistinguishable from reality. The indexical fidelity that the camera inscribes must be the
precursor to a transparent, all-seeing medium that would abolish both the
phenomenological and the epistemological distance between spectator and spectacle.
Jean-Louis Baudry’s influential “apparatus” theory subsequently suggested that
cinema was already totalizing in its psychological effect on the spectator. He specifically
situated the erasure of the boundary between lived reality and illusion in film’s projection
mechanism, which “captured and captivated”
220
the spectator’s attention to the extent that
the screen-space achieved a “hallucinatory” degree of presence. Baudry is frequently
criticized for the simplistic one-way relationship he depicts between the apparatus and the
viewer, with the former exercising ideological control over the later in a fixed perspective
set-up he explicitly compares to Plato’s cave. However, Baudry’s version of the idea of
total cinema is more intriguing than this metaphor of false consciousness might suggest.
He in fact argues that the spectator’s immersion in the “virtual image” of the film screen

219
Bazin, Andre, Jean Renoir, and Dudley Andrew. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Translated by Hugh Gray.
Rev Ed edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. p. 20-2

220
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Translated by Alan
Williams. Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (December 1974): 39–47. p. 43

159
translates into a kind of empowerment for the subject. Through the cinematic apparatus,
the spectator’s fantasies take on a validating concreteness that allows them to transcend
their solipsistic origins in the subject’s interiority:
“…the optical construct appears to be truly the projection-reflection of a "virtual
image" whose hallucinatory reality it creates. It lays out the space of an ideal
vision and in this way assures the necessity of transcendence...The movability of
the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of
the "transcendental subject." There is fantasmatization of an objective reality
(images, sounds, colors) - but of an objective reality which, limiting its powers of
constraint, seems equally to augment the possibilities or the power of the
subject.”
221

More generally applicable than Bazin’s argument based on the medium-specific,
indexical relationship between film and celluloid, Baudry’s elaboration of total cinema
points to the old phantasmagorical roots of the cinematic spectacle, as well as its far
origins in the fantascope, an antecedent projector for the imagination. In the context of
the mythical power of the cinematic illusion, this implies that as much as the camera
substitutes the world for a picture of the world, it also substitutes the world for the
proprietary universe of the subject – wherefore the “hallucinatory reality’s” singular,
limited perspective. If the end-all of spectated media is to achieve flawless simulations,
then the goal is to simulate not only external reality, but the spectator’s own subjectivity.
At the hypothetical juncture of this transparent interface, the phantasmal world of the
viewer and actuality become conflated, creating the prototypical experience of the voyeur,
to recall Christian Metz’ term, the observer who looks outside only to find his interior
fantasies and obsessions reflected back at him.

221
ibid, 42, 44
160
In contrast to this teleology of the hermetic illusion, theoretically grafted onto the
cinematic apparatus, the attraction establishes a fundamentally different conception of the
virtual image. The fiction procedurally assembled by the attraction does not occlude or
replace reality; it offers itself as an alternative phenomenal possibility that is always
encountered through an intimate comparison with the un-mediated experience. The
illusory universe of uninhibited metamorphoses conjured by the the Fleischers’ animated
films is a fantasy, but it would be erroneous to reduce it to the wish-fulfillment of a
voyeur, the spy/eye in a specular, self-enclosed reality. On the contrary, it is as
completely uninterested in the perceptual verisimilitude of the world it creates as it is in
representing the psychological truth of the subject. The Fleischer’s protean menagerie are
stylized in the extreme, rendered in their essence as autonomous agents of animatedness.
The virtuality of the attraction in this sense does reside in a coherent, framed
totality, but it does not function as a substitute for the external world. It is more interested
in formulating a response to the open-ended nature of the objective. The world does not
contain dancing ghosts and it is not possible for bodies to stretch like chewing gum and
change their configuration at will. But if they could, how far would they stretch? What
are the sensible, intelligible mechanics of a rubber ghost transforming into a bottle that
pours itself? What does it look like? What does it feel like, pretend-actually? In this sense,
the virtual image assembled by the attraction corresponds less to the hallucinatory image
manufactured by Baudry’s projection apparatus and much more closely to Pierre Levy’s
definition of the virtual as potentiality, as a series of imaginary solutions to the questions
161
raised by the concrete. Or, to put it another way: the attraction offers technical, concrete
solutions to hypothetical problems.

It is important to address the myth of total cinema in the context of attractions, not
only to elucidate how attractions contradict the premise that spectatorship is ideally a
perfectly immersive or transparent experience, but because the idea of total cinema is
frequently reprised, in updated form, when discussing contemporary attractions
principally defined in terms of their “immersive” qualities. These discussions often arise
in the context of the debate over the specificity of digital media. The different types of
digital or new media that commonly circulate within the rhetoric of immersion range
from virtual reality head-mounted displays to new advances in stereoscopic cinema; other
strategies, such as augmented reality and ubiquitous computing (also known as “the
internet of things”), embed the mediated experience in the physical structure of the built
environment, and serve as conceptual umbrellas for such varied objects as large-scale
urban screens, smart thermostats, smart watches, gestural interface systems and
interactive architectural facades. Both virtual reality and augmented reality, in spite of
their conflicting strategies – which, respectively, involve excluding the external
environment from the virtual space and converting the external environment into a
virtualized space – are concepts build around the erasure of the interface, where the
interface is defined as the boundary between mediated experience and un-mediated
experience.
162
In this chapter I will discuss the attraction that has perhaps been the most
frequently associated with the idea of immersion in the popular imagination since the
beginning of the digital era, and which in many ways has come to define our
contemporary understanding of the attraction: visual effects, specifically, their secondary
origins
222
in the technical and creative developments pioneered by 1960s and 1970s
multimedia electronic art, media compositing software, and the physics simulation
algorithms that have established the current aesthetic standards for computer generated
images. Before plunging into this topic, however, it is necessary to address to what extent
the digital attraction participates in the legacy of “total cinema” and its contemporary
avatar, the logic of the immersive, transparent interface. Clearly, digital visual effects are
designed to be immersive, in the sense that they aim to provoke a sensation of heightened
presence, of experiential vividness that astounds and awes the spectator. As we will see in
the case of visual effects, this focus on immersion includes pursuing a strategy of
photorealistic simulation whose operative goal is to produce a la carte virtual
environments with even more detail than filmic images. Is there a way to talk about the
digital attraction’s pursuit of phenomenological richness and depth that does not lead us
to back to the myth of total cinema and the transparent interface?
The evolution of the idea of total cinema into the twin notions of virtual and
augmented reality is driven by a historical association of virtuality with the digital,
specifically the idea that digital media remediate older frameworks of practice in a

222
Its primary origin is of course in analog special effects, whose beginnings are contemporary with the
first decade of cinema. The iconic progenitor of that art is Georges Méliès, whose early career as a
magician inspired his transition into the mise en scene of famous trick films like a Trip to the Moon (1902).
163
runaway process that appears to convert the material infrastructure of distinct human
activities, from office work to artistic production, into recombinant workflows that share
a common basis in the immateriality of software. In How We Became Posthuman (1999),
Katherine Hayles summarized this zeitgeist by defining virtuality as “the cultural
perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns”
223
. This
uniquely digital virtuality replaces the older hardware of material efficacy and assumes
all its functions. Jay Bolter and Richard Gruisin apply this logic retroactively to the
history of media interfaces in general. They claim that in the same way digital platforms
remediate analog forms like film, television, and telecommunications, new media in
general encapsulate and rework the functions of antecedent technologies, as part of the
process of creating novel affordances. This process points in the direction of the
vanishing interface, “the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the
real”, where “the real is defined in terms of the viewer's experience: it is that which
evokes an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response”
224
. Like Bolter and
Gruisin, Oliver Grau locates this search for immediacy, of transcendence towards a noetic

223
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. 1 edition. Chicago, Ill: University Of Chicago Press, 1999. 13

224
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Kindle edition.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000. Bolter and Gruisin outline two complimentary strategies at work
in the history of media: immediacy and “hypermediacy”, terms that echo (or perhaps identify) the
categories of virtual reality and augmented reality I mentioned earlier. “Transparent digital applications
seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation. Digital hypermedia seek the real by
multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as
reality.” Immediacy is illustrated by the evolution from the realistic perspective of the Albertian pictorial
window, to the indexical fidelity of the photograph, to the more direct degree of participatory engagement
in video games and virtual reality. Hypermediacy is associated with remix, collage, the graphical user
interface, and the internet.

164
truth – what he calls the “suspen(sion) of the relationship between subject and object”
225

– in a deep history of media. In an exhaustively researched survey that covers Baroque
ceilings, 19
th
century panoramas, cinema, as well as head-mounted displays, Grau argues
that the “natural” interface, understood as a platform that strives to achieve a perfect
mapping “of illusionary information to the physiological disposition of the human
senses”
226
, can be traced back to antiquity. According to this narrative, digital virtual
reality environments constitute the predictable realization of the technical and
philosophical logic that characterize this type of interface.
More recently, Ann Friedberg and Alex Galloway have, while distancing
themselves from the rhetoric of remediation, reaffirmed the persistence of the trope of the
immersive interface as a virtual substitute for the material world by claiming that, as
interfaces have become ubiquitous, the unmediated experience of reality is in the process
of becoming erased. In an era that sees the multiplication of mobile devices and
embedded displays, Friedberg argues “the screen has become an actual substitute for the
(physical) window”, replacing our views on the world with virtual views
227
. Galloway
also contends that the interface has become transparent by reason of its digital ubiquity.

225
ibid, 17

226
Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Rev Sub edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT
Press, 2003. 14

227
Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, Mass.; London, England:
The MIT Press, 2009. 12. Friedberg actually draws a very clear distinction between the virtual spaces
created by framed media such as representational painting and film, and the frameless experience of virtual
reality applications, cautioning against the facile equation of the virtual with both the digital and immersive
media. She argues the window functions as a potent architectural metaphor for the ontological division
between imaginary space “on the other side” of the screen and the physical space of the spectator. She
argues that the digital era however, witnesses the multiplication of the window to the point that its
continued relevance as an index of the separation of the virtual from the physical could be put into question.

165
His rhetoric indicates that Hayles’ notion of virtuality – the perception that material
objects are constituted by patterns of information – seems to have migrated from
rhetorical motif to lived reality:
“…in order to be in a relation with the world informatically, one must erase the
world, subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, preemption, modeling, and
synthetic transformation. The computer takes our own superlative power over
worlds as the condition of possibility for the creation of worlds. Our intense
investment in worlds – our acute fact-finding, our scanning and data mining, our
spidering and extracting – is the precondition for how worlds are revealed. The
promise is not one of revealing something as it is, but in simulating a thing so
effectively that “what it is” becomes less and less necessary to speak about, not
because it is gone for good, but because we have perfected a language for it.”
228

According to Galloway, the summum of immersion does not just involve convincingly
substituting a simulated experience for an unmediated one, but rendering unmediated
experience more or less impossible. Inverting Baudrillard’s argument, Galloway suggests
that lived reality is not masked by self-multiplying simulacra, but instead “revealed” by
successive layers of digital operation and data production. The digital can achieve this
colonization of the real – where the real is defined as what we perceive to constitute the
external world – because it has “perfected” the language used to describe the real. Any
simulation it runs will have access to both an inexhaustible dataset and the means to
produce complete models of the real based on that information. Galloway evokes an
interface that has effectively disappeared as a result of that interface’s successful
reinvention of what the real is.
This argument in fact simply recapitulates one of the founding premises of our
current era of personal/mobile computing. The idea of the computer as a universal

228
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Kindle edition.

166
simulator dates back to 1977, when Xerox PARC researchers Alan Kay and Adele
Goldberg published their seminal vision for the Dynabook, a new “personal” computer
that would have "the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model"
229
, including
various visual and auditory media. This platform would effectively function as a meta-
medium that could contain all existing and not yet existing media
230
(as Bolter and
Gruisin will argue two decades later), a sort of Turing machine for perceptual experience:
“a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in and give out
information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems."
231
As we know,
Kay and Golberg’s reconceptualization of digital computing as an all-powerful
metaphysical operator had an enormous influence on the development of the human-
computer interface(s), as evidenced by the fact that today we use digital devices as
generators, recorders and distributors of multimedia content.
Recognizing this unprecedented capacity to simulate a great variety of objects and
the essential role that it has played in guiding the design of digital experiences, however,
does not mean that digital media in general share a common impetus towards becoming
transparent interfaces that would erase any felt difference between mediated and
unmediated life. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree draw attention to the fallacy of
applying this type of essentializing teleology to new media, frequently understood as “the

229
Kay, A., and A. Goldberg. “Personal Dynamic Media.” Computer 10, no. 3 (March 1977): 31–41. 31.
Kay and Goldberg were seminal computer scientists who essentially designed the basic features of
computer graphical user interface we are familiar with today.

230
ibid. 40

231
ibid. 31

167
assumption that each new medium actually mediates less, that it successfully "frees"
information from the constraints of previously inadequate or "unatural" media forms that
represented reality less perfectly”
232
. Taking this point into account, I argue that the myth
of a complete or natural interface in fact obscures the concrete operative parameters that
actually define the production of the digital image. Identifying the digital with an
indefinite capacity for total simulation limits the ways in which we can analyze how the
digital image is practically constructed to achieve specific, localized aesthetic effects –
effects that determine the spectator’s phenomenological experience of the digital
cinematic spectacle. However, in order to define an alternative mode of spectatorship to
the theory of the transparent interface, we must first examine more closely the nature of
the type of “immersive” illusion it purports to describe.

Bazin’s myth of total cinema, like the Dynabook designers’s, Bolter and Gruisin’s,
and Galloway’s conception of the transparent interface with regard to digital media, read
the destiny of film in its capacity to convincingly produce an array of phenomenological
indices which had previously never been combined in a single medium. But
phenomenological richness or detail is often theoretically mistaken for a complete
representation of the real, when in fact we are merely (!) face to face with a singularly
seductive illusion that succeeds in assembling a fiction from the expressive manipulation
of perceptual cues. To dispute the claims of his contemporaries that cinema could not be
art because it was an automatic reproduction of reality, Rudolf Arnheim analyzed point

232
Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey Pingree. “What’s New About New Media?” In New Media, 1740-1915,
edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003. xiii-xiv
168
by point how cinema diverged from natural perception, citing binocular vision, the
human ability to change focus in a given view and the preservation of spatio-temporal
continuity (among others) as features of our unmediated worldview that were clearly
violated on screen. The reason why moving pictures nevertheless managed to “fool” our
senses was because we ourselves mentally completed the information missing from the
picture in order to better suspend our disbelief in the illusion.
“According to an outdated psychology that is still deeply rooted in popular
thought, an illusion can be strong only if it is complete in every detail. But
everyone knows that a clumsy childish scribble of a human face consisting of two
dots, a comma, and a dash may be full of expression and depict anger, amusement,
or fear. The impression is strong, though the representation is anything but
complete... The reason it suffices is that in real life we by no means grasp every
detail…Thus we can perceive objects and events as living and at the same time
imaginary.”
233

In this last sentence, Arnheim is not suggesting that the spectator is holding back from a
wholehearted engagement with the cinematographic illusion by remembering that what
she is seeing isn’t real. On the contrary, the spectator is entirely preoccupied with the
effort of pretending that what she is seeing is there – her powers of visualization lend the
illusion its phenomenological thickness and substance. To return once again to Houdin’s
orange tree from Chapter 2, the magician’s audience saw oranges miraculously sprout
from a lifeless automaton because they wanted to believe that was what they were seeing,
and specifically because Houdin had masterfully set up the act in a way that made them
want to believe. Illusions do not operate by providing a sensation of unmediated

233
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957. 29.

169
experience or by convincing the spectator to entertain false beliefs about what is being
shown.
This epistemological game of cat and mouse between spectator and spectacular
image describes the attraction’s “projective illusion”. Projective illusion is a cognitive act
on the part of the spectator that, crucially, unfolds at a secondary degree of removal from
raw perception: "when we perceive a projective illusion, the manner in which we
perceive it involves entertaining the thought that we perceive it as real."
234
What does
“entertaining” an act of perception mean? Clearly, we are not representing the content of
the illusion to ourselves, in our mind’s eye, as we would a scene depicted in a novel. It is
more accurate to say that the illusion tenders us a phenomenological armature, which we
then clothe more fully in our own fiction.
This process differs substantially from the simpler mechanism of the transparent
interface, where perception of the illusory space replaces or merges with perception of
objective reality. According to that model, the relationship between perception and belief
is exclusively unidirectional: we believe in the objects of our perception. The assumed
factuality of this direct causation is understood to be the source of the sensation of
immediacy, of “immersion”, which we experience in the thrall of the simulation. It is in
the context of this simplistic model that spectatorship often gets interpreted as a lack of
critical distance. Projective illusions complicate this narrative, showing us that what we
believe or imagine constructs what we perceive. In a sense, we choose to see the illusion
and we chose the degree to which it appears convincing to us. The illusion appears to

234
Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 88, 119.
170
compel our belief, but only because it is us who are throwing ourselves wholeheartedly
into the activity of perceptually building the illusion for ourselves.
For the spectator, the epistemological difference, the gap, between what she is
actually seeing and what she wants to be seeing is the most phenomenologically
rewarding aspect of the spectating experience. This effort of active, imaginative
perception is qualitatively distinct from unmediated perception, and it is the element of
surprise or strangeness in this disparity that elicits both cognitive and affective
investment on the spectator’s part. Christian Metz has a felicitous name for this effect:
“the power of unreality”, a phrase that surreptitiously substitutes the original “impression
of reality” with which he titled his chapter. Although Metz discusses this effect in order
to justify his interpretation of the spectator as a voyeur, this term communicates an
important point regarding the phenomenology of the attraction independent of its context
in Metz’s theory:
“The power of unreality in film derives from the fact that the unreal seems to have
been realized, unfolding before our eyes as if it were the flow of common
occurrence… A representation bearing too few allusions to reality does not have
sufficient indicative force to give body to its fictions; a representation constituting
total reality, as in the case of the theatre, thrusts itself on perception as something
real trying to imitate something unreal, and not as the realization of the unreal”
235
.

Metz unfavorably compares the quality of the cinematic illusion with that of the theatre
(we assume he is referring to the “high art” tradition of theatrical realism, not popular
forms like vaudeville or the circus) because the later feels too real – it lacks the looking-
glass seduction of the true fiction. The perceptual alterity of the cinematic image sets up,

235
Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press,
1974. 6, 14

171
in effect, a competing reality, not a substitute reality – a conscious, self-aware type of
cognitive affect that Michael Saler identifies in the imaginative practice of readers of
science fiction and other consumers of complex fictional worlds. This “power of
unreality” is arguably what Deleuze is referring to when he describes the simulacrum not
as a copy, but as a “model of the Other”: it is the illusion’s irresistible, eye-popping
“otherness” that arouses our avid curiosity and draws out our gaze.

