Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
'The Great Art of Light and Darkness' is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon by Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a leading scholar in his time of natural sciences and mathematics. In 1646 he published the first edition this book and in it he described a projecting device, equipped with a focusing lens and a mirror, either flat or parabolic.
Kircher described the construction of this ‘magic lantern’ by writing:
"Make ... a wooden box and put on it a chimney, so that the smoke of the lamp in the box is on a level with the opening, and insert in the opening a pipe or tube. The tube must contain a very good lens, but at the end of the tube...fasten the small glass plate, on which is painted an image in transparent water colours. Then the light of the lamp, penetrating through the lens and through the image on the glass (which is to be inserted... upside down) will throw an upright, enlarged coloured image on the white wall opposite.”
When I started to use SLR film cameras as projection devices I wrote: ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image. Caught in this fragile world a young boy somersaults and hovers forever above an icy cold swimming pool. Another camera clicks, another photograph is taken. I felt that a strange loop occurred whereby what once had been captured from the world was projected back into the world using the same apparatus, and then recaptured, light being the means of both its exposure and revelation.’
I see my camera projectors as the direct descendant of those early ‘magic lanterns’, but instead of a wooden box and a very good lens I have an SLR film camera. For the smoky lamp I have cool running Light Emitting Diode spotlights and the ‘transparent water colours’ are replaced by photographic transparencies. The transparency is still inserted upside down in my device and enlarged colour images will be projected on to the walls of the Dilston Grove exhibition space in early 2008.
The main output for this project will be the manufacture and exhibition of about 100 of these modern day ‘magic lanterns’. They will be grouped in a series of narrative sequences and photographic tableaux that will be distributed unevenly throughout the cavernous space of the former church. Two types of images will be projected. The first type will be from the collection of images I have been using for the past few years in my work and which I based by doctoral research on whilst I was at Goldsmiths. These images will occupy the smaller rectangular space at the end of the church. The second type of image will use photographs taken over the next year of the inside and outside of Dilston Grove and the locale. These images will create a site specific installation that will attempt to deconstruct the physical and political dimensions of the space and will be sited in the main body of the building.
