Page 124 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 124/206
Jules Duboscq: Grimatiscope Stereo Image Processing 1870.
After his successful commercialisation of David Brewster’s Stereoscope (at the Great Exhibition, 1851 -
Queen Victoria bought one), Duboscq went on to develop several optical-photographic instruments, and in 1870, he produces his Grimatiscope - a device for producing distorted versions of a stereo- photographic image - generally a portrait. You wound-up the clockwork spring, inserted a stereo-slide, and held the viewing-box up to your eyes, and then the Grimatiscope rotated a distorting glass lens within the elegant box and presented a series of grotesque distortions of the photograph for the viewer’s amusement. The photo-art historian, Aaron Scharf covered this and many more examples of early experimental photography in his delightful Art and Photography (1975). It is machines like the Grimatiscope that are the great-grandfathers of image processing software like Adobe Photoshop (1990). Later in the 19th century another great photo-experimentalist, Louis Ducos du Hauron, an inventor of colour photography, wrote an article describing his distorted photo-prints - he called them Photographic Transformisms (1889). In the 1930s the Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz made a spectacular series of distorted nudes using fairground mirrors: Andre Kertesz: Distortion Series 1933...
The public fascination for toys like the Grimatiscope, the Phenakistoscope, Thaumatrope, Zoetrope, Stereoscope, the Magic Lantern, (etc, etc) – toys and devices that used lenses or mechanical means to move or distort images, grew during the 19th century, reflecting both the increasing leisure time enjoyed by almost everyone, and a way of processing the vast amount of imaging (photography and engraving) that increasingly permeated our culture. These devices catalysed and reflected a growing public desire for image-based (and preferably kinetic) home entertainments...