Live illustrated magic lantern lecture

Date: 28 Aug. 2024
Time: 7.00 - 8.00 pm
Location: Chapel of the Grauwzusters, Lange-Sint Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp - Antwerp University city campus

Free admission, but registration required through this link.

This illustrated lecture demonstrates how the projection of hand-painted and, later, photorealistic glass slides captured the modern mind and helped forge a mediatized society. The lantern, from its inception, intertwined magic, spectacle, and science. It became the quintessential instrument of the middle class, satisfying the ubiquitous hunger for knowledge and exotic places, making new insights from astronomy, geology, and microscopy accessible to audiences of hundreds at a time, enchanting curious eyes with vistas from the North Pole, Egypt, China, Africa, and many other distant places. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, the lantern evolved into a mass medium to promote the new consumer culture, or to delight the senses with ever-popular ghost illusions and demonic imagery. By then, the magic lantern had become proverbial for the culture of modernity, its curious intertwinement of the rational and the supernatural, as seen in Proust's dream world, Baudelaire's phantasmagorical poems, or, later, Adorno's socio-political philosophies. All of this stemmed from the lens of a small and essentially simple projection device that preceded photography but retrospectively formed the core of modern culture. 

Kurt Vanhoutte paints this panorama in a lecture that blends word and image, together with collector and lanternists Ditmar Bollaert and Els Prevenier, who will use authentic glass plates and a unique magic lantern from the nineteenth century.

This event is organised by B-magic and Laterna Magica Galantee Show in the framework of the Arts & Media Archaeology summer school.