Our Technological Séance

Ever since the introduction of the Lumiere brothers' cinematograph, the moving image has been a key part of shaping our cultural and personal narratives, especially as these images now freely move around the globe as part of the electronic arcade. For the purposes of our teaching and research, we refer to this complicated process of image-based cross-cultural transmission, interaction and transformation as Lumiere Ghosting. The images of ourselves and of others that comprise the structure of the electronic arcade we refer to as Lumiere Ghosts—ghost-like personas that we all leave behind us as we journey through the arcade. Lumiere Ghosts are also ghost-like personas that have been created over time through their persistence and repetition throughout the environment of the arcade.

Some Lumiere Ghosts began as images of real people (as with Monroe) but then quickly translated into iconic representations of a form that other people can inhabit over time (such as the image to the left of Monroe which is actually a drag performer reenacting a famous photograph as part of his representation of himself). Other Lumiere Ghosts were never real at all, such as the ghost of Superman which is continually represented and inhabited by a wide range of real and virtual personas for a wide range of reasons and to a wide diversity of effects.

This complex process of image creation, animation, transference, and reconfiguration is central to the modern cultural subconscious, and often influences our public and private lives in ways often too subtle to fully comprehend (Barthes). The Lumiere Ghosting Project is an attempt to explore this process as students and as researchers, and through the development of the CompuObscura, we hope to comment on the process through the creation and "physical" manipulation of Lumiere Ghosts inside the CompuObscura environment.

The Lumiere Ghosting Project and the CompuObscura is a reaction against many current video and new media art installations that often appear enraptured with the marvels and immediacy of the image technologies with which the artists are working (Packer & Jordan). Even if the stated “theme” of these works is to critique modern media, or the influence of corporate images on everyday life, we feel that many of these works tend to be fairly shallow or too simplistic in their critique and seem unaware or unconcerned with the histories that feed into the technologies in use. As we worked to develop the first manifestation of our moving image theater, the CompuObscura, we noted that many of the digital art and interactive new media works we reviewed seemed to deal with media use, and misuse “issues” that the artists often claimed to be quite recent developments, with a dip into a history spanning only ten or twenty years (Morley).

As a new media instructor interested not just in image and communication technology, but in the rhetoric that informs the use of those technologies, I wanted to work directly with the history of film and moving image projection to examine our society’s current obsession with the negative effects of globalization, mainly because my colleagues and I have come to believe that the “globalization issues” of the early 21st century (cultural confusion, loss of identity, exploitation, fear of the "other," the imposition of uniformity) have actually been around for a very long time (Kraus & Auer).

Ever since the introduction of literacy, illustrated texts and mass-production printing, cultures have shared stories, myths and technical innovations, integrating concepts that are useful, ignoring or actively rejecting others; this sharing has then manifested itself in positive and negative ways through various political, economic, social, and personal struggles (Essary). Therefore, as we define it in the scope of our project, globalization is nothing new, it is just moving faster than ever before while making use of elaborate, complex and widely distributed and interlinked visual and textual metaphor, therefore drawing more attention to the process through its persistent presence in nearly every world culture.

Film as we know it now essentially began as a documentary format and was often advertised for its scientific possibilities and its ability to “honestly” document real life. This promotion of film as a semi-scientific form for careful documentation was a concerted effort to separate the early medium from the peek-show, vaudeville-like entertainment and low-class venues where its visual progenitors had mostly been put on display. Promoting film as a serious component of science certainly made it easier to raise research and development funds from “respectable” sources and it has also endowed the medium with an element of “truth telling” that has never quite gone away no matter how fanciful and fantastic films have become (Mellencamp). The writings about film from many early film makers are often filled with the sense of mission toward truth telling. Film was at first considered as a new way to see the world, as a way of peering into places where the average viewer was unable to go. The use of the technology as a storytelling medium was, at first, of secondary concern.

It immediately became apparent to early film makers that much more money was to be made from attracting a large audience of viewers, many of whom were more than willing to pay to view the same presentation many times, as long as the images were compelling. While a large number of early film innovators clearly considered themselves men of science, with noble ideals for their technological inventions, or as artists interested in this new form of personal expression, the pressure of economics and the lure of quick wealth also encouraged them to be showmen. Therefore, the history of film is as much about the technology as the hype that surrounded the new technology (Abel).

