Page 15 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 15/206
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." (CP Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (in New Scientist 1956)
But for most of the 19th century, this just wasn't the case - there was no intellectual-literary snobbery or elitism bifurcating cultural society. In fact polite society still echoed the mix established by the Royal Society of Arts (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, founded in 1660), and encouraged a healthy inter-disciplinary discourse at this time. Take the pioneer creative photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose salon guests included Charles Dodgson (photographer and author of Alice in Wonderland), the poet Alfred Tennyson, the comic writer Edward Lear, the scientist Sir John Herschel - a polymath, who also coined the words photography and snap-shot, and invented the cyanotype process - the famous artist G.F. Watts, the actress and feminist Ellen Terry, and the Pre-Raphaelite painter Marie Spartali-Stillman.
The writer and researcher Scott Bukatman in Matters of Gravity (2003) roots the Western developing taste for spectacle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries - in the Phantasmagoria, the Diorama and Panorama - and in the huge popular craze following the invention of the Kaleidoscope: "What links these episodes, attractions, and genres is a phenomenological excess that alludes the reality beyond the ordinary - 'a world of endless, enchanting metamorphosis'..." (Bukatman: Matters of Gravity 2003, p119). Several researchers (Bukatman, Scharf, Gunning, Meggs) would add that the splintering of vision, the glorious coloured patterns and symmetries produced by a shake of the kaleidoscope - and of course the huge commercial potential of adult 'toys' like this not only kick- started a string of other optical toys - the thaumatrope, the Anorthoscope, Stereoscope, Anaglyphic 3d, the Flip-book, the Grimatiscope, the Zoopraxiscope, the Praxinoscope, (and eventually the Mutoscope and Kinetoscope, etc) - but psychologically and cognitively prepared us for the dissection and capture of movement by Muybridge and Marey, the perspectival/painting and cognitive revolutions of Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, and for the invention and instant success of the cinematic image from the 1890s onwards.
So the kaleidoscope should be seen in this light - as a foundational device - an interactive optical toy preparing us for the Movies. This follows the graphic-design historian Philip Megg’s comment about wood-cut playing cards, Saint’s cards and other early printed ephemera ‘preparing us cognitively and psychologically for the invention of the moveable typeface’ and the printed book - the ability to ‘read’ symbols and images together, and to understand logical rules and sequencing etc in playing cards (and Tarot) - being a basis for understanding and learning from printed texts. (paraphrased from Meggs: A History of Graphic Design 1998).