Martyn Jolly

For several years a collaborative team of composers, musicians, artists, performers and historians has recreated the immersive experience of magic lantern shows for contemporary audiences. As part of the research project ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World’ we have developed live performances physically combining new creative elements with actual historical magic lanterns and glass slides. In magic lantern shows audiences sat shoulder to shoulder in the dark and collectively experienced visual and aural effects as transforming images interacted with voice and music. This ubiquitous apparatus formed a fundamental archaeological substratum to the special effects of today’s media spaces. But for contemporary audiences inured to subsequently developed media thrills, the apparatus’s original experiential power can seem quaint and distant. Therefore, our intention has not been to ‘authentically’ reproduce an historical event, nor to simply add a ‘retro’ flavour to a contemporary multimedia performance, but to develop ways — ranging from algorithmic coding to microscopic glass painting —contemporary audiences can reconnect with the original ‘magic’ of the lantern. We have used various strategies, including elements of verbatim theatre, site specific reenactment, and creative re-use, to encourage our audiences to reflect on the historical reality of the magic lantern show as an ‘experiential object’. Addressing the conference themes of ‘Photography, Cinema and Sound Archaeologies’, ‘Performance and Visual Media’, and ‘Cultural Heritage and the Digital Age’, I will examine the new strategies historians and museums need to develop as heritage becomes less tangible and more experiential. When historians are seeking to understand the immersive media experiences of the past in their historical and material specificity, and museum visitors are seeking to engage with their heritage in a more directly experiential way, what can be learnt from our creative, site specific, performances of historical immersive technologies?

Dr Martyn Jolly is an honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University School of Art and Design. As lead investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in the Australia and the World’ he has developed, along with the composer Dr Alexander Hunter from the ANU School of Music and the historian Dr Elisa deCourcy from the ANU Research School Humanities and the Arts, collaborative site-specific magic lantern shows at the Bundanon Trust (New South Wales), the National Portrait Gallery (Canberra), the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), Mount Stromlo Astronomical Observatory (Canberra), the National Film and Sound Archive (Canberra), the Cellblock Theatre (Sydney), ACT Historic Places (Canberra, forthcoming), and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne, forthcoming). His recent publications include: ‘Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist, J.W. Newland’, (co-authored with Elisa deCourcy), Bloomsbury (forthcoming). ‘The magic lantern at work: witnessing, persuading, experiencing and connecting’, in The magic lantern at work: witnessing, persuading, experiencing and connecting, New York: Routledge, edited by Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy, 2020. ‘The magic lantern at the edge of empire: The experience of dissolving views and phantasmagoria in colonial Australia’, in A Million Pictures: Magic lantern slides in the History of Learning, KINtop studies in early cinema, Indiana University Press, Frank Kessler, Sarah Dellman, (eds) (forthcoming) ‘The Circus and the magic lantern’ (co-authored with Elisa deCourcy), in Circus Science and Technology: Dramatising Innnovation, edited by Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming). ‘The Light of the World: Transport and Transmission in Colonial Modernity,’ Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2. ‘Practice-led research by creative re-use in the Australian Research Council Project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World’, Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 17,

Yolanda Fernandez-Barredo and Juan Jose Sanchez Garcia

Our presentation deals with the relationship between some stereoscopic series published in the 19th century whose theme is related to the operatic world, in several of its facets, and the photographic treatment that some publishers gave to these works for cultural and informative purposes.

Sara Castelo Branco

Partindo de uma exploração performativa e discursiva sobre as imagens em movimento no contexto da arte contemporânea portuguesa, procura-se interpelar nesta apresentação vídeo-instalações dos artistas portugueses João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Alexandre Estrela e Jonathan Saldanha, que se realizam numa experiência multissensorial e imersiva, através de uma consciência espacial cumprida além do ocularcentrismo. Num jogo ambíguo entre o que se dirige ao ouvido e o que remete à visão, estas obras convocam a noção etimológica de “estéreo” – do grego sólido, enquanto referência à terceira dimensão e à profundidade que os objectos possuem – onde as relações entre imagem e som são tensionadas entre o material e o imaterial, a bidimensionalidade e a tridimensionalidade, trabalhando sobre uma circunstância objectual dos ecrãs e as propriedades do som enquanto escultor do espaço. Implicando frequentemente processos retinianos e mentais que ligam factores externos da visão (como a influência exterior sobre os mecanismos neuro-fisiológicos que enganam o olho) a factores internos da visualidade (conforme a experiência construída subjectivamente pelo observador), estas vídeo-instalações implicam o espectador num jogo de analogia entre dimensões sinestésicas (a relação de planos sensoriais distintos) e cinestésicas (o conjunto de sensações que permitem a percepção e consciência dos movimentos espaciais do nosso corpo).

Sara Castelo Branco (1989, Porto). É doutoranda em Arts et Sciences d’Art e Ciências da Comunicação pela Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris) e a Universidade Nova de Lisboa, enquanto bolseira da FCT. É membro da CIC.Digital – Centro de Investigação em Comunicação, Informação e Cultura Digital (FCSH-UNL). Desenvolve uma investigação sobre as relações entre a arte e o cinema no contexto da arte contemporânea portuguesa. Tem programado ciclos de filmes de artistas e cinema experimental, como Out Off Nature (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst – Berlim) ou Under the Ground (Galerias Municipais de Lisboa, 2020), entre outros. Possui um mestrado em Estudos Artísticos – Teoria e Crítica da Arte pela Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto (FBAUP) e uma licenciatura em Ciências da Comunicação e da Cultura pela Universidade Lusófona do Porto (ULP). Na área da investigação e da crítica sobre cinema e arte contemporânea contribui regularmente com artigos e ensaios para revistas e catálogos.