Page 180 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 180/206
Wilhelm Conrad Röentgen: X-Ray photographs 1894
Knowledge of the x-ray phenomenon (at first un-named) stems from William Morgan’s Royal Society
paper of 1785 - of his experiment passing an electric current through a partially evacuated glass tube, and noticing a glow produced by these mysterious rays. Later William Crookes developed his vacuum jar, (Crookes Tube) inserted an electrical cathode at one end and an anode at the other, and discovered the cathode ray (excited electron) effect (the precursor to the television tube). When the accelerated electrons hit the anode end of the tube, they had achieved a high enough velocity to create x-rays. In the 1890s Stanford University Physics professor Fernando Sandford wrote a paper for the Physical Review entitled: Without Lens or Light, Photographs Taken With Plate and Object in Darkness - Sandford called his discovery ‘electric photography’. But the more familiar tissue-penetrating rays were captured by Wilhelm Conrad Röentgen in the plate of his wife’s hand (above) in 1894.
X-Rays are between the ultra-violet and gamma-radiation spectra at frequencies between 3×1019 Hz to 3×1019 Hz .It was Röentgen who labelled this radiation ‘x-ray’ (unknown ray). In the era when physicists thought there was nothing else to discover, x-rays caused a phenomenon - a sensation almost akin to the discovery/invention of photography itself. The first medical x-rays were made the same year. After the initial flush of x-ray images - taken by Röentgen in 1898 - significantly of a human hand (his wife’s), like early cave-paintings saying ‘I am Here!’ - the easier access to expensive x-ray machines has led to a recent batch of interesting x-ray art and new x-ray apps as artists of the 21st century discover new ways to re-present and even montage these fascinating images. There were few people of my generation who didn’t want the magical ‘x-ray specs’ advertised in the classified ads in cheap magazines in the 1950s. What’s so clever about this kind of x-ray art is the synthesis of natural light and x-rays to create ghostly ‘x-ray spec’ images, and to cast a new light upon the everyday - to make us see it afresh - an ancient function of art, stretching back the 60,000 years or so since we trekked out of Africa. X-Rays were discovered at the time when French artists were discovering the joys of Impressionism and Pointillism - the latter from ideas embodied in the Young, Helmholtz & Maxwell theory of trichromatic vision. The different perspectives accrued from x-rays extended human perception in the same way that Muybridge and Marey’s stop-motion photography had from the 1880s onwards, that cinematography had from around this same time, - all these media innovations contributing to the great questioning of what Art was for - and the multiplicity of answers to this question evident in Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Futurism - in the decade that followed.