The power of unreality in cinema is the power of the fiction of the autonomy of
our imagined worlds. In this sense the cinematic spectator is the opposite of the voyeur –
not neurotically navel-gazing but joyously estranged. The experience of the film
spectator is, as Stanley Cavell points out, one of absence: the movie unfolds in her
presence but as something complete in itself – its “own” world – without her being
present to it. Our personal point of view, our identity as actors in the proprietary universe
that constitutes our lives is excised – and we ourselves momentarily forget we exist; or
perhaps to reprise Levinas’ language, we escape. This primary elision which is the
absconding of the spectator-as-self can be added to Arnheim’s list of the violations of the
laws of perception that occur in the cinematic illusion. Projecting herself in this fictional
ontology, the spectator is no longer weighed down by consciousness’ automatism of
assigning purpose to things, no longer compelled to detach objects from the world to
serve as the instrumental focuses of her own projects and attention. Instead phenomena
promenade across the screen, burgeon into existence, free from the confining orbit of the
172
spectator’s subjectivity – they effectively recapture their “toy-like uselessness”
236
. Cavell
describes this unreal state as “a world complete without me which is present to
me…nature’s survival of me.”
237
. The cinematic illusion is the idea, made flesh by the
imaginative perception of the spectator who constructs an entire world for it beyond the
frame, of this “other” nature, of a multitudinous totality that flourishes outside and
beyond us.
Moreover, examining the process by which this illusion is assembled reveals that
this new nature is constructed in “a pointillist manner”
238
: not in a smooth reveal but like
a magic trick, each element that is presented to the audience building upon a previous
element, like the balancing act of a house of cards. The recording of “reality” is in fact
the last stage in a pro-filmic process of monumental collage – in the production of visual
effects. It is in the special effects department that the unreal is assembled before it can be
realized. Kracauer in 1926 describes the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, Germany as a
gargantuan cabinet of curiosities strewn with the bits and pieces of these pro-filmic
fragments: matte paintings with forced perspectives, opulent facades that abruptly revert
to scaffolding at the limit of the camera’s field of view, fantastical rollercoaster-like rail
systems for dollied camera shots of a flying Faust (directed by F. W. Murnau), propeller-

236
Here I am emphatically describing the effect of the cinematic illusion on the spectator – and not the
experience of the filmmaker constructing the illusion, which of course is one of exhaustive control and
decision-making.
237
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition. Enlarged
edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. 160
238

Kracauer,
Siegfried.
“Calico-‐World.”
In
The
Mass
Ornament:
Weimar
Essays.
Cambridge,
Mass.:

Harvard
University
Press,
1995.

173
powered fog machines, hydraulic mechanisms for the unleashing of floods, elevators set
on fire (for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) (Figure 36).

Fig. 36. Filming Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) by Fritz Lang at
the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, Germany. 1929.
http://www.davidbordwell.net

Each wood and plaster lamppost or papier-mâché dragon of Die Nibelungen fame is a
synecdoche of a virtual world waiting in the wings to be actualized.
“A Bolshevist guardroom turns into a peaceful Swedish train station, which is
subsequently transformed into a riding school and today is used to store lamps. It
is impossible to tell what it will become next...The regime of arbitrariness does
not limit itself to the world as it is. The real world is only one of the many
possibilities that can be moved back and forth; the game would remain incomplete
if one were to accept reality as a finished product”
239
.

The fantasy of the film studio is its promise of access to the unlimited reaches of an
imaginary nature, a virtual plenum, of which our objective reality just happens to be the
instance we inhabit. The special effects department rolls out an unending series of

239
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Calico-World.” In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1995. 283-284.
174
alternatives, a great chain of hypothetical natures that await assembly in the studio’s
cavernous warehouse. Before Goldberg and Kay’s personal computer this infinitely
extendable stage already constituted a meta-medium of sorts – or perhaps a meta-nature.
The past, the future, the improbable, the present-tense of the realist drama can all be
simulated, then broken down into their constituent parts and repurposed for a different
simulation. Instead of bits and pixels, paint, metal, cloth are given instructions and
assigned their roles/values in a process that, like a computer algorithm, eventually results
in a solution or final state. Incidentally, even living beings are shuffled around, allocated
a precise location in the three dimensional coordinate system of the film set, and finally
rendered for a display. These intelligent agents are, technically, not artificial, but they are
functional parts of the machine of this imaginary cosmos. In another act of legerdemain,
actual inhabitants of nature are transformed into visual effects:
"Despite their inherent imperfections as creations of nature, (the animals) are the
most spoiled objects of the enterprise. The fact that they leap or fly without being
moved by a mechanism elicits delight, and their ability to propagate without the
help of obvious special effects seems miraculous. One would never have thought
these primitive creatures capable of this, so much do they seem like cinematic
illusions.”
240

The process that assembles the film image translates nature into the objective
unreality of the attraction. Theme parks are (in)famous for consummately exploiting this
transformation. However, in transporting their visitors to an alien nature, a nature-as-
playground
241
(critics might say an alienated nature), they simply reenact the logic of the

240
ibid, 285.

241
Sorkin, Michael. “See You in Disneyland.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and
the End of Public Space, edited by Michael Sorkin. Hill and Wang, 1992. 210.

175
cinematic image. The end-point of this journey towards a more astonishing and coherent
illusion is not a re-presentation of the realism of lived experience, but what Umberto Eco
calls “the perfection of the fake"
242
. The perfection of the fake is a challenge to the formal
standards that define the consensus on what constitutes normal experience, “the flow of
common occurrence” as Metz calls it. It implies that the parameters of our perception are
a choice, not a default setting. In which case, which becomes the more authentic,
participatory option, the real, or the unreal? A spokesperson for the entertainment
industry in Las Vegas once said when discussing the design of the landscape of a themed
hotel, “you get a very artificial appearance with a real rock”
243
. This remark can be
interpreted as expressing a frivolous obsession with the fake – Debord would certainly
argue that its author had lost touch with “concrete life”. I propose, however, that the
visual effect functions as an exemplary phenomenological interaction because it suggests
to the spectator that, unlike the “real” rock, that “other”, fictitious nature in which the
artificial rock resides is only one of many such potential natures open to exploration
244
. It
effectively suggests that there is no baseline to our encounter with the world, there are
only new encounters – encounters we, as spectators, chose.

242
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 44. Eco was commenting on
sensation he experienced during his visit to Disneyland and the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park near
Los Angeles: of being inside an illusion, even though he was travelling through an actual space populated
with objects and performers: “When there is a fake - hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent - it is not so much
because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent, but because the public is meant to admire the
perfection of the fake."

243
Ritzer, George. Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Pine
Forge Press, 2005. 102

244
unless that rock is collected in a cabinet of curiosities, of course, in which case it becomes a crystal-
object.

176

Archeology of the Digital Effect:
procedurality in 1960s-1970s transductive art

The story of visual effects in cinema, as Stephen Prince notes, has long been
occluded by a fixation on film as an indexical record of real life. In a composited image,
however, visual effects are necessarily “at home”
245
; they create the necessary conditions
for cinema’s fiction to take shape. This critical omission is attributed to the fact that the
most visible – and often the most poorly composited – effects were relegated to then
dismissed pop genres such as horror and science fiction, even though travelling mattes
(paintings or projections that create moving backgrounds or foregrounds) and miniatures
were used in films of all genres. The prominence visual effects have acquired in the last
twenty-five years, both on screens and in popular and critical discourse, is a result of the
digitization of the moving image, and the revolution in film production workflow that it
precipitated. Technical experiments such as Douglas Trumbull’s famous “star gate”
sequence for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which used a mechanical slit-scan photography rig
to create a seamless flow of abstract animation, drew attention to visual effects’ capacity
to become attractions in and of themselves, in excess of their diegetic role.
It took the arrival of digital technology, however, for the compositing workflow
that had always characterized the creation of visual effects to define the production of the

245
Prince, Stephen. Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality. Rutgers University Press,
2011. Kindle edition.
177
cinematic image in general. Long before cinema’s mainstream adoption of non-linear
editing software in the early 1990s, special effects engineers developed programmable
hardware that allowed them to build an image piece by piece from the ground up, instead
of capturing it as a singular, indexical totality. Although initially employed to design
spectacular scenes that have no correlate in actual space, this modular approach, in which
the image is conceptualized as a system of synchronically acting parts, eventually formed
the technical foundation for contemporary filmmaking. George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New
Hope (1977) was the first feature film that applied this digital process to its entire
production workflow. Lucas and his new Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) visual effects
company devised the Dykstraflex system for motion-control cinematography, a
computer-controlled camera whose movements could be programed and matched exactly
with previous shots, allowing the filmmakers to composite multiple shots of miniatures
and models with a flexibility not possible before
246
(Figure 37).

Fig. 37. Effects artists use the Dykstraflex digital camera rig to shoot a
miniature for Star Wars. John Dykstra, the designer of the system, is on

246
Turnock, Julie A. Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster
Aesthetics. Columbia University Press, 2014. 136.

178
the far left. Copyright ILM. www.siggraph.org.

Analog techniques like optical printing, in which projected film is re-photographed and
printed onto a film strip, effectively limited artists’ capacities to fine tune and experiment
with their effects shots, since they could not modify the original shot in real time. The
Dykstraflex rig allowed visual effects elements to be filmed as if they were actual objects
moving through space, with the free, continuous, tilting, rolling, panning and tracking
options previously available only for live action sequences. It extended the perspectival
plasticity already afforded by montage into the granular texture of the image
247
.
The tight shots in which the spectator hugs the tail end of a squadron of X-wing
fighters as they soar and swerve through the canyons of the Death Star maquette attest to
the novel affordances of this digital approach (Figure 38). In this sequence, the acrobatic
movement of the camera enables a thrillingly intimate proximity with the alien nature of
the space station. Whereas previous, non-digital effects shots tended to hold the camera at
a frustrating distance from the composited element, concealing it as a flat background,
here the visual effect is foregrounded as a dimensional, dynamic presence with which the
spectator directly identifies. As the spectator’s eye follows the starfighters in the virtual
space of the screen, she is in fact retracing the physical performance and trajectory of the
Dykstraflex camera crane system.

247
The object-oriented POVs favored by digital effects films like Star Wars recall earlier surrealist
experiments in representing alien forms of embodiment through montage. Maya Deren’s film At Land
(1944) notably creates the illusion of shrinking bodies, dopplegangers, and object gigantism simply through
the judicious use of jump cuts.
179

Fig. 38. The camera follows the point of view of the spaceship as it
swoops through the trench.
George Lucas. Star Wars IV: A New Hope. 1977.

ILM’s Dykstraflex rig transforms the “eye” of the camera into the body of a robot,
thereby implementing its transition from instrument of mechanical reproduction to
automaton. In doing so it made it possible for the cinematic image to redefine itself
according to its own autonomous rules for organizing the relationships between its
constituent elements – rules that could mimic the behavior of actual objects or emphasize
phenomenological insight into radically different experiences of material embodiment
248
.
ILM’s digital innovations in Star Wars advanced an alternative model for cinematic
representation that did not marry the image to an organic, indexically derived whole, but
codified it as a system of moving parts, a system of coordinated effects that could be
controlled in real-time.
The first steps towards motion control cinematography actually came out of
technology developed by avant-garde artists interested in what Jack Burnham would

248

Bukatman discusses spectators’ extreme sensations of embodiment as the result of the camera’s
“relentless movement of forward penetration” in plunging shafts and other vertiginous spaces as one of the
aesthetic signatures of science fiction films. Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and
Supermen in the 20th Century. 117.

180
come to call “systems aesthetics”
249
. Systems aesthetics was defined by a shift in
attention away from finished objects towards the procedures and processes that were
either employed in the design of art objects, or that set up modulable parameters to create
an open-ended aesthetic experience. The robotic Dystraflex camera represented a
successful commercial iteration of already on-going, contemporary experiments that
devised new forms of expressive materiality based on recombinant electromechanical
systems. Many disciplines, from film to installation art and theatre, converged on the
idea that objects and environments could be programed to interact in compound ways that
would lead to emergent aesthetic effects. Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy
demonstrated this possibility with kinetic sculptures such as the Light-Space Modulator
(1922-1930), a mechanical contraption of mobile grills and perforated geometric surfaces
that cast animated shadows on the wall, performing a never-repeating ballet of abstract
forms (Figure 39). Experimental filmmaker and composer John Whitney further
developed this modular approach to the moving image. He launched the field of motion
graphics in the late 1950s with a device that directly anticipated ILM’s system for motion
control cinematography, a mechanical computer built from the parts of a discarded
antiaircraft gun director that enabled multiple cameras to film rotating graphic patterns in
pre-programed sequences. The cameras and the patterns were mounted on a complex
system of rotating tables, whose motions could be synchronized in order to create a
variety of graphic compositions based on combinations between the patterns’ rate of

249
Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7, no. 1 (1968): 30–35.
181
rotation and the lateral movement, zoom, and shutter speed of the cameras
250
. The result
was an abstract flow of colorful kaleidoscopic evolutions, visual noise effects, and color
fields separating, multiplying and morphing into different arrangements, as exhibited in
his landmark film Catalog (1961) (Figure 43 and Figure 44). Based on this work,
Whitney founded Motion Graphics Inc. in 1960, producing title sequence animations for
films.
Whitney’s highly complex analog process for making his films was perhaps more
of an attraction than the animations themselves, which, though striking, strongly resemble
from a formal standpoint the abstract films of earlier experimental filmmakers such as
Hans Richter (Film ist Rhytmus: Rhythmus 21, 1921), Walter Ruttmann (Lichtspiel: Opus
1,2, and 3, 1921 -125) (Figure 40) and particularly Oskar Fischinger whose Circles
(1933-34) (Figure 41) and An Optical Poem (1938) (Figure 42), already feature many of
the motifs and transformations that characterize Whitney’s work, particularly the serial
doubling or “ghosting” of geometrical shapes. Whitney’s films stand out more forcefully
as exhibits of a new technical process – first motion control cinematography and later,
computer graphics –, where each film is only one of many possible permutations that can
result from the mechanical algorithm deployed to create the image. In this sense it also
differs from Moholy-Nagy’s sculptural animation generator, which, although capable of
combinatorial actions, is not programmable in the same way. Whitney’s animations are
above all the effects, the results or output of a set of programs, and in this they articulate

250
Youngblood, Gene, and R. Buckminster Fuller. Expanded Cinema. 1st edition. New York: E.P. Dutton,
1970. 208. In the 1970s Whitney switched to an entirely digital system, which allowed him to incorporate
more seamless, organic transformations of shape and line, as in Whitney’s film Arabesque (1975).

182
the procedural logic of the attraction in a way that Ruttmann’s and Fischinger’s films,
which are presented to the spectator as complete and stand-alone art objects, do not, in
spite of their formal homology.

Fig. 39.László Moholy-Nagy. Fig. 40. Walter Ruttmann. Lichtspiel: Opus 3. 1925
Light-Space Modulator. 1922-1930.

Fig. 41. Oskar Fischinger. Circles. 1933-34. Fig. 42. Oskar Fischinger. An Optical Poem. 1938

Fig. 43. John Whitney. Catalog 61. 1961. Fig. 44. John Whitney. Catalog 61. 1961.

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The close relationship between visual effects and systems aesthetics is in evidence
in the work of other artists who developed programmable hardware to coordinate
complex, polysensory interactions between networked objects. In the 1960s and 1970s,
these artists envisioned aesthetic production as a series of possible outputs from a system
that encoded the sending and reception of information between different parts of itself.
Their efforts can appropriately be described as “transductive art”, a term coined by
Robert Mallary, an early proponent of digital sculpture, to categorize works that employ
computing processes to articulate a “syntax of intermedia translation”
251
by relaying
signals between sensors and hardware platforms. This ethos was heavily influenced by
the development of cybernetics, a field originally based on the discovery of more
efficient protocols for communication in automated control systems
252
, and subsequently
re-imagined by mathematician Norbert Wiener as an interdisciplinary science that studied
self-regulating processes in both human and machine systems.
253

These cybernetic artists opened up their generative systems to real-time
interaction, further emphasizing that their art was not located in any final or finished
object, but in the procedures and parameters that made certain aesthetic results possible.
For example, Hans Haacke’s Photo Electric Viewer-Controlled Coordinate system (1968)

251
Mallary, Robert. “Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics.” Artforum 7, no. 9 (1969): 29–36. 30

252
explained in Claude Shannon’s seminal paper, “A Mathematical theory of Communication” (The Bell
System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948). The paper defined how
information is transmitted and interpreted by machine systems, essentially founding information theory and
laying the groundwork for the design of digital circuits.

253
See Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT
Press, 1961.

184
employed photoelectric sensors and a grid of infrared beams to coordinate the movement
of a visitor with the switching on and off of a series of light bulbs. As the visitor walked
through a room, lights on the wall spatially aligned with her body turned on, and those no
longer in alignment with her turned off, creating an effect of “slow, self-generated
stroboscopy”
254
. The attraction of the piece resides in the spectacle of path-tracing lights
but also, equally in the participant’s proprioceptive enactment of the system that
generates the visuals – a case of the human miming the machine that recalls how the
spectator’s gaze mimics the trajectory of the Dykstraflex motion controlled camera in the
Death Star fly-over sequence in Star Wars. The Pulsa research group at Yale’s School of
Art and Architecture devised similar kinetic light and sound environments that
programed a “random” function in their punch tape code in order to generate
unpredictable, emergent interactions between the subsystems of their installation
255
.
Variations V, a collaboration between engineers Billy Klüver and Robert Moog
and artists John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik and Stan VanDerBeek,
combined Haacke’s real-time approach with Pulsa’s serial production model of visual
effects by attempting to create a transductive polysensory aesthetic system. In this work,
dancers, video, film, radio, sensors and recording devices were networked via a central
control circuit. Directional photocells wired to tape recorders and radios were aimed at
stage lights. Each time the lights’ beams were blocked by the movements of the dancers,
it would trigger the tape recorders to play the sounds associated with that specific sensor;

254
Skrebowski, Luke. “All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke’s Systems Art.” Grey Room - (January 1,
2008): 54–83.

255
Mallary, Robert. “Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics.” Artforum 7, no. 9 (1969): 29–36. 30

185
the dancers could also produce auditory feedback by moving in proximity to antennas
that functioned as Theremin-type instruments
256
.

Fig. 45. Variations V. John Cage and Merce Cunningham.
1965. Copyright Cunningham Dance Foundation.

