User:Sebastian Cimpean/gradproj/artofprojection

Art of Projection / Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon / 2009

The Long and The short of it: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from natural magic to the avant-garde / Tom Gunning

Notes

[…] its velvety eclipse of space, its obscuring of orientation. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of night, “it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surface and without any distance separating it from me. All space for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its parts to each other, but in this case, the thinking starts from nowhere.” What happens in the dark? How does light structure and create its own world? Projection indicates a throwing forward, in this case of light, but also of shadow, with a collision occurring between light, shadow, and a surface or screen. There is a space in front of a screen that seems to be cancelled out by darkness, the “throw” of the beam of projection. If darkness cancels out this space, the screen or projection opens up another space, a space of illusion perhaps, or representation, or simply of the play of light.
(pg. 23)
// this text brings forth the idea/importance of darkness when thinking of projection. Also the idea of the screen opening up a space for me relates to the work of James Turrell (especially, The Royal Flush).

I want to trace this play of projection back to its most elaborate spectacle - the phantasmagoria […] - and use it to think about the nature of shadow and illusion, but most of all about its dual role of canceling out and conjuring up space. To engage space in this way, as a transition between the tangible and the virtual, means to most obviously engage the most basic aspects of human perception and cognition, the données of space, but also of movement, and to play there with our most fundamental categories of world formation and orientation, of belief and confusion, of certainty and play.
(pg 24)
// again, the importance of darkness, but clarifies the idea of opening up a new space, and the tension it creates... the tangible vs the virtual.

The phantasmagoria (like the movie projection system that ultimately derived from it) created its illusions primarily by concealing its means of projection. Thus it modernized the long tradition of magic shadows, which created the impression of miraculous events by hiding the real process from view, through the implementation of new optical effects. As an illusion, it worked directly on the people sitting in the audience, limiting their viewpoint, manipulating their perception either by withholding sensual information or by over stimulating the senses (the combination of limited sight due to the gloomy atmosphere while the ears were assaulted with eerie or unfamiliar sounds). (pg 28) // Concealing the source of the projection enhances the experience, and another way of manipulating the perception of the audience