Page 134 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 134/206
John Neville Maskelyne + David Devant + George Alfred Cooke: Mysteries at Egyptian Hall,
London (from 1873 - 1904).
Maskelyne vies with the American Harry Houdini and his namesake the French Jean Eugène Robert- Houdin as among greatest stage magicians of the 19th century. This kind of magic was to have an inspirational impact on some of the early film-makers - especially upon Georges Melies and George Albert Smith, both of whom began their professional careers as stage magicians, and both ended making profound contributions to the art of film. Melies saw Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1884, and this directly inspired him to take up stage magic. George Albert Smith, living in Brighton, came to film-making through his performances first as a stage hypnotist, then through his magic-lantern illustrated and animated dioramic lectures. Later, he acquired a movie camera from the local engineer Alfred Darling, made several dozen short films, built his own camera, and invented Kinemacolour (1903) an early successful colour-film process. He shared a film season with Melies at the Alhambra, London 1898-99. Maskelyne and Devant introduced ‘living photographs’ and a Robert Paul Theatrograph projector into their stage act in 1896-the two professions neatly joined! Maskelyne himself designed a flicker-free movie projector, patented in 1896.
Magic shows weren't just another of the many theatrical entertainment genres spawned by the Victorian Music-Hall or the American Burlesque Show - shows like Maskelyne and Cooks Mysteries in the UK, and Robert Houdin's performances in France, directly inspired some of the great innovators of modern media - the French film-maker-magician George Melies, and the showman- film-maker George Albert Smith based in Sussex, England. These early film-makers devised cinematic techniques to replicate the legerdemain of stage magicians...
As Marina Warner has pointed out, in her Phantasmagoria (Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the 21st century 2006): “New technologies for seeing, recording, and picturing, have reconfigured the traditional materials from which soul and spirit have been formed by imagination, and so, alongside the constellation of spirit metaphors, I take up the story of ‘haunted media’, in the fine phrase of Jeffrey Sconce, and follow some of the ways in which modern technologies communicate the imagination’s make-believe, its desires and terrors, and shape them through the latest telecommunications and imaging techniques.” (Warner: Phantasmagoria 2006. p13)
‘Magic’ and the means by which it has been mediated and communicated has been a central ingredient and driving inspiration of new media from photography to video-games and virtual realities. The late 19th century stage magicians used their legerdemain, their props and trick- apparatus, their charm and their stage-craft, to sell us ‘magic’, and in some sense, so do artists working in all media - including fine art.