"The Subway Series" A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
The "Illusion" of Motion: The Suppression of the Moving Image through the Explanation of the Apparatus Tom Gunning, University of Chicago Abstract: My paper will return to the nineteenth century and the devices known as "philosophical toys" -- the first devices to produce a moving image -- and the common explanation of their effects given in the era -- persistence of vision - exemplified a central resistance to the very experience of the moving image qua moving. I maintain that a deeply rooted prejudice in favor of static images forced conceiving of moving images as "illusions," rather than as new modes of the interface between human perception ad technology. Reinvestigating this century and a half long history of the repression of the moving image as a phenomenological fact has shaped even the way that current debates on the nature of the long tradition of cinema and other moving images technologies have been conceived Monday, February 22, 2010 4pm MIT, E51-095
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