Thesis Outline

Format
An analytical essay exploring related artistic, theoretical, historical and critical issues and practices that inform your practice, without necessarily referring to your work directly.

How are media objects interpreted as phantasmagoria in the contemporary context?
Exploration of the integration of new media and technologies in spiritualist contexts

Topic

Supernatural / Media Archaeology / Human Perception / Light

Background

Introduction

I have been VJing since 2012 starting in the underground rave parties of Vienna and moving up to club and festival nights later on. This year I took new steps in my audiovisual practice and was more interested in the conceptual and perceptional approach behind my visuals. How can I play with space, brightness, time and perspective? How can I create an dialogue between the sound and the visual, while only using very minimalistic formal language?
In 2017 at my 360 degree projection mapping performance in La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris I realised, how much impact light has on the audience, if it surrounds them from all the sides and creates an embodied experience. During this summer I performed at two festivals: Dekmantel in Amsterdam and Atlas Electronic in Marrakech. This two underground electronic music festivals had a lot in common, but as well differentiated a lot from each other. My contribution as a visual jockey was to adapt to specific stage setups: Dekmantel festival main stage had an 80 meters long half curved LED wall, and at Atlas Electronic the main stage was an amphitheater with a terracotta wall on which the visuals were projected. Through working as an VJ assistant for the dutch light artist, Arnout Hulskamp at Dekmantel festival I understood the time factor related to space. The animations had to have an impact on the LED wall, but as well for the audience. One clip couldn't just cross the 80 meters in 2 seconds–it needed to be perceived almost in the physical sense. My first encounter of the physical characteristics of the light was at Atlas Electronic festival, where I projected a white cone and through the smoke it created a tunnel between the lens of the projector and the display wall. This discovery lead me to a new fascination of how can I encompass more spatial illusions and dissorientation by only using three main elements such as a dark space, light and smoke. I set this idea into practice during my audiovisual performance in a vault of a bank in Eindhoven, where I projected only vertical and horizontal lines into the space and controlled the right amount of smoke, so suddenly the graphical lines transformed into physical space dividers. To my biggest surprise the audience started to interact with the light beams and wanted to touch them while dancing. During this performance there were moments, when I created total darkness in the space by turning off the projector totally, and at climax moments, when the DJ dropped the beat I turned on on full brightness. The audience experienced different visual stimuli from excitement till anxiety. This made me realise that I would like to explore more the power of light on human perceptions and to understand the contemporary fear.

Body

Imaginary & Real (Chapter I) (Media Archaeology) Introduction to the media history of Phantasmagoria

Uncanny - Sigmund Freud
Gods and Ghosts - Smoke in relationship with Gods and Ghosts,The discovery of Magic Latern - Christiaan Huygens
Metaphysical Symbolism - Athanasius Kircher and Gaspar Schott pressed the laterna magica into the service of the Jesuits’ propagatio fidei in order to put the fear of God into their audiences by illuminating the devil

Supernatural (Chapter II) (Media Archaeology) Technological and perceptual psychology aspects of Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria, an audio-visual dialogue between the dead and the living – Johann Schröpfer, Edme-Gilles Guyot, Paul Philidor
Immersion – Perceptual psychology of Robertson
Hallucinations for spiritual enlightenment – Brion Gysin’s, William Burroughs’ and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine (1960), William Grey Walter, “The Living Brain”, cybernetics
Laws of gestalt
Reflection on the contemporary Phantasmagoria aspects in current audiovisual light installations – "art-science", technological manifestation, instafam and link to Robertson plagiarism problems
Smoke becoming an interactive interface – Connection to Eigengrau

Zeitgeist (Chapter III) (Narrative & Architecture) Content & Context of Phantasmagoria

Metaphoric displacement (Content of Robertson’s shows)
The Opening of Padora’s box – a metaphor in French Revolution (1799) and a metaphor in Post Digital Immersion Revolution (2019) (Zeitgeist)

What kind of narrative was Robertson saying about the french revolution?
What kind of narrative I am saying about the darkweb? – parafiction - Benjamin Bratton

The Opening of Padora’s box – a myth about the dark web
Ritual model of communication – Fear in the collective (how could darkness strength the collective feeling?)
Heterotopic liminoid
Post ritual spaces – club context – Hybrid audience
The darkness as a driving motor for a transcendental space for body and soul

- short summary of the above
- final statement

In our information age in which technology becomes more and more omnipresent of our daily there is a growing need for spiritual understanding. Therefor it is important to understand light as stimulus for human perceptions.
could be compared that most (?) of contemporary audiovisual projects are still continuations of phantasmagorias (pseudo scientific discourse) since they don’t reveal the technology (custom made software and hardware) and the software behind it and becomes not science rather alchemy