Light Image Imaginationexplores the explicit, and more particularly the implicit, interrelationship between light and the creation of (re)mediated, (im)material, mental images.¹ It brings together authors and artists from a range of disciplines, including film and media theory, media archaeology, cinema history and theory, philosophy, history of science and technology, astronomy, computer music, literature studies, neuroscience, psychology, art history and art practice (art and media practice: painting, photography, film, video and digital arts; music composition). A key feature of both the individual contributions and the anthology as a whole is that disciplinary boundaries are extended in order to amplify and...

Perception through the senses is traditionally individuated on the basis of distinct sense organs of reception: vision for the eyes, hearing through the ears, touch for hands and skin, smell through the nose and taste through the mouth.¹ In this context, the possibility of transcending the limits between the different senses tends to be a matter assigned to the imagination, a faculty whose role is largely to extrapolate beyond the sensory content of perception.² The suggestion of seeing with one’s ears or hearing with one’s eyes verges towards the cranky or even the hallucinatory. My aim in this chapter is...

The voice is one of our most complex features, and even today its technical simulation is, to a large extent, not possible. Voices are unique and recognisable; however, it is very difficult to imagine or remember them. What is lacking is their image. The following essay is about the history of some light traces of speech, which glimmered for a brief period in the second half of the 19th century. It is an event that marks a decisive juncture in the history of audiovisual media praxis: the attempt to make sound visible, and thus imaginable, without any recourse to music....

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects differentiating humans from other animals is the fact that we are inherently musical. Our compulsion to listen to and appreciate sound arrangements beyond the mere purposes of linguistic communication is extraordinary. From the discovery almost three thousand years ago of the direct relationship between the pitch of a note and the length of a string or pipe to the latest computer models of human musical cognition and intelligence, composers have increasingly looked to science to provide new and challenging ways to study and compose music.

Music is generally associated with the artistic expression...

In 1905, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) told Émile Bernard (1868-1941): ‘Draw; but it is the reflection which envelops; light, through the general reflection, is the envelope’. (Rewald 1995: 316) An interesting theory, to be sure, but what precisely is he saying? Perhaps the larger point is that deducing firm principles about Cézanne’s approach to painting is not an easy task, particularly if we rely on his own words for insight. Indeed, Cézanne himself stated how limited words are in capturing artistic expression in an earlier letter to Bernard,² where he explained that ‘[t]alking about art is almost useless. (…) The man...

This chapter returns to the beginnings of mechanised optical serial image technologies during the 19th century and revisits accounts of the experiential dimensions of light in a specific context of artistic, philosophical and scientific histories of ideas on aesthetics, intuition and imagination. It will situate Etienne-Jules Marey’s work in parallel with discussions around the receiver’s pro-active engagement during perception in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the works and writings on light by J.W. Goethe and J.M.W. Turner. In doing so it will address aspects that inform the particular condition of the ‘observing participant’ during the aesthetic engagement confronting contrasts...

Projection is a multifarious¹ concept with many different derivations (Herkünfte). It is equally at home in the sciences as well as in philosophy and psychoanalysis, painting and architecture, or media technologies, including cartography. In the second part of Kazimir Malevich’s great Suprematism manifesto, which he wrote in early 1922, the master of modern abstract art pointed out how impossible a task it is to really get to grips with this phenomenon.

The human skull represents infinity for the movement of ideas. It resembles the universe, for it also has no roof or floor and has space for a projection apparatus...

In October 1888, just two months after John Logie Baird was born, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince made a contribution to the story of cinema by filming the people and traffic crossing the River Aire at Leeds Bridge in the north of England for a few seconds. Le Prince is believed to have used a single lens camera of his own design made at his workshop and which he called a ‘receiver’. Le Prince was born in 1842, the son of a middle-ranking officer in the French Army and was well positioned for his place in the history of photographic...

Black as, technically speaking, the absence of colour is often considered the opposite of light. Yet black in art should not be mistaken for the structural or functional counterpart of black in real life or in nature. Art does not coincide precisely with nature. It is instead – at least for those who do not stick to a strictly mimetic or realist approach of things aesthetic – nature transformed, corrected, expanded, reworked; in short, remade.¹ A good example of this antirealist stance is Stéphane Mallarmé’s influential thinking on literature. A key figure in the modern reinvention of spatial poetry and the spatial...

These were the notable remarks, not by an astronomer but by the chief art critic of the British newspaperThe Guardian, Jonathan Jones. There is no doubt that the Hubble Space Telescope (Hubble or HST) has made breathtaking scientific discoveries in the years since its launch into Earth orbit in 1990. But the dramatic colour pictures of nebulae demonstrate that the art critic did not really refer to the achievements from the scientific perspective alone. In fact the visual revolution took place in the mind of the general public, changing forever their view of the nocturnal sky.

Even the tabloid...