Virus is a Knowledge

Much apologies, although I've theoretically been back from hiatus for awhile, I've also spent some weeks sick as a dawg with a horrible lung infection. I am getting better, and as soon as I can get things back in order a bit, I'll be writing more! Promise.

Diorama Extravaganza

Long, long ago, Nicholas Clayton wrote in to tell me this:

"Going off-post to point you to something that should intrigue any enquiring mind that is prepared, as yours evidently is, to be delighted. I can't find any note of it in your blog: the London Diorama.
Sitting in a taxi I saw the name blazoned on the pediment of the Nash terrace at Park Square East. This led to a fascinating article (The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s).

And the Diorama structure of building is still there behind the facade as can be seen on the Google satellite view [see picture]. I have yet to visit to find out how accessible it is to the public."




The diorama was a sensation in the early 1800s, the brainchild of Louis Daguerre, as in (you guessed it) the daguerrotype. Having apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting, M. Daguerre was a natural talent with a true skill for theatrical illusion. He became famous for his electrifying theater design, and at the age of 35 opened his first Diorama in Paris in July 1822.


"...the Diorama was a theatrical experience viewed by an audience in a highly specialized theatre. As many as 350 patrons would file in to view a landscape painting that would change its appearance both subtly and dramatically. Most would stand, though limited seating was provided. The show lasted 10 to 15 minutes, after which time the entire audience (on a massive turntable) would rotate to view a second painting. Later models of the Diorama theater even held a third painting.


The size of the proscenium was 24 feet (7.3 m) wide by 21 feet (6.4 m) high (7.3 meters x 6.4 meters). Each scene was hand-painted on linen, which was made transparent in selected areas. A series of these multi-layered, linen panels were arranged in a deep, truncated tunnel, then illuminated by sunlight re-directed via skylights, screens, shutters, and colored blinds. Depending on the direction and intensity of the skillfully manipulated light, the scene would appear to change. The effect was so subtle and finely rendered that both critics and the public were astounded, believing they were looking at a natural scene." [wiki]

Here is part of a review of one of the dioramas shown in London, from The Times, 4 October 1823:

“The warm reflection of the sunny sky recedes by degrees; and the advancing dark shadow runs across the water – chasing, as it were, the former bright effect before it. At the same time, the small rivulets show with a glassy black effect among the underwood; new pools appear which, in the sun-shine, were not visible; and the snow-mountains in the distance are seen more distinctly in the gloom. The whole thing is nature itself; – and there is another very curious sensation which this landscape-scene produces on the mind. The decided effect of the thing is, that you look over an area of twenty miles; the distant objects not included. The whole field is peopled: a house, at which you really expect to see persons look out of a window every moment – a rill, actually moving – trees that sem to wave.

You have, as far as the senses can be acted upon, all these things (realities) before you; and yet, in the midst of all this crowd of animation, there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region – of a world – deserted; of living nature at an end; – of the last day past and over. Silence, in spite of Ariosto, seems to have found a resting-place – nay, at last, an empire – upon earth.”




The diorama in London was built the year after the first one in Paris, in 1923.

I did a bit of web-burrowing and came up with this information:

Arthur Gill (who throughout the 1960s and 1970s wrote a regular column in The Photographic Journal of the Royal Photographic Society) recorded an account of a visit he made to the Park Square East/ Peto Place building at a time when it was empty in the mid–1970s. He found what seemed to be the remnant of a filled-in well of about twelve feet (3.7 metres) diameter which he thought was originally used to contain the turning shaft on which the Diorama saloon had turned. A few years before, when the building housed a department of the Middlesex Hospital, the well had been filled with warm water and used for hydrotherapy of disabled patients. Mr Gill explored fully the empty building and “tried to imagine what the aspect would be like if the circumferential rooms and offices were absent... However, try as I would, my imagination was unable to sweep away the modern amendments and adaptions, and recapture the Diorama. Except for that concrete–filled well ... everything has gone beyond recall”. (Arthur Gill, ‘The London Diorama’, History of Photography, January 1977, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.31-36)

In the early 1990s it was being used to house the Diorama Arts centre, but later it became part of the national headquarters of The Prince's Trust charity. Lord knows what's inside the structure now.