The improvisatory kinetic and auditory mechanics took place in the central portion of the
stage, while Paik’s and VanDerBeek’s projections of distorted video signals played the
“passive” role of ambient visual effects in the periphery. As seen in (Figure 45), the
technological infrastructure of the piece is foregrounded, and its performance is accorded
equal visibility with the dancers. The ensemble showcases the embodiment of the
electronic apparatus as much as it displays the technological enhancement of the human
bodies. Based on the evidence of this image, textual descriptions and an impressionistic
film montage by the NDR German television network documenting the piece’s
performance in Hamburg in 1966, it is impossible to do more than speculate on the

256

Dixon, Steve. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and
Installation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2007. 96-97. See also MediaArtNet.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/variations-v/
186
phenomenology of Variations V. However, the technical and visual layout of Variations
V suggests the impression of a system playing itself or playing with itself, and, in spite of
Cage’s and Cunningham’s by all accounts rigorous definition of its parameters of
variability, to a certain extent remaining impenetrable even to its human handlers. The
performers seem to be performing not for a spectator but for the system, enclosed by the
infrastructure behind the control panels or huddling over their instruments in
introspective concentration. Variations V, like Haacke’s and Pulsa’s installations, stages
its process as a spectacle – an effect, which, in its case, paradoxically results in an anti-
attraction. As such, the piece effectively demonstrates that not all spectacular exhibitions
of technicity participate in the logic of the attraction. The attraction’s mode of address, in
contrast to Variations V’s inward-looking system performance, is turned outward towards
the spectator, a movement mirrored by the spectator’s own engagement of her exteriority.
Jack Burnham reports that the audience reaction to systems aesthetics experiments
was often negative, claiming that contemporary critics frequently described the works of
engineer-artist collectives like Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.) as “feeble”, trivial

or inconclusive
257
. This dismissal at the time of these
experiments in the serial production of emergent sensory effects as a valid form of
aesthetic output has less to with, as Burham claims, the creative incompatibility of art and
technology and perhaps more to do with a failure to consider these works as potential

257
Burnham, Jack. “Art & Technology, the Panacea That Failed.” In The Myths of Information, edited by
Kathleen Woodard. Coda Press, 1980. Burnham claims that other transductive or cybernetic art exhibitions
such as “Cybernetic Serendipity” (London, 1968), “Software” (1969) and Billy Kluver’s, John Cage’s and
Robert Rauschenberg’s series of collaborations “Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (1966) were
generally poorly received both by critics and the public.

187
attractions (in the case of Variations V, the work in fact refuses to present itself as such).
Spectators’ reaction to these cybernetic showcases can be recontextualized by taking into
account the fact that any individual iterations of these artworks were, by virtue of their
nature as open systems, unfinished and contingent. The critics were being asked to judge
the aesthetic value of an algorithm by a reductive sample of its products. The interest of
the Pulsa and Klüver installations, as with Haacke’s, resides less in the actual visual,
auditory, kinesthetic patterns that do emerge than in the innumerable hypothetical
patterns that could emerge, which compose the virtual backlot of the effects that occur in
real-time. In these serendipitous effects generators the artwork is turned inside out to
reflect the perspective of Kracauer’s Neubabelsberg studio, for whom each film is but
one of many possible films that can be assembled from similar materials and processes.

Fig. 46. Japanese poster of the Pepsi Pavilion at the
1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan.
Copyright Harry Shunk and Janos Kender 1970.

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Other systems art efforts more explicitly addressed the spectator as attractions –
although this term was of course not employed by the artists themselves, who were trying
to legitimize their work in the eyes of a skeptical art community. E.A.T’s activity
culminated in the design of the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan
(Figure 46), a large-scale installation that was seen by millions of visitors. For Klüver,
the Pavilion was meant to function as a “total instrument”
258
that could play a
smorgasbord of effects. It was envisioned as a self-actuating poetic environment that
would stimulate visitors’ curiosity for phenomenological experimentation by encouraging
them to compare and contrast different flavors of sensation through repeated acts of
synesthetic transference between their bodies and an array of sensorial textures and cues.
To afford the spectators theoretically unlimited combinations of possible experiences, the
Pavilion was designed as a space whose physical properties could be electronically
controlled in real-time. It comprised a reactive cloud sculpture that changed its shape
based on the weather conditions in Osaka, holographic projections (achieved by
reflecting laser beams in vibrating mirrors), meandering sound-emitting “floats” and a
volumetric sound system, which transmitted snatches of ambient sound recorded at
different locations from wire coils embedded in the dome to sculptural objects the visitors
held up to their ears
259
. These concatenated attractions would fuse with each other,

258

Kluver, Billy. “The Pavilion.” 224.

259
Kluver, Billy. “The Pavilion.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort. Cambridge (Mass.); London: MIT Press, 2003. See also the documentary film by Eric Saarinen,
The Great Big Mirror Dome, 1970 (https://vimeo.com/24850126) and Packer, Randall. “The Pepsi
Pavilion: Laboratory for Social Experimentation.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film,
edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: The MIT Press, 2003.
189
separate, then join again to form hybrid phenomenal configurations, placing the viewer at
the center of a “magical” (according to a 1972 article by curator Jasia Reichardt)
260

theater of effects. The Osaka Pavilion efforts to achieve its aesthetic ambitions were
unfortunately hampered by technical and financial misfires: the project ran wildly over
budget, and during the course of the exposition its programming was taken over by its
sponsor, Pepsi, who deprived the collaborating artists of real-time control of the features
they had originally built into the experience.
Ultimately, the Pavilion’s model of imaginative participatory spectatorship finds
an expression in parallel avant-garde practices that, though contemporary with E.A.T.’s
efforts, evolved in separate artistic disciplines. Czech architect Joseph Svoboda, in
particular, conceived of the technologically enhanced theatrical stage as a “psycho-plastic”
space that could fluidly change its appearance in response to direct feedback from the
action unfolding on it. Svoboda designed complex electromechanical systems that could
be programed to produce spectacular effects. These included scenery controlled by
pneumatic mechanisms, such as assemblages of rotating mirrors and hydraulic platforms,
that expanded and reconfigured the dimensional properties of the set, while motor-driven
screens and sophisticated dimmer boards transformed the stage into a time-based light
sculpture
261
. As we will see, procedural generators of real-time visual effects like
Svoboda’s theater and the Pepsi Pavillion did not only suggest a new model for
attractions, they anticipated what Bell Labs engineer Michael Noll in 1967 called the

260
Reichardt, Jasia. “Art at Large.” New Scientist 54, no. 790 (April 6, 1972): 37.
261
Salter, Chris. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, Mass: The
MIT Press, 2010. 50-51

190
“psychedelic computer”
262
–a software model designed towards the production of
emergent aesthetic phenomena.

Spectacular Movie Machines:
the aesthetic choices of software

Effects generators such as Svoboda’s programmable theatre, Haacke and Klüver’s
real-time installations, and Whitney’s motion graphics computer, which emerged from a
dialog between avant-garde art and popular scientific ideas like cybernetics, provide a
technological and conceptual context for the development of digital visual effects in
commercial cinema. ILM’s robotic Dykstraflex system, in allowing filmmakers to
manipulate an unprecedented number and variety of image element types and integrate
them into a cohesive whole, conjured, like Svoboda, the possibility of a “psycho-plastic”
space that could be modified on an as-need basis. This flexibility in deciding how the
image can be organized in real-time has a far-reaching impact on the aesthetics of visual
effects in cinema.
This capacity for real-time adjustment that characterizes the digital production
method is often theoretically conflated with the supposed “immateriality” of digital
representations. Because it consists of an easily modifiable structure of 1s and 0s rather

262
Noll, A. Michael. “The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium.” IEEE Spectrum 4, no. 10 (October
1967): 89–95. 94
191
than presenting as a visible material substrate (although, of course, in the end, it exists as
a material electrical pattern in the circuit board), the digital image is frequently perceived
as problematically open or unanchored. Critics like D.N. Rodowick have argued that, as a
result, the digital image pushes cinematic representation to stray further and further away
from its previous grounding in physical reality
263
; Timothy Binkley celebrates it as a
uniquely phantasmagorical medium where “immutable objects are replaced by
permutable fantasies”
264
. Often this reasoning is employed to suggest that digital cinema
is inherently more spectacular, attractions-based, and (therefore) less capable of
producing a meaningful critique of reality than its analog predecessor
265
. But as Braxton
Soderman reminds us, computer generated images are also records and archives of a sort:
“all digital images contain the trace of the algorithms that produced or transformed them”,
they are “a memory of transformation”
266
. This “memory of transformation”, like the
index of the photograph, identifies each digital image as unique, the product of a set of
circumstantial decisions made about how the image was organized. While certain
structures were baked into computer graphics since their inception, the history of the

263
Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University Press, 2007.

264
Binkley, Timothy. “Camera Fantasia: Computed Visions of Virtual Realities.” Millennium Film Journal
20/21 (1988): 6–43. 25

265
Wood, Aylish. “Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema: Crossing the Great Divide of Spectacle versus
Narrative.” Screen 43, no. 4 (December 21, 2002): 370–86. 372. Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital
Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014. Wood draws
attention to the fact that the digital is frequently associated with an increase in the use of spectacular
elements in films, to the detriment of effective narrative. Wood argues convincingly, as does scholar of
digital effects Kristen Whissel, that spectacular visual effects sequences often contain crucial details that
serve to advance storytelling purposes, and that they fulfill an important function as emblematic reminders
of the themes and narrative stakes in the film.

266
Soderman, Braxton. “The Index and the Algorithm.” Differences 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 153–86.
173
192
processes that have made digital images what they are today is still always building itself,
ensuring that the future of visual effects is continuously open to new patterns of self-
organization and self-expression. This does not mean that the digital image is infinitely
plastic; on the contrary, transformations in these images’ aesthetic can be tracked through
specific, prescriptive choices made regarding how they should be produced, choices
about the software/hardware used to generate them.
The digital image is characterized by the extreme modularity of its pictorial
components, an operational modality Lev Manovitch identifies in The Language of New
Media. Digital control of the analog camera first allowed post-filmic material to be
manipulated at a much finer scale than ever before. It anticipated the granular breaking
up of the film image into a grid of discrete information, which finalized its transformation
into a procedural object – a process already modeled, I have argued, by visual effects
production methods, both in the studio and in the transductive art of the 1960s and 70s.
On the most basic level, the digital image is assembled from the virtual addresses of
picture elements (pixels) on the two dimensional coordinate system of an electronic
display. Raster graphics, also known as bitmap images, specify the code structure that
represents this grid of pixels. Developed by Michael Noll in 1971
267
, raster graphics
encode an image’s information at a high level of granularity, which can then be
algorithmically processed to produce any number of detailed transformations to the
image. Digital cameras with high resolution CCD sensors, along with compression

267
Noll, A. Michael. “Scanned-Display Computer Graphics.” Communications of the ACM 14, no. 3
(March 1971): 143–50.

193
algorithms developed in the late 1980s such as the JPEG and MPEG codecs, which
allowed bitmap images to be easily stored, read and re-written by the computer, made it
possible to translate the type of compositing operations performed mechanically by the
Dykstraflex motion control rig into software-executable commands. As hybrid
analog/digital non-linear editing systems
268
gave way to entirely digital media composers
like the Avid/1 editing system and Adobe Photoshop (both released in 1989) the
modularity of the pixel became exploitable on a useful scale. This allowed visual effects
sequences to achieve a high degree of informational complexity: as Kittler remarks, “only
the brute fact of available RAM space limits the richness and resolution detail of such
worlds, and only the unavoidable, if unilateral, choice of the optic mode to govern such
worlds limits their aesthetics.”
269

These key choices relating to the “optic mode” of digital images, the basic
operational syntax that governs their expressive possibilities, are creative as much as they
are technical choices. One of the foundational decisions made in the early history of the
medium was to have software represent graphic data as a nested hierarchy of qualitative
attributes, which opened up emergent possibilities relating to how pictorial components
could be grouped together and transformed. In 1964 M.I.T computer scientist Ivan
Sutherland developed the Sketchpad program, which defined the recursive model
according to which algorithms could operate on graphic data structures (the qualitative

268
Lucasfilm’s EditDroid (1984) queued up and shuffled video clips on a virtual timeline based on their
location in a database of laser discs.

269
Kittler, Friedrich. “Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction.” Translated by Sara Ogger.
Grey Room 2, no. Winter (2001): 30–45. 35
194
properties of the image such as color, shape, transparency). This meant that different
aspects of the image could be modified together all at once, without the user having to
sequentially specify changes for every discrete part of the picture, as one does when
painting, for example. The type of actions users can perform on a computer image, are,
therefore, only limited by their (or rather software designers’) imagination of how these
data structures can be transformed.
“A Sketchpad drawing is entirely different from the trail of carbon left on a piece
of paper. Information about how the drawing is tied together is stored in the
computer as well as the information which gives the drawing its particular
appearance…A drawing in the Sketchpad system may contain explicit statements
about the relations between its parts so that, as one part is changed, the
implications of this change become evident throughout the drawing… a few very
general functions were developed which make no reference at all to the specific
types of entities on which they operate. These general functions give the
Sketchpad system the ability to operate on a wide range of problems...”
270

Sutherland goes on to explain how these general functions, which include the now
ubiquitous “copy” command, operate as constraints, but with flexible parameters. These
parameters can be tweaked to produce drastic compound changes in the image’s
appearance, even though the actions performed are limited to a few basic types.
“Each constraint type is entered into the system as a generic block indicating the
various properties of that particular constraint type. The generic block tells how
many variables are constrained, which of these variables may be changed in order
to satisfy the constraint, (and) how many degrees of freedom are removed from
the constrained variables.”
271

270

Sutherland, Ivan E. “Sketchpad: a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.” Simulation 2, no.
5 (May 1, 1964): 3 –20. 5-11,14. Sutherland would go on to become the mentor of Alan Kay, of Dynabook
fame, at the University of Utah.
271
Sutherland, Ivan E. “Sketchpad a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.” 14.

195
Sutherland effectively envisioned the digital image as a series of nested visual effects, an
iterative string of transformations capable of producing a great range of formal variety.
This principle of exponentially increasing returns, built into the structure of the
digital image, is artfully exploited by contemporary digital compositing tools. Programs
like Photoshop casually task algorithms with recreating familiar experiences of
emergence that we encounter in the outside world. These “natural” visual effects are
sampled from lived experience – a mise en abîme, in fact, of the primary action of
sampling that translates the continuous signal of the image into a discontinuous series of
discrete graphic elements – and transcribed into virtual actions. As Lev Manovitch
remarks:
“This is how Photoshop CS4’s built in Help menu describes (the Wind) filter:
“Places tiny horizontal lines in the image to create a windblown effect. Methods
include Wind; Blast, for a more dramatic wind effect; and Stagger, which offsets
the lines in the image.” We are familiar with the visual effects of a strong wind on
a physical environment (for instance, blowing through a tree or a field of grass) –
but before you encountered this filter, you probably never imagined that you can
“wind” an image.”
272

Here the graphics application operates as a “metaphorical” transducer of optical
phenomena, laying out a method by which each “real” physical action can potentially be
described in terms of a corresponding virtual effect. These elemental effects become part
of a database that functions as a laboratory for the design of more complex and inventive
“verbs”.
In an animation program such as Adobe’s After Effects, complex series of
operations can be executed on both the qualities and quantities of pixels. The user

272

Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. INT edition. New York ; London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2013. Kindle edition.

196
organizes her image into separate objects that all occupy their own layer, to which each is
assigned its own panoply of algorithms, including the handy interpolations that allow
objects to be automatically animated without having to specify their discrete locations in
the picture-frame. Objects are grouped into other objects, allowing the user to apply
transformations to collectives of elements while also maintaining individual control of
micro details of the image. The compounded results of these operations across sometimes
hundreds of layers produce unexpected mutations and discoveries: what starts as a
purposeful plan to design a particular image quickly leads to an experimental outcome.
Visual strategies are liable to devolve into a tactical reaction to the current state of the
composition. (Figure 47).

Fig. 47. Do we feel the need to explore all these options? Timeline panel in Adobe
After Effects CS5.5’s interface. Screenshot from author.
197

While the options in the animation software’s menu do not necessarily demand to be
exercised, as Manovitch suggests, these operational characteristics can lead to a certain
“toyification” of the cinematic image, which effectively becomes a playful demonstration
of the capabilities of the software: how many autonomously moving objects can be
featured in a single shot? How much range in scale and resolution can the virtual
camera’s sweeping survey of a 3D scene reveal? This pursuit of technical excess is at
heart a pursuit of technical virtuosity, a fantasy of discovering the totality of the
functionality of the software – in which case the digital tools employed to produce
spectacular images become attractions in themselves.

Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) translated this sensibility of
compositing software-as-attraction into a stylistic syntax that aimed to overturn
traditional expectations of cinematic representation. Like Baudrillard’s Beaubourg’s
brazen exhibition of its colorful infrastructure, Speed Racer put the algorithmic
infrastructure of the software that produced it on display, embracing the new
representational possibilities of the digital system as a formal imperative. Adapted from
an 1960s anime series by Tatsunoko Productions, the film tells the story of a young race-
car driver (Emile Hirsch) fighting to win a series of competitive races in order to
rehabilitate the aesthetic purity and spirit of fun of his sport, which has been corrupted by
capitalistic interests. Set in a fantastical world that belongs neither to the past nor the
future (the interior design, dialog and family dynamics are from the 60s, but all the
198
technology is, appropriately enough, emphatically digital), the film showcases a number
of Technicolor race tracks looping like hair-raising rollercoasters against the backdrop of
exotic landscapes such as deserts of gigantic orange dunes, “Alpine” ice caves, tropical
islands, “Mediterranean” cliff villages, neon metropolises – effectively, a recreation of
the mixture of World Fairs-style vicarious tourism and kinetic exuberance that
characterized turn of the century Coney Island (Figure 48).

Fig. 48. Purposefully excessive rainbow reflections in the ice-caves, one of
the film’s racetracks. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski.
Speed Racer. 2008. Warner Bros. Pictures.

