The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting

Abstract

The optical projection of images has a long history. Technologies first developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still exist, archaeologically embedded in today’s digital PowerPoint presentations. This introductory chapter outlines this broad history as a background for the individual chapters that follow. It identifies key moments of technological reconfiguration, working backwards from PowerPoint to the first inventors of the magic lantern. It unpacks the strange couplet ‘magic lantern’, which was in use from the mid-seventeenth century through to the early twentieth century, and examines the affective power for audiences of the magic lantern show. Each show brought together in a unique way still and animated, photographic and hand-painted slides, accompanied by music and songs, supported with formal recitations and informal extemporisations, and projected with both human manipulation and technical operation, all in an intimately shared domestic or public space. By focusing on the relationship between audience and the apparatus, as well as the glass slide as a material object, not just an image, the chapter draws out this book’s themes of ‘experiencing’, ‘connecting’, ‘persuading’ and ‘witnessing’, and argues that further study of the magic lantern has much to offer historians, curators and artists.