Six (or Seven) Ways of Looking at a Lantern Slide

This chapter offers a consideration of the magic lantern slide from a series of viewpoints giving overlapping ways of thinking about what it is as an artefact, how it works as a component of a narrative and performance medium, and its significances in historical and contemporary contexts of creative use. With illustrations from the Lucerna web resource, institutional and private collections, and the work of the Million Pictures research project, the chapter considers the physicality of slides as objects; their relative cultural (and financial) valuations; their various roles and motivations in the transference and concealment of knowledge; their relationships with other portions of the projection process; and some parallels between historic usage of slides and modern media practices, especially in the complex mixture of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ that determines their use and interpretation. Conventional approaches to what is sometimes called the ‘historical art of projection’ can be prone to dwell on one or two of these aspects, often with an emphasis on the visual content of the slide image or the physical nature of the artefact. However, to begin to understand the overall cultural impact of this largely lost medium we need to open out the discussion beyond its component parts and consider its possible uses, both historical and current. This chapter therefore aims to describe lantern slide projection as an interactive, ephemeral performance medium, elusive and difficult to categorize, but rich in its creative possibilities.

Overhead Projector as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter describes how the overhead projector develops into a projection tool which first experiences broad cultural acceptance through its use in schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first theories of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) emerged, promising increased productivity and innovation through research organization in small, interdisciplinary teams. The overhead projector then was regarded as a medium that reinforces interactivity and collective thinking in such small groups via dynamic transparencies, explicitly separated from 35mm slide projection as a medium of organization of a passive crowd of isolated spectators. In the course of digitalization, this idea of organization then turns into its opposite: PowerPoint, originally developed for the production of transparencies for overhead projectors, became a presentation tool through the coupling with projectors, which organizes a passive crowd of spectators in front of static slides like the 35mm slide projection before. A large part of PowerPoint’s epistemological criticism today stems from this form of medial organization.

Educational technology and the traditional lecture

I was recently invited to give a lecture at the opening of a new high-technology lecture theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University. It is one of the best examples of its kind I have seen. Its impressive features include hi-fi surround sound, an enormous back-projected screen giving superb picture quality from either a VCR or directly from a computer for live demonstrations, online facilities, the latest remote-control slide-projection equipment, complete lecturer's control panel, and several nice touches such as automatic dimming of the auditorium lights when Play is pressed on any of the hidden video playback machines. The overhead projectors and their screens are of the best quality and correctly positioned for the clearest possible display. There are also video-link facilities for spill-over into a secondary lecture theatre which itself is well fitted out in presentational equipment.DOI:10.1080/0968776940020101

Opening technology's door: perils and possibilities

While waiting for class two years ago one of my students looked at the back of the room where two unused slide projectors stood. ‘But’, he wondered out loud – having no history of comparative slide projection – ‘how come you have two of them?’ His remark speaks directly to the rapid change from print to pixel and about the transformation of the lecture room, the place where this change has been most sharply felt: pixels are our daily habit, our night-time curse, and our weekend distraction.

Aphrodite Speaks: on the Recent Performance Art of Carolee Schneemann

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.

Comparison of Individual versus Group Administration of the Modified Version of the Bender-Gestalt Test

No significant difference was found for a comparison of Qualitative scores for individual versus group (slide projection) ( ns = 45 children, Grades K—2) administration of the Modified Version of the Bender-Gestalt Test.