As much protagonists of the film as the actors are the racecars themselves, “finish fetish”
models with eye-watering specular highlights and sweeping curves that express the full
sensuality of cutting-edge global illumination algorithms and NURB spline functions
273
.
In fact, the film presents the human elements as symbiotically plugged into their
expressive machines: young Speed Racer “makes noises like an engine before he can talk”
and later strives to transcend himself by inventing always more creative forms of
mechanical acrobatics. The Wachowskis dubbed the balletic racetrack battles between
their aerodynamic automobiles “car-fu” to describe the self-affirming martial artistry of

273
Non-uniform basis spline, a mathematical model commonly used in 3D modeling software to represent
curved surfaces. These spline functions were originally developed to facilitate industrial automotive design
– their use in designing virtual cars for cinema therefore actually calls back to their historical origins.
199
these vehicular bodies cartwheeling, jumping, and crashing through space
274
. While the
fantastical physics that were used to animate the cars put off some critics
275
, they often
served the purpose of highlighting the machines’ aesthetic agency. In one scene, we see
two cars that just have collided with each other barrel down a slope in smooth
symmetrical bounces, and what should be rough skidding of tons of metal on sand is
humorously expressed as delicate spirals of fluffy smoke (Figure 49). In addition to
mixing their physics metaphors, the Wachowskis chose not to include the randomness
generators that lend an organic look to the rigid body algorithms commonly employed to
simulate realistic mechanics; instead they allow their digital tools to represent “the
perfection of the fake”, thereby marking their hero-cars as intentional beings that, like
their human pilots, strive to achieve beauty and meaning.

Fig. 49. “Car-fu”. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Speed Racer.
2008. Warner Bros. Pictures.

274
McCarthy, Erin. “Speed Racer’s Breakthrough CGI Road Rally: Anatomy of a Scene.” Popular
Mechanics. Accessed May 29, 2015.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4262754.

275
Acording to New York times critic A.O. Scott, Speed Racer did not “convey the tension and grace of
real physical movement” which kept it from being “truly sensational”. Scott, A. O. “Gentlemen, Start Your
Hot-Hued Engines.” The New York Times, May 9, 2008, sec. Movies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/movies/09spee.html.
200
Reflecting the technophilic story-arc of their diegetic world, the Wachowskis
attempt to transcend cinematic conventions of perspective and montage by taking
advantage of the depth of layering made possible by their compositing software. They
developed new methods for integrating heterogeneous media sources into their workflow,
which included live footage, high resolution photographic panoramas, 3D models and
motion graphics, developing their own software based on a modified game engine to
composite digital scenes in real time while shooting actors against green screen
276
.
According to visual effects supervisor Dan Glass, cameras placed on robotic
tripods captured millions of panoramas of international locations
277
, which were then
stitched, using photogrammetry information extracted from the images, into scenographic
bubbles. These spheres were stacked one inside another; transparent windows cut into
these spheres allowed rows of layers to become visible as they were shifted relative to
one another
278
. This virtual recursive three-dimensional arena is neither a digital model
of physical space nor a flat rendering of a comic book’s picture-plane, but an alternative
form of representation altogether, which visual effects supervisor John Gaeta calls
“photo-anime”
279
. The orientation and position of these backgrounds were matched with
the orientation and position of the camera used to shoot live actors, a virtual correlate of
motion control cinematography called matchmoving. Matchmoving today is a ubiquitous

276
“Speed Racer’s ‘Photo Anime’ Workflow.” Studio Daily. Accessed May 29, 2015.
http://www.studiodaily.com/2008/05/speed-racers-photo-anime-workflow/.

277
McCarthy, Erin. “Speed Racer’s Breakthrough CGI Road Rally: Anatomy of a Scene.”

278
“Speed Racer’s ‘Photo Anime’ Workflow.” Studio Daily.

279
ibid.

201
technique in digital filmmaking, typically used to realize seamless live-digital
composites. In Speed Racer, however, the filmmakers playfully derailed its original
function in order to produce uncanny, baroque effects. According to previsualization
artist Euisung Lee, by “stretching or scaling the bubbles along the axis of the camera”
280
,
the editors introduced psychedelic distortions in the film’s worldview, with objects subtly
undergoing metamorphoses in size, shape and relative position. For example, in a
sequence during which Speed’s car soars across an abyss in the mountains, it is not only
the car that flips through the landscape, but the landscape that flips around the car,
creating a nonsensical, topsy-turvy space of mirroring slopes that has no referent in
actuality (Figure 50).

Fig. 50. Impossible landscape. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski.
Speed Racer. 2008. Warner Bros. Pictures.

The result of this compositing style is a film frame in which objects behave
autonomously relative to one another. The camera is no longer the anchoring reference
for the relationships between elements in a scene, as it is, by virtue of the physical
apparatus of the camera, in analog film shots. Frequently the objects in a Speed Racer
sequence (cars, dunes, buildings) will move instead of the camera in order to show the

280
“Speed Racer’s ‘Photo Anime’ Workflow.” Studio Daily.
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spectator a shift in perspective: rather than the camera changing its angle of view, the
objects will change the angle of their position relative to the spectator’s view, dollying
forward or backward, or tracking sideways. This creates the disconcerting effect that the
objects in the frame are projecting their own (multiple) viewpoints simultaneously
towards the spectator. The spectator-as-camera is absent from the performance of
perception: instead, a kind of object-oriented perception immanent to the image itself
monstrously organizes its own rules without the need for (human) perspective at all.
Editors Roger Barton and Zach Staenberg report on liberally employing "infinite focus
and exaggerated parallax ", as well “different focal distances for each character”
281
as
strategies aimed at perfecting this counter-intuitive POV. These photographic actions,
which would be impossible outside of a digital context, become visible evidence of the
film’s software’s tampering with “reality”.
The removal of the camera as the anchoring force in the organization of the image
allowed the Wachowskis to reinvent cinematic montage as a kinetic collage of
crisscrossing trajectories of diegetic objects
282
. By applying these animation techniques to
a live action film, Speed Racer drew attention to the fact that, in the digital era,
photographic realism persisted only as a convention. To this effect, the filmmakers
articulated what might be called anti-montage: scenes are not cut off from one another
but fused in a common metaphorical space that gives equal ontological weight to

281
Kaufman, Debra. “Life in the Fast Lane. Speed Racer’s Post Pit Crew: Zach Staenberg and Roger
Barton.” Editor’s Guild Magazine, 2008.
http://www.editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/archives/0508/cover_story.htm.

282
According to John Gaeta, “Pushing layers is like moving a camera through space, and at some point it
moves past collage and into composition and 2D camera motion that falls between cinematography and
editing.” “Speed Racer’s ‘Photo Anime’ Workflow.” Studio Daily.
203
unfolding action, states of mind and portions of the scenery. Transitions between scenes
occur by sliding pictorial elements past one another, so that a new shot is effectively
revealed when the old one ceases to obscure it. This technique is used to interweave
scenes depicting interior psychological states with exterior action, as when a close up of
Speed’s face exits the frame trailing a horizontal rainbow pattern that both represents
Speed’s amped-up mood and the motion blur of the car he is driving. As the rainbow
speeds out of the frame we see the competitors that trail him in the race caper across the
orange dunes of the Casa Cristo racetrack. To emphasize the anxiety Speed feels at their
approach, the dunes in the background lurch forward in relation to the dune in the
foreground, a parallax trick that gives the spectator the impression the cars are moving
more quickly towards Speed, and that the racetrack itself is abetting his rivals (Figure
51).

Fig. 51. Internal and external realities composited together on screen. Wachowski, Andy, and Lana
Wachowski. Speed Racer. 2008.
Warner
Bros.
Pictures.
In another sequence the rivalry between racecar drivers Snake Oiler (Christian Oliver)
and Taejo Togokhan (K-pop star Rain) is portrayed by having the actors in their
respective temporally disconnected scenes – Snake Oiler is scheming with his corporate
sponsor in a pink hookah lounge, Togokhan is awaiting the sunset-timed pistol shot that
will jumpstart the Casa Cristo race – slide past each other in a show of cocky sneers and
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revved-up motors (Figure 52). The characters acknowledge each other in a meta-diegetic
space that exists in parallel to the sequential action of the story.

Fig. 52. Meta-montage: encounters in post-diegetic time. Wachowski, Andy, and Lana Wachowski. Speed
Racer. 2008.
Warner
Bros.
Pictures.
At other times a graphic pattern in a scene will cease to be background ornament and take
on an active role in propelling the narrative forward, thereby establishing the heroic bona
fides not only of cars but of visual “eye-candy” as well. In the film’s final race, Speed’s
sensation of ecstatic fusion with his machine as he crosses the finishing line is performed
by a change of scenery, as the spiraling checkered vortex he is blissfully flying through
disintegrates in a pixelated fuzz only to resolve back into the hard checkered surface of
the racetrack. Speed has finally triumphed against all obstacles, and his desires now
finally correspond, diegetically as well as visually, with external reality (Figure 53).

Fig. 53. The racetrack in Speed’s mind is a “real” racetrack after all. Wachowski, Andy, and Lana
Wachowski. Speed Racer. 2008. Warner Bros. Pictures.
205

Speed Racer’s plastic screen-space molds itself effortlessly to the will of its inhabitants,
mimicking the Wachowski’s use of digital technology to escape from the conventions of
photographic representation and shape a world that obeys only the diktats of the
imagination. In this, the film pursues a certain aesthetic of transcendence that Scott
Bukatman associates with visual effects in science fiction films, where the awe-inspiring
display of the sensuality of technology also serves as a spectacle of its ontological
significance. Speed Racer’s compositing software exceeds its function as mere equipment
to become an end in itself, another instance of the relationship between the attraction and
its technical being in which “instrumentalism is undermined by an antiproductive,
antiteological, kaleidoscopic passage”.
283

If Speed Racer embraces the digital image as an autonomous system of illusion
that competes with the cinematographic model, George Miller’s action symphony Mad
Max: Fury Road (2015) takes advantage of the advances made in the robotics of motion
control cinematography to endow physical space with the malleability previously unique
to digital environments. In doing so, it breaks down the boundaries between visual effects
and material evidence, calling back to the earliest moments in the cinema of attractions,
for which the pure record of naked actualités was considered a revolutionary effect.
Unlike this turn of the century phenomenon, however, Mad Max operates in a post-digital

283

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham, N.C:
Duke University Press Books, 2003. 129

206
practice that has internalized the phenomenological depth and detail of fictional CGI
spaces. Whereas the Wachowskis’ film was constructed in composited layers, Mad Max
treats real locations and props as if they were 3D models, its programmable cameras
matching the mobility and agility of the virtual cameras employed in animation software.
The result is an exploration of texture, space, and movement that reveals itself as a paean
to the gratuitous purposefulness of embodied action.
As with Speed Racer, cybernetic symbiosis, via the exemplary technology of the
car, is at the centre of Miller’s attraction. While the Wachowskis imbued their shiny
vehicles with the glee of runaway digital utopianism, Mad Max jerry rigs extravagant
junkyard mutants, repurposed ruins that appear to reject the artificial abundance
promoted by creative digital processes in favor of the contrary physicality of grit, grime
and metal. The fourth installment in a twenty five year old franchise, Mad Max: Fury
Road tracks the journey of near mute protagonists, broken individuals in whom the
survival instinct, like their cars, is an automatic mechanism, as they race through a post-
apocalyptic wasteland driven to predatory frenzy by the extinction of its resources. In this
skeleton of a society, where an increase in speed is directly proportional to the
prolongation of life, cars are the most meaningful objects in existence: weapons, homes,
totemic signs of communal identity and flamboyant works of outsider art. One of these,
christened the Doof Wagon, is a hybrid of automobile and rock concert stage, manned by
a Greek chorus of hysterical drummers and a clown-suited “Doof Warrior” wielding a
flame-throwing electric guitar. Their sole purpose is to exhort the bellicose minions of the
207
local warlord to drive faster (Figure 54). Each car similarly shelters its own microcosm,
an island in the roving archipelago of a culture on wheels.

Fig. 54. The Doof Warrior exhorts the drivers to more speed. George Miller.
Mad Max: Fury Road. 2015. Warner Bros. Pictures.

In order to convincingly portray these human-automotive interactions, one hundred
and fifty fully functional vehicles were built for the production of the film, many of
which were destroyed in diegetic crashes and explosions
284
– a performance that echoes
the work of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), an art collective that stages mutually
destructive battles between repurposed industrial robots as a critique of the institutional
uses of technology. Like the SRL, Mad Max unleashes the excess of expressiveness
lurking in the body of a utilitarian machine. The cars themselves were the products of a
hybrid process of digital industrial design and surrealist bricolage. After the production
team scoured Australian junkyards for shapely chassis from the past and more exotic
parts like caterpillar tracks, the mechanical components of the vehicles were designed
using dedicated software (Figure 55). This method challenged the production designers to
find practical solutions to the engineering problems of imaginary machines, a task similar

284
interview with production designer Colin Gibson. “How The Man Behind The Machines Of Mad Max
Put A Hellscape On Wheels.” Jalopnik. Accessed May 20, 2015. http://jalopnik.com/how-the-man-behind-
the-machines-of-mad-max-put-a-hellsc-1704037927.
208
to that confronted by the authors of the 17
th
century “theatrum machinarium”, those
poetic manuals that depicted creative iterations of popular mechanisms discussed in
Chapter 2. According to an interview with art director Jacinta Long,
“The Gigahorse was a stacked pair of Cadillac bodies, powered by a pair of Chevy
502 engines. So it obviously looked intimidating, but how did it actually drive?
Engineer Antony Natoli and mechanic Mark McKinley designed a system so the
two engines sat in a side by side arrangement and were connected to the
transmission. I modeled the system in AutoCAD, and from this file, the plates and
components were waterjet cut. I used 3DSMax to calculate and animate the extent
of arm rotation…making sure the tires didn’t interfere with the chassis.”
285

Fig. 55. Testing the “Peacemaker”, a dual track vehicle manufactured
by Howe and Howe Technologies for Mad Max: Fury Road, before its
chassis is mounted. Copyright Howe and Howe Technologies.

As the mismatched assemblages of found body parts and conjoined nervous systems,
these Frankenstein cars seemed to suffer from the same radiation sickness that affected
the humans of the Mad Max universe. Compounding this disturbing liveness, the cars
were designed as robots with “remote drive pods” connected to their powertrain. The film
crew would pilot the vehicles at a distance to ensure their trajectories synchronized in a

285
“Here’s How They Built the Beastly Machines for Mad Max: Fury Road.” The Credits. Accessed May
20, 2015. http://www.thecredits.org/2015/05/heres-how-they-built-the-beastly-machines-for-mad-max-
fury-road/.
209
timely manner for collision and boarding scenarios – in one case, a delicate balancing act
involving stunt actors on giant swinging metronomes – while actors pretended to drive
286
.
In orchestrating this armada of machine performers the filmmakers in fact reproduced on
an epic scale the ballet mécanique of the automated toy theatres in vogue at Baroque
courts in the 18
th
century. Like the hundreds of figurines animating the miniature city of
hydraulic clockwork in the Schloss Hellbrunn Palace Gardens in Salzburg, all the
movements of the technological participants in the film production could be centrally
controlled via a chain of escapement mechanisms.
The quasi non-existence of the film’s plot – a non-stop car chase that covers the
ground between point A and point B and back again – belies the complexity of the action
unfolding on the screen. Its attraction lies in the Rube Goldberg-esque ingenuity with
which it uses the kinetic momentum of its interlocking parts, the variously motivated cars
and their clinging inhabitants, to set the larger machine of the chase in motion. To
engineer this impression of efficacious chaos, Miller’s team digitally choreographed
sequences before shooting them with multiple mobile camera units, whose video outputs
and movements could be edited and coordinated in real time. The cinematographers
created detailed 3D previsualizations animating the characters and the vehicles
287
as they
negotiated the environment laid out by the production design team, effectively planning
the shoot as if running a set of virtual scenarios in a video game (Figure 56).

286
Emanuel Levy. “Mad Max: Fury Road–Shooting the Opening | Emanuel Levy.” Accessed May 20,
2015. http://emanuellevy.com/comment/mad-max-fury-road-shooting-the-opening/.

287
“Here’s How They Built the Beastly Machines for Mad Max: Fury Road.” The Credits.
210

Fig. 56. Previz animation of the scene in which Mad Max
is imprisoned in Immortan Joe’s fortress. George Miller.
Mad Max: Fury Road. 2015. Warner Bros. Pictures.

During the shoot, cameras were mounted on Edge Arm robotic cranes, which were
themselves mounted on cars to chase after the diegetic Mad Max vehicles.
According to the cinematographic strategy described above, the physical cameras
used on Mad Max’s set were effectively behaving as if they were virtual cameras in 3d
animation software. In animation software, any moving object in a scene can become the
scene’s camera (the camera is assigned to the object), while the object’s trajectory then
becomes the camera’s path through space. The ability to adopt this virtual perspective
and shoot from the “middle” of a scene allowed the cinematographers to maintain a
spontaneous, cinéma vérité approach to the image, effectively capturing a fantastical,
purely imaginary world as if they were filming a documentary. Takes could be
improvised while the action unfolding in front of the camera still sped away at seventy
211
five miles an hour, owing to the fact that all cameras were remotely networked with one
another
288
.
Documentary footage of the set reveals an uncanny isomorphism between what is
happening in front of the camera and what is happening behind it. The dusty production
vehicles with their mechanical appendages weave in and out of the pods of tricked out
cars shown in the film, the cameras kissing fenders and peeping over dashboards to get an
intimate perspective of their quarry (Figure 57), or even, in one case, swooping down like
a curious drone from an automated zip line (Figure 58). The camera is enfolded in the
action, a plucked eye surveying the scene in all directions. Like a stunt actor, it leaps over
cars and hangs off unhinged auto parts. In one scene Max (Tom Hardy) pole vaults over
an oil tanker to escape the raiders of warlord Immortan Joe, and is distracted for a second
by the multi-car explosion happening in another section of the chase (Figure 58). His
perspective mimics the viewpoint of any one of the roving cameras, all turned in a state
of hyperactive absorption towards whatever micro-moments are unfolding in different
regions of the set. By peering through this virtual periscope, the spectator projects herself
in the trajectories of the objects crowding around her.

288
“Cinematographer John Seale Captures ‘Mad Max - Fury Road.’” Accessed May 20, 2015.
http://www.codexdigital.com/news/cinematographer%20john%20seale%20captures%20mad%20max%20-
%20fury%20road. As cinematographer John Seal explains, “RF interfaces were used with the Alexa
cameras to transmit images to a command vehicle for monitoring by…Miller. Miller was not only able to
review shots, he could edit material to determine what further coverage was needed.”

212

Fig. 57. Fusion of the camera with the production design. George Miller. Mad Max: Fury Road.
2015.

Warner
Bros.
Pictures. Mad Max: Fury Road B-ROLL (2015). April 17, 2015.

