Mediacology

I have a new article up at Reality Sandwich: The Transported Man: Phantasmagoria, Tesla and Magic.

It’s an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Mediacology (out in April 2008). Though my article mostly deals with The Prestige, I also delve into some more philosophical musings. Here’s a teaser for the article:

Some art historians claim the Greeks were aware of linear perspectival space as a technique, but rejected it because of its innate distortion of God’s natural order. In this respect, the Renaissance and the project of Enlightenment, which conformed the world to the eye and book, would probably have incensed Socrates as a kind of sorcery, for Socrates hated magicians and poets: “I don’t mind saying to you, that all poetic imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” The vitriol continues as he vilifies the Sophist who is a “sort of wizard, an imitator of things.” Ironically, it was the codification of the alphabet by the Greeks that set our imitative technologies into motion.

Cut to the 19th Century when phantasmagoria was a popular entertainment spectacle that incorporated smoke, mirrors, and projected light to create illusions during live performances. The term itself combines roots for ghost or spirit (phantasm) and gathering (agora). Webster defines it as,

1: an exhibition or display of optical effects and illusions; 2 a: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined b: a scene that constantly changes; 3: a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage.

The key words are “exhibition,” “illusions,” “shifting,” and “assemblage,” all of which characterize the change that was taking place in the 19th Century as a result of the rise of mass media, commodities culture, industrialization, urbanization and the exponential increase in speed of transportation that was shaping perception. What is particularly interesting about the root “agora” is the sense of an open gathering space of the Greek polis, denoting a collective, public experience , the phantasmagoria being a shared social reality.

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