Neat find: Professor Heard’s Magic Latern Shows is a traveling act that nostalgically recreates the “phantasmagoria” of the 18th & 19th centuries for contemporary audiences. (I learned about Heard’s show via his article, “The Lantern of Fear” published by Grand Illusions, a fun online shop for offbeat science toys, uncanny gizmos, and illusionary devices.) As I further pursued this, I found that magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria are still very much a living art. The question I have is whether these are quaint celebrations of our domestication of their uncanny spectacle, or does the nostalgia for these “dead” technologies make their apparitions all the more uncanny?
Terry Castle provides a marvelous history of these uncanny special effects in her book, The Female Thermometer.