Fig. 58. The camera as a stunt actor. George Miller. Mad Max: Fury Road. 2015. Warner Bros.
Pictures. Mad Max: Fury Road B-ROLL (2015). April 17, 2015.
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Is the spectatorial desire for this high-resolution simulation a derangement of the subject?
Christina Buci-Glucksmann quotes from the play Life is A Dream by the great dramatist
of the Spanish Siglo de Oro, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, in which a character thus
addresses his beloved: “seeing that this sight kills me I am dying to see more”. In a scene
that encapsulates this obsessive, reflexive gaze Fury Road turns on its own attraction, the
young “War boy” Nux jubilantly exclaims while driving his car at full throttle into the
red, lightning-streaked depths of a sand storm, “What a day, what a lovely day!” Like
Nux, the viewer of the film is poised to annihilate her privileged position as a subject in
order to join the great spectacle of the world unleashed – and escape, as Baudelaire would
put it, “into the unknown to find something new”.

Like Speed Racer, Miller offers what at first glance appears to be a chaotic
spectacle, but one that is in fact rigorously controlled and articulated. While both films’
respective use of digital tools guides and structures their creation of a highly stylized,
phenomenologically saturated universe, ultimately Speed Racer is a second-degree
simulation of its own technical process, while Mad Max: Fury Road is a simulation of the
spectator’s exteriority. Both adopt the virtual camera as means of revealing the self-
motivated unfolding and autonomy of the objects on the screen. For Speed Racer,
however, those objects are ghosts produced in the machine of its compositing software,
emergent, phantasmal phenomena generated by a technology indexed to a human
aesthetic. In Fury Road, these objects are tessellated into a system the cameras represent
as an organic entity, a constantly evolving Sturm and Drang taking place at the tips of the
214
spectators’ fingers, just out of reach. As such, it holds perhaps an even more utopian
vision of the digital future than Speed Racer: the idea that technology may eventually be
able to conjure a somewhere outside of our control - a new, weird nature that we wander
as interlopers freed from ourselves, somewhere truly “unreal”.

Hunting for Visual Complexity:
Revelations of texture in computer graphics

The diversity of the digital workflows invented for the production of visual effects
and the substantially varied forms of attractions they generate show that we cannot think
of the CGI image as a unified system of representation. This goes against the grain of the
more categorical arguments of theorists like Manovitch and Rodowick, who trace the
foundational character of all digital images to the loss of photographic indexicality and its
replacement with a process that assembles a representation out of whole cloth. For
Manovitch, this means a new convergence between cinema and additive arts such as
painting. For Rodowick, it means that digital cinema has the option of projecting the
semblance of external reality, but, unlike film, it is not obliged to do so:
“the process of automatic analogical causation is indeed necessarily tied to
physically existing spaces and times, even though captured elements may be
recombined to produce imaginative worlds and counterfactual senses.
215
Alternatively, digital synthesis is only optionally tied to the physical world
through its capacity to construct spatial semblance.”
289

Systems like Dykstraflex that enable a high degree of recombination in analog images
pose a certain problem for this clean cut separation between indexical and non-indexical
media. Does the scene mentioned earlier in this chapter from the 1977 celluloid version
of Star Wars, in which a squadron of X-wing fighters descends upon the Death Star, have
a more direct relationship with reality, in any useful meaning of the term, than its
counterpart in the digitally remastered version issued by Lucas in 1997?
Nevertheless, the issue of indexicality is indeed germane to understanding
computer generated images, and digital visual effects in particular, by virtue of the fact
that effects artists and engineers have consistently aimed to push their “capacity to
construct spatial semblance”, to achieve photorealism for their digital compositions.
Rodowick’s analysis does not account for the fact that CGI has an ambiguous, but real,
relationship with indexical representation. Today, the technical benchmarks of virtual
reality head-mounted displays like the Occulus Rift consistently involve increasing the
resolution of the image and reducing the lag time between a user’s head movement and
the corresponding shift in the perspective displayed on the screen – both solutions to the
problem of making the virtual reality experience feel more “realistic” or
phenomenologically complete. Does this mean that digital attractions aim to realize
Bazin’s vision of total cinema, to produce an immersive experience that achieves perfect
fidelity with non-mediated, physical experience? As we saw in the case of Speed Racer

289

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University Press, 2007. Kindle edition.

216
and Mad Max: Fury Road, immersive strategies can be deployed to create effects that
pleasurably jar with, even contradict, our habitual perception of the exterior world. These
spectacular vehicles made tangible the fusion of internal with external states,
simultaneous contradictory perspectives, the concupiscent gaze of robotic observers and
the sublimation of the subject in the grain of the seen. In a parallel fashion, the quest for
photorealistic simulations by digital means has functioned as a laboratory to test the
limits of human phenomenological experience. It has led to the discovery of visual
objects that are both pure artifacts (of the algorithms that produced them) and active
investigations into the textural qualities of materiality itself. By serving as models for
speculative points of view, these graphic digital entities represent our growing knowledge
of the world made visible.
Mark Wolf proposes that computer-generated visualizations – specifically,
walkthroughs of 3d models for medical purposes, product testing and architectural
reconstructions – relate to the physical world in a mode he refers to as “subjunctive
indexicality.”
290
Instead of pointing to a (recorded) event from the past, such simulations
reconstruct events based on a theory about the rules or relationships that have caused the
event to occur.
“The computer allows not only physical indices like visual resemblance but
conceptual indices (like gravity or the laws of physics) to govern simulated
events…Like the photograph, computer simulation can combine observation and
documentation, and as the embodiment of a theory, it can document what could

290

Wolf, Mark J.P. “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation.” In Collecting Visible
Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press,
1999.
217
be, would be, or might have been...thus the simulation documents possibilities or
probabilities instead of actualities”
291
.

An anatomical visualization, to use an example of Wolf’s, is based on a current
understanding of the relationships between the organs. If the simulation has been built to
appropriately reflect that knowledge, details like the way in which the skin seems to
espouse the contour of the musculature will in fact directly follow from the structure of
the musculature underneath and the way it interacts with the texture of the skin. Based on
this model, the computer can run different scenarios, for example bending a knee or
flexing an arm, that make visible the consequences of these actions on the way skin looks
and behaves. So, depending on the quality of the information supporting the theory on
which it is built, the computer simulation can more or less accurately point to an entire
category of self-similar events, and it can make predictions about specific instances
within that category. In effect, it creates a system that can produce future visualizations.
The physics simulation and rendering formulas developed by computer scientists
to create digital images are similarly systems of potential representation. Unlike film
images they are not based on the physical imprint of objects (or rather the light from
those objects) but on theories about the way objects behave in nature. They reproduce a
second nature that plays out its effects on the computer display, which sometimes
includes unanticipated, emergent phenomena. While the discovery of perspective and the
science of optics’ relationship with perception allowed Renaissance and Baroque artists
to re-present optical effects whose ubiquity in ordinary experience had been unknown (in

291
ibid. 280

218
the sense that they had until then not been objects of knowledge), computer graphics
scientists create the conditions by which possible objects of perception might become
known.
Historically, computer scientists seeking to model naturally emergent phenomena
availed themselves of two major mathematical tools: random or stochastic processes to
simulate the probabilistic behavior of composite, amorphous entities like fluids, gases,
and light, and a branch of mathematics called fractals to procedurally generate complex
three-dimensional textures and objects. These methods permitted them to automatically
populate their images with a high degree of variety that mimicked the profusion of forms
seen in nature. According to computer graphics researcher Pat Hanrahan, the graphics
community for practical purposes did not define photorealism as a copy of reality, as it
could be captured by a medium such as film, but, essentially, as visual complexity
292
.
The production of visual complexity both in space and time, as the continuous
transformation of forms into other forms, was the impetus behind the development and
refinement of powerful algorithms that could generate a maximum amount of variety
from basic principles (referred to by graphics engineers as data amplification). This
problem of sufficient visual complexity was basically a problem of describing texture.
The first steps towards creating digital textures were taken by Edwin Catmull
(now the president of Pixar Studios, then working in the ARPA computer graphics
program at the University of Utah with Ivan Sutherland), who in 1974 devised a method

292
Ebert, David S., F. Kenton Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley. Texturing and
Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural Approach. 3rd edition. Amsterdam ; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann,
2002. V.

219
called texture mapping that mapped photographs onto three-dimensional models – the
two-dimensional graphic patterns of the photos created the illusion of real texture
293
. The
invention of the alpha channel by Catmull and Alvin Ray Smith in 1977 was another
crucial milestone, since it allowed image elements to have an opacity value as well as a
color value
294
. Not only did it make compositing multiple objects in front of each other
computationally economical (instead of having to re-render an element every time the
background changed
295
), it opened up a whole new vista of lighting effects – complex
interactions between surfaces and light, such as shadows, reflection and refraction, could
suddenly be described by defining the transparency of objects. A whole new class of
algorithms called shaders was developed to describe how differently textured surfaces
reacted to light, first for diffuse or matte illumination (Bui-Tuong Phong, 1973), and later
for specular illumination (Jim Blinn, 1977)
296
. Portraits of smooth, curvy objects – so-
called “implicit surfaces” that could be tidily described by a mathematical function rather
than painstakingly assembled polygon by polygon – showing off glossy specular
highlights are a signature look of digital images in the 1980s and early 90s. Their lush

293
This method is still widely used today given the ease of using photographs as visual reference points,
with the difference that information can now be extracted from the shading patterns of the photograph to
reconstruct the texture in its original three-dimensional state. This method is called bump mapping.

294
Smith, Alvy Ray. “Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing.” In Microsoft Technical Memo #7,
1995.

295
The problem of how to store information about the depth value of different pictorial elements – used by
the computer to decide which objects in a scene are visible and which are not – was also solved by Catmull,
with the invention of the z-buffering algorithm.

296
See Phong, "Illumination for Computer-Generated Images" and Blinn, “Models of Light Reflection for
Computer Synthesized Pictures". Today the basic shader for local illumination scenarios is an update of
both models, the Blinn-Phong shading model, which describes both the diffuse and specular characteristics
of most textures.
220
plastic appearance denotes a moment in the evolution of computer graphics when
complex textures were still difficult to achieve, but photorealistic lighting was
increasingly within reach. Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) exemplifies this aesthetic, turning the
limitations of the digital representation of materiality at the time into a powerful
expressive device (Figure 59). Through the empathetic characterization of the toy
protagonists of the film, plastic becomes a “hero texture” that evokes both the innocence
of childhood and the nostalgic pains of a consumer society based on planned
obsolescence. The sensual attributes of the digital surfaces model the intentionality of
their objects. In the shot below, for example, the high specularity of Bo-Beep conveys her
vibrant, feminine personality, while the more muted look of Woody’s diffuse shader
communicates his ruggedness and self-deprecation.

Fig. 59. Plastic as a “hero” texture. John Lasseter. Toy Story. 1995.
Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures.

Further down the line, the alpha channel also made it possible to simulate volumetrically
complex objects like clouds or even organic tissue, whose degree of transparency varied
with their level of density. In 1985, Darwyn Peachey and Ken Perlin achieved a further
advance in complexity with their “solid texture” algorithm, which could produce genuine
221
three-dimensional textures that appeared carved and sculpted rather than painted on, and
that displayed none of the distortions that resulted from mapping 2D images onto models.
However, the designers of digital textures made perhaps the most important
conceptual leap towards phenomenological verisimilitude by introducing stochastic
processes in the algorithms that modeled the behavior of digital materials and light. Perlin
noise (1985), devised by Ken Perlin while creating visual effects for Disney’s 1982 film
Tron, was the first method to produce emergent, non-repeating patterns when applied to
procedural textures, and multiple versions of it were subsequently used not only the
model the variable grain of materials like wood, stone, marble and flesh, but to simulate
the erratic movements of water, fire, and smoke. Perlin noise uses controlled randomness
or pseudorandomness – randomness exercised within a pre-defined range of consecutive
numbers – to generate patterns that exhibit small increments of change rather than jarring
discontinuities, allowing digital images to mimic the organic statistical variation seen in
nature
297
. When the effects of noise generators are recursively applied the resulting
textures can be unpredictably complex. One of the most spectacular visualizations of this
type of controlled randomness is the sophisticated modeling of water. Taking advantage
of the increase in the power and speed of programmable GPUs (graphics processing
units) installed in computers in the early 2000s, designers started to model natural
dynamic systems using actual physics, rather than relying on ingenious shortcuts like

297
Specifically, the Perlin noise algorithm divides the image into a lattice of points, each of which is
assigned a pseudorandom number generator. The algorithm then interpolates the values between those
points, creating a smooth gradient in the appearance of the “noise”. Perlin subsequently improved this
algorithm to avoid the production of certain image artifacts with the invention of Simplex noise in 2001.
Ebert, David S., F. Kenton Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley. Texturing and
Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural Approach. 3rd edition. 69.

222
particle generators
298
. Sequences showcasing the flow of currents, eddies and waves use
algorithms derived from the equations that describe the science of computational fluid
dynamics
299
. Surface effects like foam take into account the ways in which momentum
and energy are transferred across the entire system, approaching the problem of
visualizing these effects from a structural, rather than a painterly, perspective. In Gore
Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) the attraction of the
maelstrom featured in the climactic naval battle at the end of the film is greatly
heightened as the camera’s lingers voluptuously, maliciously, on the growing turbulence
in the ocean, which suspensefully gathers momentum until the full, horrifying force of
the phenomenon is revealed to the spectator (Figure 60). The Lovecraftian, alien behavior
of this supernatural ocean is impeccably expressed by the equations that describe how
water runs out of a faucet.

Fig. 60. Computational Fluid Dynamics for an imaginary maelstrom. Gore Verbinski.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. 2007. Buena Vista Pictures.

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Particle generators, often used to simulate anything from starry skies to fire or atmospheric effects, are
processes that generate and annihilate pseudorandom numbers of particles at staggered intervals, conveying
the impression of a dispersed, dynamic, amorphous object.

299

Parent, Rick. Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques. Newnes, 2012. 298

223
The use of pseudorandom processes also made it possible to convey an accurate
model for the behavior of light in complex scenes, by calculating a critical density of
interactions between different kinds of surfaces and the angles at which they reflected
rays. In 1984, Loren Carpenter, Rob Cook, and Thomas Porter modified a technique
called ray tracing – which involves casting rays between the camera and the different
surfaces in a scene, and calculating the angles and amount of light that bounces off those
surfaces – by casting the rays in random directions instead, and then taking samples of
their indices of reflection and refraction, rather than calculating those values for single
rays
300
. This allowed digital images to represent the imprecision and fuzziness of natural
phenomena such as soft shadows or gradients of light, instead of portraying an artificial
world of sharp contours. In 1986 James Kajiya further refined this process by proposing a
technique called global illumination, which not only calculated the incidence of light rays
bouncing off an object from a local source, but also took into account the light reflected
off of all the other objects in a scene, which, in the real world, also function as light
sources by virtue of their own reflective properties. Once computers in the mid-2000s
acquired the processing power necessary to solve Kajiya’s rendering equation, elusive,
organic illumination effects like “the moving patterns of light seen at the bottom of a pool
on a sunny day, or the bright pattern created on a table from light transmitted through a
glass of wine”
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could be represented by digital means. The visual complexity and

300
The specific stochastic process used to generate these samples is called the Monte Carlo method, which
is used extensively in a number of quantitative fields outside of computer graphics. Kurachi, Noriko. The
Magic of Computer Graphics. 1 edition. CRC Press, 2011.

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Kurachi, Noriko. The Magic of Computer Graphics.

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specificity that computer scientists aimed for could be rendered from general purpose
algorithms – even the most localized, the most ephemeral phenomena. Digital graphics
successfully reproduced the mechanism of nature itself, creating the total sum of
individual variety from a smaller set of initial principles – effectively setting up a mirror
image of nature in miniature. Like the colorful, shiny inhabitants of Baudelaire’s toyshop,
its objects detach from their backgrounds with a singular vibrancy, a strangeness that
beckons our attention.
The use of global illumination in combination with complex textures also derived
from random processes, such as Perlin noise or cellular texturing,
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provided the
technical basis for experimenting with and exploring materiality in radical ways. In Gore
Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), the crew of the Davy
Jones’ ship “The Flying Dutchman” is transformed through digital makeup into a motley
assemblage of creatures that are half-men, half-underwater bestiary, a result of the curse
that has condemned them to roam beneath the waves in search of new victims to shanghai
into their service. These ambiguous beings sprout beards of seaweed and fans of coral,
their tattered clothes merging with their skin like barnacles covering a weathered rock
face, while their limbs and faces take on the features of sharks and assorted mollusks.
These hybrid textures model selected properties from different sources, forcing, for
example, their designers to imagine the physical mechanics of how hard and brittle
materials like coral or shells could move fluidly with the vigorous muscle movements of

302
cellular textures result from the random distribution of a discrete pattern within a given space. Examples
include textures like honeycombes, sponges or reptilian scales. Ebert, David S., F. Kenton Musgrave,
Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley. Texturing and Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural
Approach. 3rd edition.

225
the creatures whose skin they are. Global illumination allows these new materials to
emerge into view in all their pocked and ridged dimensionality (Figure 61).

Fig. 61. Novelty flesh. Gore Verbinski. Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006
Buena Vista Pictures.

The design of the captain of The Flying Dutchman’s face, for example, employs a
lighting technique called sub-surface scattering, which models the way light penetrates
and reflects back through different densities of layered material (Figure 62). It is
especially useful to produce effects like the warm, glowing aspect of skin in candlelight,
or sunlight scattering through the pink, translucent shell of a conch. Davy Jones’ face, an
octopus-like mass of tangled tentacles, is wet, slimy and flecked with algae – sub-surface
scattering is masterfully deployed to express the horrible springy chewiness of his
invertebrate flesh. Not only his eyes but also his skin glistens with malevolence, and he is
literally slippery.
226

Fig. 62. Davy Jones’ uncanny skin texture. Gore Verbinski. Pirates of
the Carribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. 2006. Buena Vista Pictures.

Like the uncanny bodies of his crew, Davy Jones’s digital texture concretizes the
metaphor of his identity. More than a character, however, he portrays materiality gone
rogue: a kind of hyper-flesh, the octopoid texture rendered on the screen has invaded and
consumed what was originally, according to the story of the film, a recognizable human
silhouette. Here global illumination and sophisticated shaders create a meta-material with
an excess of sensorial properties, charging Jones’ texture with metaphoric potency and
unusual expressiveness. Many sequences show his tentacles wriggling in the air or
haphazardly curling around objects while he is talking, undermining his agency with their
autonomous movement, as if his skin were trying to impose its own secret agenda.
Techniques developed in the past ten years have only accentuated digital textures’
capacity for displaying self-motivated autonomy. Today, the coordinated movement of
multiple instances of similar objects in particularly complex scenes is modeled by
assigning rules for local behavior to each object. The object – essentially an artificially
intelligent agent – follows a pattern of actions in response to its interactions with other
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objects in the scene
303
. In this manner, elements like animals, cars, clouds or armies can
be made to display swarm or flock behavior, populating digital worlds with facsimiles of
animated entities from nature. Using the same stochastic processes that made digital
lighting and texturing feel so organic, these new algorithms enable an intelligent
materiality to take form through the medium of visual effects.

