“Grand Illusions: Large-Scale Optical Toys and Contemporary Scientific Spectacle.”

Teorie Vedy/Theory of Science 35:2 (December 2013): 249-267.

http://teorievedy.flu.cas.cz/index.php/tv/article/view/190/239

Although often considered “dead” or “obsolete” media that merely paved the way for cinema, philosophical toys, and particularly optical toys that showcased illusions of motion such as the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, have enjoyed active “afterlives” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rather than finding application principally as scientific apparatus or as parlor amusements that facilitated rational recreation, contemporary incarnations of optical toys are primarily found in the realms of fine art and advertising, and they are often much larger than their nineteenth-century counterparts. Drawing upon an extensive archive of contemporary examples, this paper argues that modern-day optical toys are able to conjure feelings of wonder and spectacle equivalent to their nineteenth-century antecedents because of their adjustment in scale. Specifically, I will consider three primary categories in which large-scale philosophical toys have found success: as commercial or promotional tools, such as Sony’s Braviadrome and Jim LeFevre’s Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope (2011), within the fine art context, as seen in work such as Mat Collishaw’s Garden of Unearthly Delights (2009) and Gregory Barsamian’s Feral Font (1996), and as public installations, including Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope (1980 restored 2008) and Joshua Spodek (and class)’s Union Square in Motion (2011). The article will discuss the various technical adjustments that have had to occur in order to successfully “scale up” optical toys, including the replacement of hand-spun mechanisms with larger sources of motion (such as a subway train or a motor) and the use of various means such as architectural features and stroboscopic lights to replace the traditional slats that the viewer peers through. In each of the examples, the large-scale optical toy demonstrates a complex interaction between science, popular culture, and spectacle. It is primarily through their adaptation of scale that they successfully elicit wonder as scientific spectacles from their audiences today.