In 1888, Thomas Edison announced that he was experimenting on ‘an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion’. Just as Edison’s investigations were framed in terms of the known technologies of the phonograph and the microscope, the essays included in this collection address the contexts of innovation and reception that have framed the development of moving images in the last one hundred years. Three concerns are of particular interest: the contexts of innovation and reception for moving image technologies; the role of the observer whose vision and cognitive processes define some of the limits of enquiry and insight; and the role of new media which, engaging with the domestic sphere as cultural interface, are transforming our understanding of public and private spheres.

Contents:

Introduction

1.The Apparatus
Unaltered to Date: Developing 35mm Film, by Paul C. Spehr
Seeing Seeing: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Invention of the Ophthalmoscope, by Oliver Gaycken
On Fairies and Technologies, by Frank Kessler
Seeing in the Dark: Early X-ray Imaging and Cinema, by Solveig Jülich
The Bolex Motion Picture Camera, by Carlos Bustamante

2.The Observer
Sore Society: The Dissolution of the Image and the Assimilation of the Trauma, by Bent Fausing
Closing In: Telescopes, Early Cinema, and the Technological Conditions of De-distancing, by Jan Holmberg
‘We Partake, as it Were, of His Life’: The Status of the Visual in Early Ethnographic Film, by Alison Griffiths
Architectonics of Seeing: Architecture as Moving Images, by Pelle Snickars
Submerged Landscapes of the Postmodern Body: Surface, Text, Commodity, by Jay Moman