The increasing sophistication of the procedural techniques employed to model
digital materiality destabilizes the boundary between objects that we know and objects
that are purely speculative. The passage from one to the other is open: familiar objects
can become denaturalized, and theoretical entities can be made visible. In digital fine
artist’s Takeshi Murata’s music video for electronica group Oneohtrix Point Never’s
track “Problem Areas” (2013), still lifes of household bric-a-brac co-exist in various
stages of texture rendering. The objects emerge from their algorithmic chrysalis, some
fully formed, others still in a semi-hypothetical state. In one image, gummy worms, soft
and vibrant with the glow of sub-surface scattering (or perhaps an analogous effect),
crawl out of a generic alarm clock still in its naked state, the default white Phong shader
of 3D modeling programs (Figure 63). The richly textured worms look more “real” than
the alarm clock, which appears to be more model than object, but the clock could equally
be a minimalist sculpture of itself (it sits on a pedestal) and the worms found ephemera.
The question of which is more “perfect”, the clock or the candy, remains open.

303

Parent, Rick. Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques. Newnes, 2012. 246-261

228

Fig. 63. Ambiguous ontologies. Takeshi Murata and Oneohtrix Point Never.
Problem Areas. 2013.

The ontological status of its digital inhabitants is also questioned in another image of the
music video. There, an improbable stack of anti-depressants and a Escher-like dice
formation on a counter illuminated by a jaundiced light recall the fatal signs depicted in
the “vanitas” genre of Northern European still life paintings (Figure 64). Unlike skulls
sinisterly planted amongst overflowing fruit, however, they do not indicate the transience
of earthly possessions, but the precariousness of digital entities. The impossible physics
of these slightly imaginary found objects place the dice and the pills in a transitional zone
between realism and fiction.

Fig. 64. Digital “vanitas” ? Takeshi Murata and Oneohtrix Point Never.
Problem Areas. 2013.
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Another composition stages the unfinished relationship between the digital and the
organic. Fully-rendered ripe bananas lie side by side by with the same banana rendered in
a dark metalic texture, which lies next to a photorealistic cattle skull. Ambiguous solids
mirror these objects back to one another (Figure 65). Which objects are more “alive” than
others? The corpse with its flesh of warm, delicately marbled bone or the banana divested
of its organic texture? Does it occupy a lower rung on the ladder of “truth” than the
yellow copies that are strewn around it?

Fig. 65. In-between copies. Takeshi Murata and Oneohtrix Point Never.
Problem Areas. 2013.

While the mingled assemblages of familiar and unfamiliar objects recalls the surrealist
method of Dali compositions, Murata’s piece doesn’t stage a troubled interiority so much
as a troubled exteriority, evinced by the shifting, shifty status of digital images in the
representational canon. How real are the objects that surround us? Murata’s lush
rendering of household objects with their colored translucencies and pillowy shadows
speaks to the same “finish fetish” that motivated seventeenth century Dutch artists like
Willem Claesz Heda or Abraham van Beyeren to paint with exquisite care the
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glimmering highlights on a scalloped chalice or the vitreous eye of a carp. Like these
painters he celebrates the indiscriminate abundance of civilized domesticity (which now
include broken iphones and gummy bears). His nature morte, however, is also a spectacle
of possessions on the verge of non-existence. They are always at risk of fading back into
their algorithms. In “Problem Areas”, objects are only ever the sum of their (visual)
effects.
At the inverse of Murata’s intimate exploration of the digitization of ordinary
materiality, Christopher Nolan’s epic science fiction film Interstellar (2014) uses digital
effects to make visible objects that are theoretically known, but have never yet been
observed. In the film, astronauts are sent through a wormhole to another part of the
observable universe to find a planet that can sustain Earth’s dying civilization, ending up
in a system that orbits a massive rotating black hole called Gargantua. Theoretical
physicist Kip Thorne collaborated with Nolan to determine how to visualize the general
relativity equations that described the physics of black holes (which are understood) and
the physics of wormholes (which are speculative). In order to do so, they had to write a
new renderer that was capable of calculating the curved paths that light takes in the
vicinity of warped spacetime (an effect called gravitational lensing), since ordinary ray
tracing algorithms assume, per the laws of classical physics, that light travels along
straight paths
304
. This involved solving exotic problems of projective geometry, including
what the shadow of a spinning black hole would look like, and its effects on the behavior

304
James, Oliver, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, and Kip S. Thorne. “Gravitational Lensing by
Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar.” Classical and Quantum Gravity 32,
no. 6 (March 19, 2015). 1-2.

231
of light caught in the black hole’s gravitational field, from the point of view of an
observer orbiting the black hole. Drawing on previous scientific research and low-res
simulations by astrophysicists, they determined “how a black hole’s spin affects the
shape of the shadow that the hole casts on light from a distant star field. The shadow
bulges out on the side of the hole moving away from the observer, and squeezes inward
and flattens on the side moving toward the observer.”
305
The images of distant stars are
multiplied and twisted around the spinning black hole, compressed on one side and
inflated on the other.
306

The filmmakers used this effect of distorted, sliding reflections to depict the
wormhole. Using the visualization of a real scientific phenomenon to speculate on the
appearance of a similar, but hypothetical, object, they imagined the wormhole as a
revolving sphere – a hole in four-dimensional space – that reflected the stars and galaxies
on the other side of it. As the astronauts’ spaceship approaches this higher-dimensional
hole, the reflections of the stars curve away only to wrap back around them, mimicking
the gravitational lensing modeled by the visual effects renderer for black hole physics
(Figure 66). In this case, the visualization of speculative theory is not left purely to the
imagination but is instead grounded in the rules that govern actual objects. The effect is
thrilling because it confronts us with an object that we, as the spectators, or even the
filmmakers themselves, could not have imagined. It functions as an extension of the
natural world into a virtual domain that is not a domain of subjectivity, of interiority, but

305
James, Oliver, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, and Kip S. Thorne. “Gravitational Lensing by
Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar.” 2

306
ibid. 17.

232
a space of objective hypothesis. It is like a hand extended towards our desire to know.

Fig. 66. Sailing into the wormhole. Christopher Nolan. Interstellar. 2014. Paramount Pictures and Warner
Bros. Pictures.
On the other hand, the visualization of Gargantua, the black hole featured later in
the film, arguably produces new knowledge, in that it successfully represents an object
that had until then only been described in a complete fashion mathematically
307
. The
visual effects programmers realized that the same pattern of gravitational lensing that
applied to the star field surrounding a black hole would also apply to its accretion disk – a
disk of bright matter orbiting the black hole and progressively falling into it. This meant
that the accretion disk wrapped around the shadow of the black hole, forming a double
halo (Figure 67).

307

In their journal article, James Oliver, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, and Kip S. Thorne point
out that astrophysicists did previously run simulations of spinning black holes, but that these did not
incorporate the level of detail achieved by their rendering program. 3

233

Fig. 67. The black hole Gargantua, with its unexpected accretion disk. Christopher Nolan. Interstellar.
2014. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures.
Thorne reports that this last result surprised him, once he saw the image spit out by the
rendering software– although the physics that described this phenomenon were well
understood, it had never been visualized.
308
Davis Baird points out the importance of
visualizations for the production of knowledge. Models complete scientific knowledge by
offering a different mode of representation that can lead to a fresh understanding of the
object being studied. Baird discusses this feature in the context of the role that James
Watson’s and Francis’ Crick’s experimentation with stick-and-ball models of molecules
played in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA:
“when Watson and Crick were short of reasons why the atoms should be one way or
another, the models gave them room to explore possibilities "without reason", which is to
say, without propositional reason, but with the reason supplied by the material modeling
space.”
309

308
Rogers, Adam. “Wrinkles in Spacetime: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar.” Wired, October
2014. http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/.

309
Baird, Davis. Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. 1 edition. University of
California Press, 2004. 33. Baird classifies models as one of the major types of scientific instrumentation,
alongside instruments that generate phenomena and instruments of measurement.

234
The rendering software that the Interstellar visual effects programmers wrote similarly
provided the filmmakers with degrees of freedom in how they approached the general
relativity physics that governed the phenomenon they were attempting to describe. Their
model eventually demonstrated an emergent effect of the propositional knowledge that
had informed the model’s construction, namely, details in the shape of the black hole’s
accretion disk and gravitational lensing patterns as they would appear to a moving
camera.
Nolan made the decision to not include certain objective features that would have
made the images of the black hole difficult to understand for the audience, for example,
the Doppler shifting that occurs as a result of the rapid spinning of the hole, which would
have made the accretion disk change color as the astronauts’ spaceship flew past it
310
.
However, even if the images that made it in the film lacked the rigor of true scientific
visualizations, they did depict a deep space phenomenon beyond our current capabilities
of direct observation with a degree of phenomenological complexity that had never been
realized before. The visual details discovered by the effects team are arguably a mere
curiosity in terms of their contribution to scientific knowledge. But this open-ended,
gratuitous curiosity is frequently what drives the hunt for new knowledge in the first
place. The visual effects achievements of Interstellar give its spectators the luxury of this
non-instrumental exploration. With the film splashed across an iMAX screen, the viewer
follows the miniscule spacecraft of the protagonists – looking like a mote floating
through a sunbeam – as it penetrates the equatorial edge of the accretion disk, buffeted by

310
James, Oliver, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, and Kip S. Thorne. “Gravitational Lensing by
Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar.” 22
235
winds of spinning gas. The arch of light circling the black hole’s shadow soars above the
craft like a celestial gate, beckoning the humans into the dark folds of the enigma beyond,
into the heart of the unknown. The vista is all the more poetic for representing
identifiable features that exist (somewhere) in the world. Through the instrument of this
scene, the spectator virtually projects herself across incomprehensibly vast distances in
space and time to contemplate an unobservable object. By making the invisible visible,
the visual effects of Interstellar act as the vanguard of our senses in their historical
exploration of the material world.

The algorithms developed for computer graphics gave digital artists access to new
horizons of visual complexity. By modeling phenomena in terms of a distribution of
probabilities instead of predictable outcomes, visual effects engineers were able
reproduce the self-generated variability found in nature. This in turn equipped them to
create ambiguous textures and unfamiliar dynamic physical systems that have changed
our imaginative relationship with objects. As a result, digital images are not simply
simulacra of the external world, they are a theater for the evolution of matter. They reveal
a hypothetical space of branching decision paths, where each branch terminates in a self-
contained region of material expression. For Sutherland, the inventor of the Sketchpad
graphics program whom we encountered earlier in the chapter, computer graphics
signified an opportunity to fiddle with the dials and change the values for the parameters
of our experience:
“We live in a physical world whose properties we have come to know well
through long familiarity….For example, we can predict where objects will fall,
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how well-known shapes look from other angles, and how much force is required
to push objects against friction….We lack corresponding familiarity with the
forces on charged particles, forces in non-uniform fields, the effects of
nonprojective geometric transformations, and high-inertia, low friction motion. A
display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with
concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a
mathematical wonderland.”
311

Fractals, perhaps more than any other major tool in the algorithmic arsenal of the
digital image, have made possible the realization of Sutherland’s idea of a mathematical
wonderland made tangible for the senses. Where stochastic processes constitute one path
towards visual complexity, fractals constitute another, based on the principle that nature
features pattern repetition across different scales. Fractals are a branch of mathematics
developed by Benoit Mandlebrot in the late 1970s, while a researcher at the IBM Thomas
J. Watson Research Center in New York. Mandlebrot took advantage of the computing
power he had access to at IBM, as well as recent advances in graphics software, to
explore how geometrical objects that had until then been considered curiosities by the
mathematical community could be used to describe much of the texture that was visible
in nature
312
. Mandlebrot saw his project as a reconciliation of sorts between pure
mathematics and our everyday experience of the material world:
"Scientists will (I am sure) be surprised and delighted to find that not a few shapes
they had to call grainy, hydralike, in between, pimply, pocky, ramified, seaweedy,
strange, tangled, tortuous, wiggly, wispy, wrinkled, and the like, can henceforth
be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion”
313
.

311
Sutherland, Ivan E. “The Ultimate Display.” Information Processing Techniques Office, ARPA, OSD,
1965. http://www.wired.com/2009/09/augmented-reality-the-ultimate-display-by-ivan-sutherland-1965/.

312
Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Macmillan, 1983. 9

313

Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Macmillan, 1983. 5
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Complex objects with highly irregular shapes such as landscapes or clouds could be
explained by examining the fractal nature of their structure.
Mandlebrot established that a fractal is basically a pattern that repeats itself over
and over again at smaller and smaller scales (it displays self-similarity or invariance
across all scales). When you zoom into a sphere it eventually turns into a two-
dimensional plane: you can no longer see its higher dimensionality. When you zoom into
a fractal you continue to see fine structure filling up space, and when you zoom into that
structure you see more structure with the same amount of detail. No matter how much
you blow up the image you still see an image of equal resolution. The complexity of a
fractal (the fractal increment) is measured by the rate at which increased detail becomes
apparent as you zoom in
314
. Although the total surface of a fractal is infinitely intricate, it
is simple to produce. A fractal is much more easily described in terms of a series of
transformations than in terms of its geometric properties.

Fig. 68. The Koch curve. www.fractalfoundation.org.

314

Falconer, Kenneth. Fractals: A Very Short Introduction. Kindle edition. OUP Oxford, 2013.

238
(Figure 68) is a set of instructions to create a fractal called a Koch snowflake or a Koch
curve (a fractal discovered in the early 20
th
century, before fractals had been defined as
their own group of objects). You start with an equilateral triangle. Then you add two
other equilateral triangles whose sides are 1/3 as long as the sides of the original triangle
to the midpoints on either side of that original triangle. Then you zoom into one of these
new triangles, and you repeat the process. After however many iterations, one is looking
at a highly fragmented and fuzzy object. Other shapes besides the snowflake can be
obtained by rotating the set of transformations after a certain number of iterations,
creating a less predictable figure like a coastline, for example. It is a simple recursive
process that is admirably suited to computer programing. Indeed, Ken Muskgrave, a
graphics engineer who worked closely with Mandlebrot in the 1980s, states that fractals
were impossible to explore before the advent of computer graphics, and that, in turn,
computer graphics came to rely on fractals as a source of visual complexity.
315
The
ubiquity of fractals in nature –more precisely, of statistical fractals or fractal
approximations, taking into account the role of chance in producing variety of form –
makes sense when one thinks that natural objects are often the result of iterative
processes of growth or progressive accumulation. The fact that fractals are equally suited
to producing digital images reinforces the homology between the digital milieu and the
external environment. When it comes to fractals, computer graphics do behave as a
reductive, “toy” version of the world whose lines, perhaps, are simplified and whose
colors are brightened, but whose structure is eerily familiar.

315
Ebert, David S., F. Kenton Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steve Worley. Texturing and
Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural Approach. 429
239
The first demonstration of the potential for the application of fractals to visual
effects was Boeing engineer Loren Carpenter’s short computer animated film Vol Libre,
debuted at the SIGGRAPH conference in 1980, which featured a swooping fly-by of a
procedurally generated mountain range (Figure 69).

Fig. 69. Visual effects’ first fractal mountains. Loren Carpenter.
Vol Libre. 1980.

Amazed spectators saw the mountains maintain their level of detail even when the
camera zoomed into the slopes. Carpenter was subsequently hired by ILM to model an
entire planet for a visual effects sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Paramount
Picures, 1982)
316
. Carpenter had researched Mandlebrot’s work and devised the
subdivision method for generating fractal landscapes, which instead of building a fractal
from the ground up with a starter pattern, repeatedly subdivided a slightly rough shape
into smaller sections, which then themselves were subdivided into smaller parts, and so

316
Paik, Karen. To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. Chronicle Books, 2007. 22-
24

240
on
317
. This method was very efficient in terms of producing a large amount of texture
within a wide range of scales for a minimum of computing effort. Instead of having to
hold all the information about the image’s geometry in the computer’s memory in order
to render the image, the computer only had to calculate the geometry for the scale that
was visible in the image at any given time
318
. This meant that, in principle, enormous
quantities of geometry could be generated using relatively very little memory – the
landscapes of computer-generated worlds could march on unbounded, brought into
existence moment by moment by the user’s gaze.
This effect proved useful not only for producing CGI environments for films, but
for rendering content in real-time for video games. By using procedurally generated
content, games were able to both increase their degree of photorealism and grow the size
of their game spaces. Methods based on the principles of fractal structure were
developed to automate the population of virtual worlds with vegetation and even animals.
Like the algorithms used to generate fractals, these systems lay out a set of instructions
that is then repeated multiple times to construct a complex shape. Variations of programs
like the L-system, a grammar of rule-based transformations written by Hungarian
theoretical biologist Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 to describe the branching structures of
plants, could easily be applied recursively to produce any number of organic forms
319
.

317
Carpenter, Loren C. “Computer Rendering of Fractal Curves and Surfaces.” SIGGRAPH Comput.
Graph. 14, no. SI (July 1980): 9–15. 10

318
Perry, Tekla S. “And the Oscar Goes To...,” April 2, 2001. http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-
careers/and-the-oscar-goes-to.

319
Lindenmeyer’s system, which is based on transformations of string sequences, is very similar to John
von Neumann’s concept of cellular automata or “artificial life”, according to which cells on a grid are
241
Often the “scene generators” based on these algorithms are not purely procedural. The
SpeedTree plugin for Autodesk’s Maya 3D modeling software and the Unity and Unreal
game engines, for example, uses photographic textures in addition to fractals to create
foliage
320
. More recently, game designers have attempted to model the movement of
dynamic objects with fractals. Will Wright’s 2006 game Spore (Electronic Arts, 2006),
which allows users to “evolve” their own custom life forms from single-celled organisms,
designed a complex branching hierarchy of body plans and limb shapes so that any
number of hypothetical creatures could be designed by the game’s users and still animate
and behave in ways that felt intuitive and organic
321
.
By multiplying the “roughness” of digital spaces, by increasing the depth of their
texture, fractals hold out the fantasy that secret worlds can be uncovered if one stumbles
across a fertile algorithm. Like a rich soil, the right set of numbers can cause new species
of trees and insects to sprout, mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans to unfold. A creator-
spectator can cup a glittering jewel-world in the palm of her hand. One of the most
extreme explorations of this “mathematical wonderland” is a collection of user-generated
online art called “Mandlebulbs”. Mandlebulbs are three-dimensional visualizations of the
Mandlebrot set of fractals, whose formula was set down by Benoit Mandlebrot in 1977.

assigned certain growth rules, leading to emergent patterns in the distribution of the cells. Parent, Rick.
Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques. Newnes, 2012. 275. Also, Deussen, Oliver, and Bernd
Lintermann. Digital Design of Nature: Computer Generated Plants and Organics. Springer Science &
Business Media, 2006. 49-50

320
“Tree Models & Animated Forest FAQs | SpeedTree.” Accessed July 14, 2015.
http://www.speedtree.com/tree-models-faq.php.

