User:Zalán Szakács/thesis1chapter

Chapter I
Imaginary & Real
Uncanny
Our times is characterised by over and over fearful circumstances such as the rise of ‘alt right’ movements around Europe; the Brexit-debate; the migration from Africa and Middle East; the Donald Trump’s political sanctions; the coming closer climate change; the terror attacks executed by the ‘Islamic State’ these all leading to destabilisation of the West’s psyche. Are we heading towards a dystopian future or living already in a “hyper-normalised fake world” run by corporations and kept stable by politicians? 1 (do I have to answer this question?)
Uncanny is surrounding us in every aspect of our life and our society. The notion and the feeling of this phenomenon could be traced back to the existence of human kind. To understand this experience, first I would like to examined the ethnology of it described in Merriam-Webster dictionary:
uncanny: a: seeming to have a supernatural character or origin: eerie, mysterious b: being beyond what is normal or expected: suggesting superhuman or supernatural powers. 2
Secondarily I would like to address it from the psychological perspectives described by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “Uncanny”: “Animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration-complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something fearful into an uncanny thing.” 3 (Freund, 1919) He aimed to understand this subject from the purest human point of view by ignoring the ego and focussing on the subconsciousness. We appear to encounter the ‘‘uncanny’’ in conjunction with the ‘‘survival of primitive ideas,’’ the resurfacing of infantile conceptions of life that the rational adult imagines have been overcome. These include belief in the existence of supernatural destructive forces, the return of the dead or contact with them, all of which belong to the doctrine of animism. According to Freud, the uncanny results from the contradiction between what we think we know and what we fear we perceive at a particular moment. 4 (Grau, 2007)
Certainly many people in the nineteenth century spoke of the "phantoms of the brain" as though they came from outside-as if there were, at the very heart of subjectivity itself, something foreign and fantastic, a daemonic presence from elsewhere, a specter-show of unaccountable origin. By the time of Freud, the rhetorical pattern had resolved, as it were, into a cultural pathology: everyone felt "haunted." That is to say, the mind itself now seemed a kind of supernatural space, filled with intrusive spectral presences-incursions from past or future, ready to terrify, pursue, or disable the harried subject. 5 (Castle, 1988) The endless disproportionate action of anxiety is ticking as a bomb clock under the surface of our daily human interactions. Do we feel “haunted” in the twenty-first century?

Gods and Ghosts
During ancient Greece and Roman times the most successful and most common magic was practiced with the plane and concave mirrors. The projections of gods and ghosts took in temples and places of worship place, and described in 1829 by the French scholar Bacconiere-Salverte in his book The Occult Sciences. 6 Hermann Hecht is stating in his 1983 written article, “The History of Projecting Phantoms, Ghosts and Apparitions” that, concave mirrors were in fact used for projection purposes. Here he is referencing to the Jewish story of the Witch of Endor, who summoned before King Saul the ghost of the prophet Samuel. (1 illustration) There is a Jewish tradition, which says, that ghosts always appear standing on their heads, which would be of course be the case if concave mirrors were used without the image being reinverted. 7 Paradoxically the appearance of Samuel cannot be true, because he appeared before Saul standing on his feet! The anonymous author of the book The Wonders of Light and Shadow written in 1851 thinks, that “apparitions of heathen gods” were achieved by a form of magic lantern rather than mirrors, because of the logistical difficulties of setting up the latter. 8 ‘Gods’ were temple workers appearing from hidden corners under the cover of smoke from the alter fires. 9 ( 2 illustration ?)
Writing about ghost and devil projection instruments is it important the underline the influential characteristics of camera obscura. This apparatus allowed in its simplest form to project images through an aperture, upside down on a surface opposite the hole. ( 3 illustration) Giovanni Battista della Porta (4 illustration) revolutionised in 1589 the use of the lenses and projected the picture the right way round, above the aperture, by fixing a concave mirror inside the camera to reinvert the image. 10 The mirror reflects an enlarged image the right manner round on the screen by inserting a bi-convex lens in the aperture and placing a concave mirror in its focus. In illustration 5 (5 illustration), AB is the inverted image received in the focus of the mirror from the lens, and CD is the projected upright image. Porta describes his ‘Spectre and Magic Theatre’ in his 1589 published book on natural magic in which his “delighted, and often terrified audience, hardly knew whether what they saw was true or only illusion. 11 Through the introduction of new technologies during the history of image projection, the audience have difficulty in establishing whether the image is real or illusory, and only once they became familiar with it – the apparatus becomes a commercial media object, thereby the magic is faded away.
The seventeenth century described as an age of social uncertainty and anxiety, that lead to flourishing of illusionistic magic and stage plays, and influenced in the indirect ways the development of the invention of magic lantern, which was developed by Christiaan Huygens in 1659. 12 (6 illustration) Yet while Koen Vermeir argues in his article “The magic of the magic lantern (1660–1700): on analogical demonstration and the visualisation of the invisible”, that it is somewhat anachronistic to pinpoint a ‘true’ inventor, because looking from a present-day standpoint, ‘hybrids’ were created, combinations of camerae obscurae, lanterns, magic lanterns, solar microscopes, projection micro- scopes, projection mirrors and projection clocks; and making distinctions was not so easy. 13

Metaphysical Symbolism