Abstract
Knoops discusses the seventeenth-century medium cylindrical anamorphosis as a precursor to two defining traits of contemporary media culture, challenging representational conventions and questioning the observer. A study of cylindrical anamorphosis’s deep time signals how other ways of representation and of looking, and another status of the observer were alternative possibilities that did not become part of mainstream media. The analysis of Knoops’s media installation Mirror Mirror (2014) shows how a confrontation with the digital and the moving image magnifies these inherent qualities of cylindrical anamorphosis to subvert representational conventions and challenge the role of the observer, and illustrates how these traits reverberate in the media culture of our time.
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Notes
- 1.
Baltrušaitis has elaborated his reference work on anamorphosis in three consequent editions, in 1955, 1969, and 1984. In this chapter, I refer to the English translation of the second French edition of Baltrušaitis’s Anamorphoses.
- 2.
More information about the research methodology can be found in my as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation Cylindrical Anamorphosis. Thaumaturgical Origins and Contemporary Workings (2017, 333 pp). It is an in-depth study of the aspects covered in this chapter and of other aspects and characteristics of anamorphosis, more specifically cylindrical anamorphosis.
- 3.
The best-known example is probably the Pepper’s Ghost illusion, originally invented by Henry Dircks, who named it the ‘Dircksian Phantasmagoria’, it quickly became known as Pepper’s Ghost because of its association with John Henry Pepper, director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, where the illusion premiered in 1862. See Kattelman in Reilly 2013.
- 4.
The first version of Niceron’s Perspective Curieuse appeared in 1638. The revised and extended Latin edition Thaumaturgus Opticus was published posthumously in 1646, and also contained additional illustrations. A new French version, based on the revised Latin version appeared in 1652. The original French text in the preface to the 1638 edition reads: “De sorte que nous pouvons à bon droit appeller Magie artificielle, celle qui nous produit les plus beaux & admirables effets, où l’art & l’industrie de l’homme puissent arriver”. The 1652 edition formulates it in a slightly different way: “que nous pouvons appeller Magie Artificiele, celle qui produit les plus admirables effets de l’industrie des hommes” (Niceron 1652, 6).
- 5.
The quote is from the Oxford English Dictionary. J. Dee in H. Billingsley tr. Euclid Elements. Geom. Pref. sig. aiiij, (1570).
- 6.
Concerning the perspectival form of anamorphosis Mark Hansen remarks that computer modelling has “fundamentally demystified the illusion of anamorphosis by giving it a precise location within the “virtual” perspectival space of the computer” (Hansen 2004, 202 note 5). He gives the example of The Ambassadors where the two hypothetically possible vantage points from where the warped image coalesces into coherent form can be determined exactly using three-dimensional virtual computer space.
- 7.
The theoretical model of the dispositif has its origins in the context of Apparatus theory and the discussion and critique of the ideologically charged position of the spectator in (mainstream) cinema, and has been revitalised and used in a wider media art context by writers such as Bellour (1996 [1990]), Royoux (2007), Elsaesser (2016).
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Knoops, R. (2019). The Art of Anamorphosis: Subverting Representational Conventions and Challenging the Observer. In: Wynants, N. (eds) Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99576-2_11
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