321
Hecker, Chris, Bernd Raabe, Ryan W. Enslow, John DeWeese, Jordan Maynard, and Kees van Prooijen.
“Real-Time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies.” In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008
Papers, 27:1–27:11. SIGGRAPH ’08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008.
242
Inspired by Rudy Rucker’s 1987 science fiction short story “As Above, so Below”, which
featured a 3D Mandlebrot set, Daniel White and Paul Nylander figured out a way to
model the fractal as a volume by squaring part of Mandlebrot’s original formula to a
power of eight and repeating it up to hundreds of iterations in order to achieve the desired
resolution
322
. The resulting object looks like a kind of vegetal architecture, full of folds
and invaginations and bulbous indentations that curl around themselves like strings of
pearls – like a Geiger-meets-Art Nouveau artifact from some baroque alien civilization
(Figure 70 and Figure 71). In 2007, White posted his new formula alongside images of
zooms into the structure of the “Mandlebulb” to the community of fractal art aficionados
fractalforums.com, giving his new “landscapes” fanciful names like “Ice Cream from
Neptune” and “Christmas Coral Reefs”. Over the next few years renderings of
Mandlebulbs that tweaked different parameters of White’s formula flooded the popular
website of user-generated digital art DeviantArt, alongside videos that showed the camera
vertiginously deep-diving into the ever more ornate details of the fractal structure,
revealing a chain of receding caverns and esplanades, and what appeared like the
crumbling curlicued remnants of balustrades, stairs and arcades (Figure 72). The viewer
peruses these vistas as if she were floating through an abandoned castle, perhaps a planet,
or a hybrid of both, soon lost in a space that is infinitely larger on the inside than on the
outside.

322

White, Daniel. “The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal.” Accessed July 15, 2015.
http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/2mandelbulb.html. White and Nylander’s visualization actually
involves more complicated mathematical prestidigitation, including wrapping the Mandlebrot set around a
higher dimensional sphere, in order to achieve an aesthetically pleasing shape.

243
This initial stage in the development of the Mandlebulb reflects some of the
practices of the “demoscene” digital art subculture, an international community of
programmers with origins in 1980s hacker culture who compete in creating video “demos”
that exhibit a maximum amount of visual detail from a minimum amount of low-level
code. But while demosceners hold the efficiency of the demos’ programing as the
primary benchmark of their value, for the Mandlebulb community the mathematical
formula is simply the means to unlock a beautiful, even coveted visual object. As a result,
it has evolved beyond the domain of visually curious mathematicians to encompass a
larger group of “lowbrow” digital artists.

Fig. 70. An object with infinite texture. Daniel White Fig. 71. The original Mandlebrot set. Benoit
and Paul Nylander. Mandlebulb. 2009. Mandlebrot. Fractal Geometry in Nature. 1977
244

Fig. 72. “Landscapes” show fine details in the structure. Daniel White and Paul Nylander. Mandlebulb.
2007.

Today, open-source applications developed by the Mandlebulb community such as
Fragmentarium or Mandlebulber offer users with less mathematical expertise the option
of modifying different aspects of the original formula via an exhaustive interface.
Featured in these applications are also a variety of shaders to beautify the Mandlebulb
and a specialized renderer that uses “ray marching” instead of ray tracing to solve the
complicated paths light rays follow to interact with different levels of fractal structure.
This software has birthed new species of fractal universes such as the “Mandlebox” and
the “Juliabulb”, both based on the Julia set of fractals.

Fig. 73. Krzysztof Marczak. Hybrid-Mandelbox-IFS-Fractal-3.
www.deviantart.com.
245

In DeviantArt user Krzysztof Marczak’s
323
creation, for example, the fractal becomes a
sky-sized ceiling with gothic arches terminating in what appears to be an Art Deco
elevator room (Figure 73). Trailing plants hang from the gargantuan rose-shaped
moldings in the ceilings. Is this the tropical abode of a dead civilization on another
planet? Hyperben2’s “mossy_ruins” shows a mist-shrouded labyrinth of staggered
gardens inlayed in the walls of monumental bridges, or perhaps aqueducts (Figure 74).
Besting the convoluted interiors of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, the topiary is cut
precisely in the shape of the decorative details that ornament the marble surfaces. The
architect evidently has fallen prey to a pathological degree of ratiocination.

Fig. 74. hyperben2. Mossy_ruins. 2010. www.deviantart.com.

Theli-at displays the cross-section of a world of budding metallic spheres, like drops of
water frozen in the act of dribbling off icicles (Figure 75). Perhaps these are the decadent

323
Marczak is the primary developer of Mandlebulber. http://www.mandelbulber.com/about.php
246
egg-palaces of insectoid life forms on a planet far, far away. Thanks to the artist’ decision
to dissect her Mandlebulb, we can clearly perceive its structure as a series of nested
spaces. The use of ambient occlusion of “distant” features to create a sense of scale, and
more pointedly, a sense of place, is popular amongst Mandlebulb artists, as we see in
hyperben2’s and Theli-at’s pieces.

Fig. 75. Theli-at. Inside a Box. 2011. www.deviantart.com.

Software like Mandlebulber allows users to render these mathematical objects as
photorealistic objects-in-the-world. As the eye follows the details of the structure it finds
corners of interest, where the spectator lingers as if in a room. In these spaces, the
spectator becomes a solitary explorer, intrepid and curious, filled with a sense of
adventure at the knowledge that no matter how far she walks down the line, there is
always a new structure waiting to be discovered. The Mandlebulb is a kind of hyper-
object, not only because as a fractal it is infinitely dense, but because it enters into a
fantasy relationship with the subject. Breaching the rules of epistemological engagement,
247
she finds herself able to enter the object, as it expands around her in all directions and
encloses her in its own suspended cosmos. The unending complexity of matter enfolds
her – the imagination alternately identifies the organized tissue of recesses and
excrescences as macrostructure or microtexture. It appears both abstract and concrete.

This visual plenitude identifies the Mandlebulb as a form of ornament, the
underlying ontology behind all visual effects. If the visual effect is a vector of un-reality
that clothes an armature of form in the phenomenological substance of projective illusion,
then the ornament is the original effect whereby a pattern may become something larger
than itself, extruding, as it were, into a virtual space where the imagination can project
itself. Henri Focillon, whom we encountered in Chapter 1 when discussing the cabinet of
curiosities, describes the ornamental line thus:
“The sign signifies, whereas the form signifies itself…(Form) encodes emptiness
and confers it an original existence…reduced to a thin sinuous line, it is already
both a border and a path…not only does it exist in and of itself, but it configures
its milieu.”
324

The movement of the ornamental line does not just establish a contrast with empty space
– it is not simply some thing – , it creates a milieu, a signifying totality encoded with
forking paths for the senses to follow. The ornamental form fans out, explores a series of
possibilities and then collapses those possibilities into a motif, repeating the process. The
ornamental object progresses by spinning out new variations and physical translations of
its original structures, multiplying material topologies to ensnare a space in a visual

324
Focillon, Henri. Vie des formes: suivi de, Eloge de la main. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1996. 7, 22. Author’s translation.

248
system of concatenated motifs. This in-form-ational pattern sets up its own regime of
embodiment. In fact, Focillon goes so far as to say that form is not just embodied it is
embodiment itself - “incarnation”
325
. In its ability to project a sense of palpability, of
presence, it effectively spawns “a new nature that never ceases to renew itself”
326
. By
following the ornamental line, the subject loses her privileged distance from the object
and progressively disappears in the sensation of immediacy, the perceptual fusion with
the object being contemplated. In the labyrinth of the unending ornamental line of the
Mandlebulb – the length of a fractal is, after all, infinite
327
- the spectator-explorer
encounters the embodiment of exteriority itself. It takes us beyond the interface into what
Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “darkness stuffed with visibility of which (the object’s)
surface is but the limit”
328
.
Through this vertiginous plunge into fine structure, the Mandlebulb leads us once
again to Deleuze’s fold: “a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a
fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided into infinity
in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion.”
329
. The fold pleats the
material surface of objects with the sensate/sentient skin of the spectator, making it
impossible to demarcate, on an epistemological level, where the texture of the world ends

325
Focillon, Henri. Vie des formes: suivi de, Eloge de la main. 39

326
ibid, 38.

327
Falconer, Kenneth. Fractals: A Very Short Introduction. Kindle edition. OUP Oxford, 2013.

328
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968. 152

329
Deleuze, Gilles. The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. 6
249
and the texture of affect begins. The visual effect then emerges as an epistemological
mechanism that consists in “following a fold up to the following fold”
330
, a way for the
gaze to lose itself in the vagaries of an ornamental line that metamorphoses into a
pathway to a fictitious space. This spectator-explorer is a monad in Leibniz’ plenum:
there is no privileged viewpoint that can allow us to circumscribe a world in its entirety
when worlds are bundled up within one another ad infinitum and we ourselves are
wrapped up in them. It is this virtual visibility, which even the ordinary object in cloaking
itself always intimates, that holds out the promise of aesthetic fulfilment in the attraction.
This phantasm of infinite contact with the object expresses the spectator’s desire
to come into contact with her own exteriority, which is not her mirror but an unchartered
territory in which she would adventure. As Mandlebrot cites from Pascal in his opus on
fractals, “l’imagination se lassera plutot de concevoir que la nature de fournir” –
imagination tires before nature
331
. The world imagines us: in the end it is the unadorned
mathematics of the Mandlebulb that unlocks the hidden recesses of our private
phantasmagorias. In its hyperbolic outpouring of “informing form”
332
, its density of
sensorial information, this algorithmic world reveals that both materiality and perception
are recursive structures, folds within folds that are essentially coextensive with each
other. In making the algorithm perceptible, it confirms our intuition that form and
information are one and the same: information is not abstracted from form, it is

330
ibid. 7

331
Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Macmillan, 1983. 4

332
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. 1 edition. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2013. 14

250
continuous with it, the reverse side of a fold, the next pleat over. It is not so much an
abstract entity as a topological phenomenon of the object. The virtual character of the
Mandlebulb presents as a prolongation and exacerbation of its sensual nature –the trompe
l’oeil, rather than seducing us into a disembodied, secondary reality, sinks us deeper,
through an act of “voyance”
333
or perceptual imagination, into the condition of our own
embodiment.

333
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes.
251

CONCLUSION:
THE ONCE AND FUTURE ATTRACTION

The Case of the Mysterious Nuage Vert

Driving down the highway through the industrial parks of Ivry-sur-Seine, for a
few nights in November 2010, one could see a lurid and mysterious green cloud floating
above the factories and warehouses of the Paris suburb. This incongruous spectacle was
the effect of a laser projection on the contours of the cloud of a municipal incinerator
(Figure 76). The artist collective Hehe – as in “haha” in English, the acronyms of Helen
Evans and Heiko Hansen – was projecting without authorization, having failed to
negotiate permission from the city, which had refused on the grounds that the “anxiety-
inducing” green cloud would draw attention to the incinerator, and the fact that the
252
incinerator was smack in the middle of an “ecologically protected” zone
334
. Like the
urban interventions of performers from Gordon Matta-Clark to the street artists of the
Billboard Liberation Front and the Graffiti Research Lab, Nuage Vert reclaimed political
control of an anonymous space by staging a striking distortion of its textural and
symbolic fabric.

Figure 76. Nuage Vert, HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen). 2010. Laser projection on the cloud of an
incinerator at Ivry-sur-Seine, France. Copyright Sébastien Lapeyre and Yuki Kawamura. hehe.org2.free.fr.

Hehe weren’t the only individuals making the Nuage Vert a reality, however. Hehe
convinced thousands of members of the local community to “unplug” for an hour, the
duration of the projection: the more people collectively reduced their power consumption,
the larger the green cloud would be, as Hehe varied the size of the projection in reaction
to real time data it received from a power substation on the neighbordhood’s electricity
usage
335
. Mapped onto a physical index of waste, Nuage Vert would transform it into its

334

Lechner, Marie. “Ivry vire au rose: Nuit blanche. L’autorisation donnée à l’éclairage du panache de
l’incinérateur, samedi, interloque.” Libération, October 3, 2012.
http://www.liberation.fr/culture/2012/10/03/ivry-vire-au-rose_850677.
335

HeHe. “Le Rayon Vert Divise.” Nuage Vert, June 3, 2009
http://hehe.org2.free.fr/?language=fr&paged=2.
253
inverse, an index of society’s will to change. The good intentions of the inhabitants of
Ivry literally outshine the dismal actuality of their situation.
Nuage Vert sublimates the material substrata of the city into an ideal – but it also
shines a light on a forgotten corner of urban space, making it visible again. Under the
actions of its assemblage of laser, consumers, vapor cloud, electrical meters dispersed in
hundreds of buildings, incinerator, municipal bureaucracy, night sky, data-interpreting
software, a derelict corner of daily life undergoes a poetic metamorphosis. In the context
of the written word, Symbolist poet Paul Valéry compares the transfiguration achieved by
poetry to a pendulum swinging back and forth between the sensuous materiality of the
word and its meaning, tracing a hypnotic relation between signifier and signified. In
Nuage Vert, it is the ordinary background of everyday life – an emissions cloud – that has
been galvanized by a phantom presence that continuously draws attention back to the
material and signifying specificity of that background. In the aesthetic space described by
this work, the everyday, to quote Valery, “has acquired a value; and has acquired it at the
expense of its finite significance”
336
. Here the familiar technological transformation of the
real - the efficacy, the efficiency of the technic - becomes equivalent to a poetic,
imaginary, virtual transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. What appeared at
first to be a series of feedback operations that transferred data between the community,
the power grid, the factory, the laser, the cloud and back to the community, becomes an
unpredictable journey whose final significance is always reconsidered and postponed.

336

Valéry, Paul. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” The American Poetry Review 36, no. 2 (2007): 61–66. 63
254
The spectacular green cloud is the tip of the iceberg of the invisible infrastructure
of human/software networks that constitutes the Nuage Vert attraction. Its procedural
component, its machine, spontaneously assembles itself from an animate and inanimate
terrain that it has invested and organized. Its mechanism is as ephemeral and protean as
its effect. Like the “transductive” systems art of the 1960s and 1970s, it translates signals
between different hardware, software, sensors and human referees, creating an
informational matrix that enables heterogeneous materialities to behave as a coherent
body. Unlike installations such as John Cage’s Variations V and Billy Klüver’s Pepsi
Pavilion, Nuage Vert is at-home in its chosen environment, which it interpenetrates and
interacts with in a mobile fashion: the green cloud operation migrated to Helsinki in 2008,
and tried to migrate to Saint-Ouen in May 2010
337
. This adaptive attraction is an
evolving, responsive collectivity, what Jane Bennett calls an assemblage:
“the effects generated by an assemblage, are…emergent properties, emergent in
that their ability to make something happen…is distinct from the sum of the vital
force of each materiality considered alone.”
338

The technological and human components of the assemblage are tessellated with each
other, often resulting in experimental human/machine cooperative behaviors and
experiences. Hehe’s piece networks disparate elements with previously independent
interests to produce a completely new object, the Green Cloud, which is both a physical
effect and an intentional being.

337

HeHe. “La Maire de Saint-Ouen N’ose Pas (toujours).” Nuage Vert, May 12, 2010.
http://hehe.org2.free.fr/?language=fr.
338

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press Books, 2009.
Kindle edition.
255
One might say this attraction is not only sensorially experienced, it is itself
“sensate” – it collects data from its environment and its inhabitants, and processes that
data in order to effect a series of transformations on that environment, its inhabitants, as
well as on itself. These transformations result in a kind of expressive embodiment, one in
which the interface of the attraction becomes a sensitive skin to the rest if the world.
Nuage Vert blurs our conceptual framework for what constitutes an object or a body,
proposing instead a model of distributed material agency. This “impersonal affect”
339
,
immanent to the Green Cloud, engages our own affect as spectators – adding to the
experience of astonishment and wonder, a feeling of uncanny kinship.

In achieving this, the “sensate” attraction challenges commonsensical thinking
about how we relate to objects, and to technological objects in particular. Gilbert
Simondon’s philosophy in many ways directly anticipates this “turn” towards a greater
awareness of material agency, an experience of exteriority the attraction itself has
historically embodied. Simondon claims we impoverish our understanding of the external
world by viewing it as a collection of autonomous identities – subjects and objects. The
irreducible complexity of the things we perceive can be more readily visualized if,
instead of looking for identities, we pay attention to the continuous processes of
emergence that organize and give shape to those perceived identities. For Simondon,
there is never a time when this creative process ends in a “finished” or self-sufficient
individual – individuals are always individuating: growing into new individuals,

339

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

256
migrating to or breaking off from other individuals, evolving into collectivities that
become individuals (of a different type and on a different scale) themselves. In this
context, what we understand as the epistemological relationship between subject and
artifact/object is not a straightforward hierarchical rapport between “given” individuals in
which one (a spectator) observes and the other (an aesthetic object) is observed, one (a
subject) uses and the other (a technical object) is used, but rather the concatenation of
different systems of individuation into each other.
Simondon uses the exemplary individuation of the crystal – crystallization – to
show how the substance or “given” that is traditionally understood to be the individual
object obscures the event of the object’s formation. In the case of the crystal, the presence
of impurities within a supersaturated solution (a liquid with a critical mass of soluble
particles) precipitates a phase change, allowing these impurities to become the foci
around which the structure of the crystal builds itself in successive layers; the crystal
grows by capturing more and more matter from the solution in which it bathes, in effect
individuating by producing a ripple-effect phase change across its original milieu. Using
this and other events of individual formation in the physical sciences as a template,
Simondon argues that all material beings create themselves through a series of such phase
changes that resolve the virtual potentialities of their milieu into actuality. Things as well
as people are “metastable” systems – equilibriums on the verge of being disrupted and
reconstructed by new parameters entering their system. As such an individual always
257
exists in “peripheral relation to itself”
340
: its individuation occurs along its own porous
edges, as an evolving differential relation between its interior and the associated milieu
that supports it.
“Individuation, then, is a relative phenomenon, like the alteration in the structure
of a physical system. There is a certain level of potential that remains, meaning
that further individuations are still possible. The pre-individual nature, which
remains associated with the individual, is a source of future metastable states from
which new individuations could eventuate. According to this hypothesis, it would
be possible to consider every genuine relation as having the status of a being, and
as undergoing development within a new individuation. A relation does not spring
up between two terms that are already separate individuals, rather, it is an aspect
of the internal resonance of a system of individuation.”
341

This aspect of Simondon’s thought is perhaps what is most radical about it, that non-
subjects are endowed with the same faculty of “becoming” that is typically assigned
exclusively to subjects. Simondon’s individual is always “in excess over itself” and
“more-than-one”
342
. For Simon the non-human as well as the human is a being caught in
a perpetually unfinished movement towards it’s own possibilities.
343
This inversion opens
up entirely new possibilities for imagining how non-subjects, including artifacts, relate to
and interact with the subjects/individuating systems with whom they are intertwined.

