(Marina Warner, OUP 2006)
I think this is going to be a book about how the non-material has been rendered visible by artists. I'm interested because of my own attempts in my work to connect viewers to higher states of consciousness.
Introduction: the logic of the imaginary
Some of the ideas and phenomena she will be looking at:
- the difference between vision and illusion, and anxiety around this - are the works created simply reflections of the creator's state of mind? or signs for something else? what status do they have in 'the optical unconscious'?
- the domination of clouds and cloudiness in communicating the inner world/spirit
- the use of optical devices like the magic lantern (camera obscura) to depict imagined states/objects and project them into the world; these brought into being speculative models of the mind and how it works.
- these first proto-cinematic devices conjured a melancholic mind, ghosts, fantasies, nightmares - flickering and so animated
- photography - 'writing in light' as a form of shadow play and with mythical connections
- the notion of photographs capturing the soul or spirit of the sitter, and the apparent documenting of ghosts
- devices that move sound and images through the air (wireless, telephone, tv, movies); these have taken us into new realms but also revealed our sensory boundaries - there is a space between these that we navigate, our perception determined by what we already know. The power of imaginary projections (psychoanalysis, surrealism). The status of cinematic images and beings.
- contemporary metaphors of spirit
- the relationship of fantasy, memory, sensations and emotions (soul) to current visual communications, an enfoldment within them
Pt 4 - Light
Ch 9 - The Eye of the Imagination
Although the imagination works in images, so too do perception and memory. To distinguish, use term 'fantasy' which relates to the inner world of the unconscious and what it generates.
The issue of how 'truthful' the imagination is has been an alive one for centuries. Where do these lie on the scale of truthfulness: visions of the divine (illumination), the influence of personal psychology on perception, dreams, reverie, visions of the mentally ill, beliefs in the demonic, magic. . .? How does imagination interact with the outer? At what point do we say it is fantasy rather than imagination at work? All sorts of (fantastical) theories. But an issue of anxiety around what is true, what can be relied on.
Ch 10 - Fancy's Images
Development of magic lantern by Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in 1640s. Used smoking lamps, crystals, different kinds of lenses and slides, salts and chemicals sprinkled on them, to evoke both the divine and demonic 'optical enchantments', flickering spirit visions. This supernatural subject matter was chosen to show the power of this illusion-creating device. The mind fabricating in 'the mind;s eye' what cannot be actually perceived. His writings show he was using light and shadow with their moral and mystical meanings; light is connected with consciousness, darkness with dream, fantasy, what is invisible. He seems to conflate fantasy and the physical outcomes through his device, so that they are given a greater reality or truthfulness. He also uses the camera obscura as an image of the mind itself: a dark chamber which can mirror its fantasies outwards. Shadows, reflections, swirling clouds all return - unexamined -as part of the imagery for and understanding of mind. These plus the painted transparency and attempts to reproduce movement lead directly to cinema and digital media. The choice of subject matter by users of MLs - myths, fantasies, the uncanny - also very influential.
The camera obscura (light coming into a completely dark room through a pinhole, projecting upside down what is outside) was known to the ancient Greeks, Chinese and Japanese.
Ch 11 - Darkness Visible : The Phantasmagoria
Development of son-et-lumiere picture shows, refinements of magic lantern shows (both with an emphasis on the occult) dioramas and panoramas.
[Projections on to thin gauzes saturated in wax - diaphanous and translucent; overlapping glass slides; kaleidoscopic - 'gorgeous geometries']
Researchers and instrument-makers aimed at enhancing the visual experience of the world, but also played into expressing fantasy and inner visions, the melancholic and terrifying.
Part 6
Ch 15 The Camera Steals the Soul
Early use of the camera to record - but accompanying fear that it took something - soul - from the subject alongside preserving something of them. To communicate inner worlds, it needed to become vague, dreamy.
Conclusion
Historically people have investigated what the soul is made of using scientific investigation, into materials suggested by the imagination and its symbolism (wax, air, ether, light, shadow, ectoplasm. . .). Failure. More recently investigation has been into the nature of the psyche and of consciousness, of individuality, informed by understanding of DNA and use of brain scanning. The two investigations are entwined: the methods and metaphors they use are contingent, relative to contemporary experience, and the metaphors change in their meaning dependent on this (cloud has gone from heavenly to atomic/destructive/polluting and back to incorporate the idyllic too). Investigation is now by neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers, theologians - with an emphasis on the brain and its materiality. This is the conditioned metaphor of our time. It does not accord with our sensed experience of what it is to be us. We end up recorded and stored digitally in a vast untouchable available network, dematerialised just like the early metaphors of soul. This reduction only serves to highlight its discrepancy with what we feel it is to be human, to re-examine that question - and fresh 'phantasms' emerge. One of these is the photo of ourselves, our enchantment with this and our very recent ability to transmit it globally. This re-fashions our self-image and its relation to others. And the magical imagination returns in movies, games full of mythical and phantasmic beings, often confusing virtual and real.
So there is what is seen of us from the outside, what we project from within via multiple media, and our own inner sense of what it is to be 'ensouled as a person'. How can we truly communicate this singular experience? MW asks why have all the media now at our disposal 'led only to monstrous reinforcement of earlier systems of alienation, an oppressive media culture'. She highlights an increasing slippage between real and imagined - e.g.the plethora of double and multiple personalities, hauntings, daimons, monsters, traumatic memory, potential universes, celebrity images, fantasy psychic travel, alien abductions. . . Personal identity is being unsettled, a person seen more as 'a node in a web of connections'. 'The self splits, is usurped by alter egos, and becomes disunited and free floating.' What used to be called soul is harnessed to the new media and the laws that govern those. Our understanding of ourselves exists in symbiosis with the technological means of expression - and we need to understand this more deeply and also recognise the language of phantasms that we have inherited.
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