The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Darwin, Concepción, and the Geological Sublime

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Earth History ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Popular Audience

ArgumentDarwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin's Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

The Black Diamonds of Sydney Harbour

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-664
Author(s):  
Ann Elias
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Mining Company ◽  
Pastoral Area ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Sydney Harbour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Below Ground ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article explores the case study of a coal mine that was first tunneled under Sydney Harbour in 1897 but closed in 1931. Specifically, it examines how the history of the mine intersects with aesthetics, race, colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Centered on the story of an English mining company that first sought a mine site in a pastoral area of the city, but under public pressure was forced to select instead a grimy working class suburb on the opposite harbor shore, the article argues that environmental aesthetics and tastes in beauty collaborated with extractivism. The argument emerges that economics, art, and aesthetics are inextricably linked in this history and further, that while the mine excited the industrial imagination through the aesthetic of the sublime, and associations with darkness and vastness, it conflicted with colonial settler tastes for the pastoral imagination defined by the aesthetics of the beautiful and its associations with light. The article discusses the context of a settler economy in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, and how conceptualizations of the sublime and beautiful, as well as dark and light, were aligned with the racialization of the properties of coal and space above and below ground.

THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC: GOTHIC MEDICINE AND CURIOUS FICTION IN SAMUEL WARREN'SDIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case History ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Vision

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novelPassages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

scholarly journals Networked Worlds: Social Aspects of Multi-User Virtual Reality Technology

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 89-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This paper examines two aspects of multi-user virtual reality (VR) systems; the socio-technical shaping of these systems and the social relations inside multi-user virtual worlds. The paper begins with an overview of the history of networked interactive computer graphics and examines the main factors which are currently shaping networked VR systems. The second part explores the social relations between users inside virtual worlds and makes comparisons with other forms of computer-mediated-communication. In the conclusion, these two parts are linked: how is the development of multi-user virtual reality technology influencing how users interact within virtual worlds - and vice versa?

The sublime yet awful grandeur: the Arctic panoramas of Elisha Kent Kane

Polar Record ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 35 (194) ◽  
pp. 193-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell A. Potter ◽  
Douglas W. Wamsley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Optical Media ◽  
Arctic Regions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Technologies

AbstractIn mid-nineteenth century America, the Arctic adventures of Elisha Kent Kane were a common and central subject for the emerging mass media. Kane's exploits were retold through illustrated newspapers, magazines, and books, but his narratives found one of their widest audiences through the medium of the ‘panorama.’ Initially presented in fixed locations, these panoramas later traveled across the country, combining large moving canvasses with a variety of visual and theatrical effects. Kane's two Arctic expeditions were among the most popular subjects represented by panoramas in the period before the American Civil War. This article examines the history of the panorama as it reflected and shaped public interest in the Arctic regions, including earlier polar expeditions, and gives a detailed account of the Kane panoramas. Other optical media that represented Kane's exploits are also considered. Because of its broad audience and widespread appeal, the panorama, along with other emergent visual technologies, played a vital yet overlooked part, both in disseminating Kane's accomplishments and in elevating Kane to prominence and fame in the mid-nineteenth century.

scholarly journals VR Technology and International Business Negotiation Teaching

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. p39
Author(s):  
Fanyu Mao
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Human Development ◽  
International Business ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Business Negotiation ◽  
Technology In Teaching ◽  
History Of ◽  
Teaching Application

With the continuous advancement of science and technology, technological products not only bring convenience to people’s lives, but also bring great benefits to education. The emergence of VR technology is a major milestone in the history of human development. This article starts with the theoretical basis of Virtual Reality technology in teaching application, analyzes the characteristics of VR technology, summarizes the problems existing in negotiation teaching, and finally discusses the advantages of VR technology to the teaching of International Business Negotiation courses.

The Design of Small Vehicles Based on Virtual Reality Technology

2012 ◽  
Vol 562-564 ◽  
pp. 1870-1873
Author(s):  
Bao Zhang ◽  
Zhi Feng Liu ◽  
Guang Fu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Design Development ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Automobile Design ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ergonomic Analysis

Virtual Reality, Automobile Model, Ergonomics, Aesthetics Abstract. In the process of design development for vehicles, Virtual Reality (VR) technology is the inevitable trend in future. The paper explores the foundation of automobile model based on VR technology. The automobile ergonomic analysis in virtual environment and the aesthetic utilization of VR technology in automobile design are also discussed in paper.

scholarly journals Curating The American Algorists: Digital Art and National Identity

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
American Art ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
College And University ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay details the curating strategies and central premise behind the 2013 traveling exhibition The American Algorists: Linear Sublime. This group exhibition, which showcased the artwork of Jean-Pierre Hébert, Manfred Mohr, Roman Verostko, and Mark Wilson, marked the 20th anniversary of New York Digital Salon. In organizing this exhibit, I attempted to expand the discourse of digital art curation by linking the Algorists, a group formed at the Los Angeles SIGGRAPH conference in 1995, to the broader narrative of American art. Through the exhibition catalogue, I constructed a detailed history of the Algorists and connected the movement’s narrative to ideas of national identity and myth. To cultivate this nexus, I interpreted the Algorists’ unique approach to linear abstraction through the various theories of the sublime active within the history of American art. Ultimately, this case study reveals the incongruities of aligning this group of digital artists—who shared a decidedly internationalist outlook—with a national narrative. While the Algorists resisted parochial characterizations, the concept of the sublime provided a useful vehicle for theorizing the aesthetic response to computer-generated abstraction. The travelling exhibition also offered a potential model, based on effective partnerships and resource sharing, for small college and university galleries.

Virtual Reality Technology in the Application of Tibetan Architectural Heritage and Protection Research

2014 ◽  
Vol 1030-1032 ◽  
pp. 1873-1876
Author(s):  
Xiao Bo Yang ◽  
Bang Ze Chen
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
3D Animation ◽  
Architectural Heritage ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
World Heritage List ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
World Cultural Heritage ◽  
Tibetan Architecture

Tibetan architecture wrote immortal chapter in the world the Chinese architectural history, Potala Palace was listed in the world cultural heritage list. Tibetan Architecture in the history of World Architecture and wrote the immortal chapter, Potala Palace was inscribed on the world heritage list. Potala Palace's annual tourist capacity is also facing enormous increment, the protection of cultural relics and open utilization in the continuous emergence of new problems and contradictions. This paper studies the use of virtual reality technology and 3D animation technology in virtual roaming system of Potala Palace.

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