340

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter. Zone 6. New York, N.Y: Zone Books, 1992. 305
341

ibid, 306.

342

Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, 2013. 3, 5
343
Heidegger notably proposed that human Being is always in a state of “being-towards”, which refers to
the essential incompleteness of this Being resulting from his preoccupation with the future, and “care”,
Heidegger’s version of intentionality that describes the human Being’s essential orientation outside himself,
towards the world. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
2008.
258
In this theoretical context, Nuage Vert’s uncanny mode of reciprocal spectatorship,
its capacity to evolve as a system that turns parts of its milieu into functional parts of
itself, to transform its environment both physically and ideationally, is evidence of a
process of individuation. The Green Cloud is a spectacular object, a thing to look at – a
splash of vibrant, otherworldly color on a drab background – but it is also a dynamic
process, a process that moves itself forward through a series of disruptions that initiate
chain reactions in its material milieu – the emissions cloud, the view from the highway,
the electric grid, the human community of Ivry-sur-Seine, even HeHe, the catalysts of the
whole enterprise. As the cases discussed in the past chapters have consistently shown, the
attraction is always both these things, an effect and the technical system that generates
that effect, a virtual image and a material being. But it is more intuitive to think about it,
like Simondon, as a milieu in which individuation occurs, as a continuous movement
towards actualization that, in a concrete way, connects us to the multitude of
individuations already occurring around us.
Who knows which town Nuage Vert will visually disrupt next time, and whether
it will also convince some locals to change their own way of spectating their urban
environment and way of life? Two years later an Ivry artist – this time with the sanction
of the authorities – projected a festive “nuage rose” or pink cloud on the vapor of the
incinerator
344
. The attraction seems to have successfully implanted itself in the wider
assemblage of Ivry-sur-Seine and now propagates there in a mutated form…while Hehe

344

Lechner, Marie. “Ivry vire au rose: Nuit blanche. L’autorisation donnée à l’éclairage du panache de
l’incinérateur, samedi, interloque.”

259
has moved on to other projects. Nuage Vert has become a spectacular agent, or perhaps
an ambulant spectacular lens that any inhabitant of Ivry can intermittently look through,
as if through a pair of Green Cloud – colored glasses. Other vapor cloud producers, after
all, await their moment in the spotlight – chemical factories, power plants, refineries.
Like the Museum of Jurassic Technology visitor who, after experiencing the attractions
within, could not help but stare avidly at a common pencil sharpener as if it were a
continuously unfolding spectacle, people who glimpsed a certain incinerator off a
highway ramp on their evening commute might experience a newfound curiosity for
industrial clouds of all sorts – wondering what they are made of, anyway, if they had
never given that question thought, and perhaps unconsciously hoping that one day
another one might spontaneously turn green, or pink, or blue, or metamorphosize in some
other unexpected fashion.
In this casual manner, the attraction affects the spectator in a way that Jacques
Rancière considers to be unique to the artwork, introducing “a multiplicity of folds and
gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible,
the thinkable, and the feasible”
345
. Spectatorship opens up new possibilities of being for
the subject, multiples her awareness of her potential choices as an actor in the world. This
transformative effect has been historically attributed to art, and has traditionally excluded
attractions. However, as we have repeatedly seen, the attraction also has a profoundly
liberating impact on its spectators, whose gaze it frees so that they might truly pay
attention to the presence of things around them. Attractions demonstrate that, as a culture

345

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Reprint edition. London: Verso, 2011. 72
260
and as individuals, we are deeply invested in the idea and expression of this material
agency.

The Virtual Lives of Technical Objects

Nuage Vert evokes a new type of mobile, dynamic, “sensate” attraction. Other
aspects of its phenomenology – that it manifests emergent effects and operates
procedurally – have historically characterized attractions in general, as I have argued in
the preceding chapters. Attractions are vectors of material agency because they express
themselves, above all, through technical objects and processes such as systems of
taxonomy, recursive architectures, phenakistoscopes, fantascopes, automata, stage tricks,
transductive networks, programmable cameras, compositing software, noise functions
and fractal formulas. Technology is usually conceived in terms of its instrumentality and
its value is judged by how well its performance conforms to the predefined purposes and
standards we have set for it. Technology structures every aspect of our lives but its
ubiquity and its necessity make it somewhat invisible – unless, as Heidegger points out,
our device breaks and then we suddenly start paying attention to it: by malfunctioning it
261
uncomfortably becomes something that is separate from us, that is no longer determined
by us
346
.
The attraction exemplifies an altogether different and more open way of
imagining our relationship to technics, revealing instead the non-instrumental dimension
of the technological object. In exhibiting its own technological apparatus as a spectacle,
the attraction draws attention to the technical object’s autonomy and self-driving logic.
No longer cast in the role of infrastructure, it emerges as an end in itself. Attractions are
gratuitous technologies, they serve no function but novelty – in essence, no function but
themselves. In this, they unveil the independent being of the technical object, showing it
as our co-participant and co-creator in the world, rather than our tool (or our master).
Simondon again provides a model for understanding the attraction’s “technicity”.
In Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958)
347
, he argues that the technical
object, like the aesthetic object, is essentially an experimental and underdetermined
process whose principle characteristic is its capacity to produce emergent phenomena.
Simondon calls this capacity “concrescence”, and it is an index of the technical object’s
ability to both harness the conditions of the concrete and to free the potential inherent in
the concrete. It reflects the technical object’s role as a transducer between the virtual and
material
348
. A machine acquires concreteness the more its components and sub-systems

346

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Reprint edition. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
2008. 102-105.
347
On the mode of existence of technical objects.

348
Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Editions Aubier, 2012. 197.
Simondon also refers to this phenomenon as “the conditioning of the present by the future”. 71
262
can perform multiple functions that allow the machine to operate synergistically, as a
system of recurrent causality
349
, rather than as series of elements with discrete functions
whose mutual incompatibilities must be contained and managed, limiting the machine’s
possibilities. To illustrate this principle Simondon uses the example of the circulation of
oil in a Guimbal turbine: the oil simultaneously transports the heat of the generator to the
housing of the turbine, and lubricates and insulates the generator itself. The overall
functioning of the turbine cannot be understood as the result of a concatenation of
individual functions, fulfilled by different components within the machine
350
; it is an
emergent effect of the play between these components. The machine does not operate
according to an instrumental principle, but according to a creative, almost organic logic.
For Simondon this "plurifunctonality"
351
of the oil in the turbine is the result of a
structural open-endedness, a process of hands-on experimentation in which the materials
and physical principles are put into work/play with each other. As a result, the technical
object’s total effect is greater than the effect of its individual parts. This total effect is the
technical object’s “milieu”, the self-sustaining system that it has set up for itself and
which effectively perpetuates those conditions that give rise to it.
This syncretic process is visible in an attraction as technically simple as the
phenakistoscope. A handheld wheel, a disk with printed figures, a disk with slits placed at
regular intervals around the disk’s circumference, a mirror (in certain versions), the

349
ibid, 70.
350

ibid, 41.

351
ibid, 66-67.

263
spectator’s digit are all inert, unrelated elements that produce no effect until they are
articulated together as an apparatus. These elements are redefined by the milieu of the
phenakistoscope; by virtue of its transductive efficacy, a flat image can suddenly move,
bringing into being an endless circus of prancing horses, jugglers, children playing
leapfrog, devils getting their head chopped off, vomiting clowns, dancing headmasters,
leaping leopards and bowing butlers
352
.
But Simondon’s notion of concrescence perhaps reaches its apex in the visual
effects algorithms that generate Perlin noise, define the alpha channel, and adapt the real
physics of computational fluid dynamics to imaginary oceans. The lines of code that put
these effects in motion hide systems within systems in a dizzying series of nested
structures that finally reaches into the flow of electrons that animates the circuits of the
computer rendering the image. The code is divided into “objects”, self-contained
programs that can be called at different moments in the course of the running of the larger
program that contains them. These chunks of code themselves call on functions and data
structures that are defined by the programming language in which the code had been
written. This programming language, in turn, builds on “lower” programming languages
that define more basic structures in the system, which are eventually translated in
assembly code, then 1s and 0s, where an addressing system accessed by the processor
determines which transistors in the computer’s motherboard should switch their voltage.
The levels of plurifunctionality achieved by this concatenation of languages that serially

352

From “The Richard Balzer Collection” of animated phenakistoscope gifs on Tumblr.
http://dickbalzer.tumblr.com

264
translates system references in the order of the most specific to the most universal, are
difficult, if not impossible, to represent to ourselves. For this reason it is easy to forget
that the digital image, as much as the phenakistoscope, is a synergistic mechanism with
emergent effects. We tend to think of it instead as a “black box”, Bruno Latour’s term to
design a technical process whose intelligibility, for the sake of convenience, has been
reduced to a set of inputs and outputs
353
. An attraction like the fractal universe of the
Mandlebulb, however, counteracts this dissimulative tendency by showcasing what
digital visual effects are, in their technical specificity and mode of operation – which the
Mandlebulb does by concretely visualizing the algorithm that generates it.
As Simondon makes clear, technical objects are essentially creative, not only
because they are the output of the engineer’s creative activity, but because they
themselves produce the new. This capacity extends between the production of physical
effects to the user of technology herself – or, in the case of the attraction, the spectator of
technology. Technologies do not only change the conditions of the concrete, they invent
the conditions for the actualization of imaginary experiences. For example, an aqueduct
makes the hypothetical concept of running water a reality. It not only effectuates a
physical transformation of the environment, it defines a new space of possibilities for
how we might interact with it.

353

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Reprint
edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. 130-31.

265
As we have seen, the attraction also consistently pushes the spectator’s
expectations of how the physical world can behave, and in doing so, allows the spectator
to vicariously experience imaginary phenomena. The fantascope, for example, makes the
“hypothetical” concept of ghosts a “reality” – within the confines of the game of pretend
that the spectator is engaging in with the device. The speculative nature of the fantascope,
the fact that it is at once a purely fictional and completely functional technology, marks it
as a self-reflexive technical object – a technology that re-stages the operation of
technology, so to speak. In doing so, it directly engages the question of what technology
is for. It puts the ends of technology back into play. In proposing a technical model that is
experimental both in its design and functionality, the attraction suggests that technical
objects need not be primarily conceived by pre-defined values or needs. Thomas Lamarre
discusses Simondon’s commitment to the non-instrumental ethos of technology to that
effect:
“In effect, how machines are “used” (or rather, participated in) should follow
from how machines are invented. As such, it is precisely because invention
proceeds in a hands-on, practical and inventive fashion – as a sort of dialogue
between humans and machines that engages the pre-individual within humans –
that humans should not strive to “use” machines in a purely rational utilitarian
fashion”
354

The indeterminacy or freedom of play without which a technical object cannot achieve
concreteness, cannot come into its own as a working system of relations is also the
condition without which we cannot hope to enter into a genuinely productive relationship
with technology. The attraction enacts technicity from this Simondonian perspective. By

354

Lamarre, Thomas. “Humans and Machines.” Inflexions 5 (2012): 29–67. 51
266
staging technology, by placing it in the foreground and not in the background of our
experience, it encourages the spectator to explore the apparatus beyond the “black box”,
beyond the smooth, static surface of the appliance, and delve into a dynamic process that
moment by moment creates and defines its own milieu, its own reality.
Bruno Latour sees evidence in our own patterns of technological practice and use
that, contrarily to our intuitive belief, technologies rarely lead us to a destination of our
own design. They can be understood better as labyrinths, sinuous detours that takes us
away from our starting point. When opening up the black box of the technological object,
one finds a long chain of human collectives and their agendas, including other
technologies and devices that had to exist to make that specific object a working reality.
Even a humble speed bump, so technically unsophisticated, is a complex machine of
captive human and non-human interests: “it is full of engineers and chancellors and
lawmakers, commingling their wills and their storylines with those of gravel, concrete,
paint, and standard calculations”
355
. We saw that, like the speed bump, Nuage Vert is also
a disguised collective, an object-event that contains a multitude of other objects. The
sinuosity of the labyrinth effectively describes the Green Cloud’s movement by which
non-humans are “folded” into humans as complementary programs of action that “enlist”
each other in order to effect a series of transformations on the world. This cascading
effect has no predetermined end, and a final account of its impact does not exist.

355

Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press,
1999. 190
267
Latour himself seems to spy in the attraction the ur-metaphor of this adventure of
the technological:
“Once we enter the realm of engineers and craftsmen, no unmediated action is
possible. A daedalion, the word in Greek that has been used to describe the
labyrinth, is something curved, veering from the straight line, artful but fake,
beautiful but contrived…Daedalus is an inventor of contraptions: statues that
seem to be alive, military robots that watch over Crete, an ancient version of
genetic engineering that enables Poseidon’s bull to impregnate Pasiphae to
conceive the minotaur – for which he builds the labyrinth, from which, via
another set of machines, he manages to escape…”
356

Daedalus’ fantastical inventions are “detours” that Daedalus employs to accomplish his
own ends, but they also have a way of transforming those ends and setting up a new
reality in their place, which in its turn necessitates the creation of other machines or
detours to navigate. What appeared at first to be a shortcut to a goal becomes an
unpredictable journey whose destination is always modified, and which takes us through
multiple translations across different spatial and temporal frames of reference. Much like,
Latour mentions offhand, our experience of fiction
357
.This fictionality of technology
recoups with what we have so far discovered about the technicity of the attraction,
namely, the attraction’s capacity to set up a world – to open up a space for potential
relations between different elements to be put into play and actualized
358
. This “self-

356
Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. 175.
357
ibid, 188.

358
The concept of “world”, as it applies to the aesthetic, is famously explored by Heidegger in The Origin
of the Work of Art. Heidegger’s poetic evocation of the artwork’s world (in this case, a Greek temple)
reveals how the concreteness of the work stems from its open-endedness as a system of possible future
relations between different elements:
"Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws out of the
rock the darkness of its unstructured yet unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its
place against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence. The
gleam and luster of the stone, though apparently there only by the grace of the sun, in fact first
268
conditioning” of the technical object, as Simondon named it, its knack for generating its
own milieu as both product and origin of itself, is a feature of all fictional worlds, whose
composite elements only acquire meaning if they are put in relationship with an
overarching system. As world-building processes, technical objects are essentially poietic
– in the original Greek (and later Heideggerian) sense of poiesis as creation or bringing
into being. Attractions, in their self-conscious refusal of instrumentality and their
sympathy for gratuitous detours, constitute the avant-garde of this phenomenon of
technological agency.

brings forth the light of day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple's firm
towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. The steadfastness of the work stands out
against the surge of the tide and, in its own repose, brings out the raging of the surf. Tree, grass,
eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as
what they are"
This world, as opened up by the artwork, is not a collection of elements whose meaning can be scrutinized
separately, it is a sensual totality whose “true” meaning can only be derived from attending to it as a whole
For Heidegger, this means being attentive to the work’s “shining”, the unveiling of its Being – a term that
curiously evokes the spectacular appearance of the attraction. The Heideggerian relationship between
spectator and artwork is not a straightforward epistemological one, but occurs as an act of co-creation or
imaginative encounter. If the technical object gains concreteness by increasing its degree of relationality
within itself and with its associated milieu, the aesthetic work gains power and effectiveness by setting up
an open-ended framework in which different elements can be brought into play with each other, and, like
the plurifunctional role of the water in the turbine, come into their own meaning and purpose only in
relationship with each other. As both a technical and aesthetic object, the attraction is a world-builder in
this double sense. Chapter 3’s discussion of spectacular cinema like Speed Racer and Mad Max: Fury Road
makes a case for this in the context of divergent technical-aesthetic approaches to digital filmmaking. “The
Origin of the Work of Art.” In Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
20-23.
269
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ABSTRACT

This study aims to provide a theoretical framework for understanding a certain
number of experiences and objects that have until now been studied as separate forms of
media practices in terms of their common basis in the concept of the attraction. Critical
theory has often ignored the central role attractions played not only in the histories of
cinema and new media, but also in the domain of technical innovation. By analyzing the
technical and phenomenological operation of attractions such as cabinets of curiosity,
19
th
century entertainments such as phantasmagorias, amusement parks, stage magic, as
well as digital visual effects in cinema and urban installations, this study shows the
concept of the attraction is not only a useful tool for the comparative study of media
across history, but illuminates transdisciplinary issues such as the nature of spectatorship,
the role of scientific and technical knowledge in the construction of aesthetic experience,
and the subject’s imaginative rapport with the material world as a domain of alterity. I
argue that the attraction acts as a two-way transducer between the material and the virtual.
The attraction realizes imaginary phenomenologies as sensible images, and conversely, it
produces emergent phenomena – new objects – from its own physical components. As
such, attractions have a multivalent relationship with the concept of the virtual –
specifically, they relate to the virtual as emergence, as simulation, and as projective
imagination. I moreover argue that the attraction is a fundamentally procedural object,
functioning as a dynamic system that produces its own lineage of parallel or “un-real”
phenomena. In this process, the attraction illuminates the frontiers of our relationship
296
with objects, becoming a site where exteriority – the spectator’s sense of the world
outside herself that is not subject to her control, that she cannot assimilate, but that also
physically incorporates her – is expressed and negotiated.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Fenton, Lauren (author)

Core Title Machines of the un/real: mapping the passage between the virtual and the material in the attraction

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Publication Date 12/06/2018

Defense Date 08/28/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1970s multimedia art,19th century visual culture,aesthetic of the operational,aesthetics,aesthetics of software,Amusement Park,art and technology,attraction,automation,Bruno Latour,cabinets of curiosity,comparative study of media,Coney Island,digital effects,early animation,emergence,expanded cinema,fractal art,Gilbert Simondon,history of cinema,history of computer graphics,history of graphics software,history of visual effects,illusion,individuation,materiality,Museum of Jurassic Technology,OAI-PMH Harvest,phantasmagoria,phenomenology,philosophy of technology,procedural object,projective imagination,robotic art,simulation,spectacle,spectatorship,stage magic,technical objects,virtual,virtuality,visual complexity,visual effects

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Hoberman, Perry (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

Creator Email laurenmjfenton@yahoo.com,lfenton1@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-110658

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