Early film cameras were small, able to film only a few minutes of action at a time, and relied upon a lot of available light to impress a viewable image onto the film. The first truly popular moving picture camera was the cinematograph, a hand-held motion picture camera invented by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. The primary “invention” of the Lumiere brothers was in making the mechanics of filmmaking economical and fairly convenient. The Lumiere cinematograph allowed filmmakers to capture images during the day, develop film in the afternoon, then when the filmmaker turned the device around and illuminated it with a gas light or a small electric bulb, he could project the moving images he had captured just a few hours before.

To promote their new devices, the Lumiere brothers established a collection of franchise agents who took on the task of making hundreds of the first films, and showing the results as widely and as frequently as possible. Lumiere’s nascent filmmakers traveled throughout Europe, then eventually over most of the globe, capturing moving images as they went. The most famous short film from this period—the one always displayed when presenting a history of film—is of workers leaving a factory (see images above). Many early filmmakers wanted to simply capture selected moments from the day, preferably moments filled with some type of action that could not be adequately represented through still photography or painting. The early motion picture camera was considered to be a device to help us look at life more closely, to help us slow motion down or speed it up, to help us see our bodies and the world around us in a new light. But it was also mainly seen as a way to present action itself just for the sake of showing action; this is perhaps why so many early films resemble footage captured from a surveillance camera.

By the start of the 20th century, cinematographs and other, more advanced motion picture film cameras, had spread around the world, capturing scenes of people engaged in the mundane details of their lives. These images of life in distant lands were brought back home and projected to audiences that integrated these early Lumiere Ghost images into their evolving visions of the world. Storytellers also quickly became interested in the fact that large, diverse audiences willingly paid to experience this new medium. The vaudeville and cheap-show nature of the medium flourished, more and more stories and narrative uses for the medium were created, and within a few years the film industry and the techniques of presenting persuasive, compelling and entertaining screened motion had fully taken shape.

As we explored the uses of the camera obscura, and explored early developments with still photography, we began to see a reoccurring social fascination with the occult and magic in connection to the use of captured and/or projected still or moving images. Any good look at the history of film and photography eventually reveals that the process of capturing a "realistic" image on film, either for stills or for the movies, has often been directly associated with the presence of ghosts (Cherchi). As I discussed earlier, camera obscura technology was used as a component of a formal séance, and early still photography was also associated with the attempt to "capture" the ghostly images of the deceased as they floated close to those who had recently lost a loved one. Early film was therefore similarly associated with aspects of the occult or of the world of ghosts and so the use of Lumiere Ghosts as a uniting metaphor for our work seems quite natural as a compliment to the history of the image technologies that precede us.

Therefore, as developers, as instructors, as students, and as artists working with the Lumiere Ghosting Project we are passionately interested in the idea of ghosts, both in the occult sense (haunting and foreboding), the spiritual sense (religious, historical, philosophical), and in the theatrical sense (as a narrative device, as a convenient distraction to cover a slight of hand, as a frightening and thrilling crowd pleaser). In the development of the technologies for our project, we are also interested in mating the ideas of theoretical interaction and critical dialectic with the actual, somewhat “physical” interaction with imagery itself. We are also interested in the idea of making the “subject” of an image a simultaneous “creator” of that image in the same way that Japanese keitai users can create and interact with their virtual tomogachi characters, and then eventually let them loose into the world to take on lives of their own.

We are, to be simplistic, interested in a high tech form of séance that works equally well as a form of theater, as a comment on history and as a metaphorical centerpiece for interdisciplinary collaboration and invention. One of the goals of this technology development and study process is to allow us as teachers, students and inventors (and then eventually the users of our inventions) to directly intervene in the electronic arcade and thereby learn more about how the arcade influences our everyday lives (Postman). By tapping directly into the texts, images and sounds being broadcast on the web and on television, we hope that our new media theater, the CompuObscura, will help to demonstrate how Lumiere Ghosts have been incorporated into our culture as they appear in newscasts and soap commercials, played again and again in Bollywood musicals and in late-night Russian satires, flashed on giant screens in a Tokyo entertainment district and flickered as a cell-phone background in a teenager’s hand in Ulan Bator (Reiser).

The Lumiere Ghosting Project tries to make the cloaked, the internalized and the hidden visible, tangible, understandable and something we can individually control. The first step is to make this process visible. The second is to make the process small enough, specific enough, that we can grasp it in our hands. The third and vital step is to allow us to become active, informed participants in the process, to allow us to direct it from inside, to help us preserve and promote individuality, difference, differentiation, uniqueness, and the quirky everyday aspects of human culture (Collier).