Daguerre went on to build other dioramas, the last one being a diorama in a church in Bry-sur-Marne, just outside Paris, where he lived. Last time I was in France I tried to get there because they still have one hanging in the church; but apparently it was poorly restored over the years, and now they are trying to restore it from the restoration, so to speak, having lost a good deal of the transparency and effect in the previous restoration.

Daguerre, of course, was fascinated by visual representation in all forms, and ways of reproducing the reality of the world in a more permanent, frozen form. It was not surprising, then, that he became involved in the first photographic process:

In 1822 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce three years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, was connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 7 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."
Daguerre and Niépce's son obtained a pension from the Government in exchange for freely sharing the details of the process.

The Wikipedia article on dioramas says that Daguerre was a manufacturer of mirrors, which is interesting for several reasons. One is that the plates on which the daguerrotypes were developed used a silvered surface; another is that his cameras depended on taking the light that came through the camera's lens and reflecting it with a mirror onto the plate, very much like a camera obscura. He never developed this camera much, and depended on this same essential concept for his patent. All part of the smoke and mirrors of good theatre, I suppose.


Many thanks to R.D. Wood's extensive work on the history of the diorama.

Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Brief News

Okay, I'm still on hiatus for the moment, but I just wanted to say I'll be on two panels at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition in Emeryville on Saturday, March 13th. Here's the info:

Saturday 1:00-2:45
STEAMPUNK GARB FOR LIFE ON A BUDGET
Jade Falcon, Ryan Galiotto, Jean Martin, Gail Carriger (M), Heather McDougal
Modifying and adapting everyday wear. Making steampunk gear out of found objects and clothing.

Saturday 4:30-5:45
STEAMPUNK TECHNOLOGY
Jon Sarriugarte, Patrick McKercher, Alexander Logan, Mark Anderson (M), Heather McDougal
Making and creating past inventions for the future. Discussing the maker mentality, why the rise of steampunk, why now?

Yeesh! I'm terrified. But it might be fun, if I keep the Mouth Editor on full speed ahead. It's not that I'm not smart, it's that I very often don't look it, so I have to watch my step. Expect a blog post on this kind of disconnect in March.

This Hiatus was a Good Thing, and I've been collecting ideas for posts. So see you soon - I'm looking forward to it!

Hiatus: Until March 20th 2010

Things have been a little chaotic here recently. In fact, the whole summer has been nuts. I am trying to build a house (and so far failing), finishing two novels, and sorting things in order to someday move into a smaller place; we were evacuated for the Lockheed fire in August and are just getting things back in order; and suddenly, I am realizing I need to really get some writing out there now that I've been published a little bit.

So I am taking a 6-month hiatus from the blog. I don't know what that will do to my readership, but it seems more fair to simply state when I'll be back, writing about things that are cool and interesting, than to simply fall away like I've been doing recently.

I'll hopefully collect weird bits during the coming six months and come back fresh and full of new things to talk about.

In the meantime, take care and feel free to use these pages as a source of inspiration for writing or art, a place to come to be reminded that the world is not a dull place, or just resource for finding out about something obscure which just might be here.

Please, feel free to email me at mcdougal dot heather at gmail dot com and let me know if there's anything you think I should be blogging about. And thanks to those who already have. I'm thinking about it, I promise.

I'll be back on March 20th, 2010.

Cheers,
Heather

Hubble: Deep Field

My friend Gwyan just sent me this and I actually can't find many words to describe the effect it had on me. There was a moment, and I will let you find that moment, when I caught my breath and actually became too emotional to speak. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It is, quite literally, awesome.

MetaHaiku

"Cent mille milliards de poemes" (A hundred thousand billion poems), by Raymond Queneau

For a number of years I've been really interested in the possibilities of hypertext as a vehicle for really interesting and complex narrative. I diddled around with writing stories in hypertext, but was never satisfied with the result; they seemed to me either confusing or aimless or simply mechanistic, and at best I came up with something so voluminous that I couldn't possibly complete it in one lifetime.

I decided to try poetry instead.

Poetry has the virtue of being all about simplicity, about using as few words as you can to create complex images and ideas. It's about making little windows into reality, places where the world stops for a moment and you see, really see, something unexpected.

It's really a perfect place for hypertext, being spare and clear and often having a specific structure. And there is a long history of what is called combinatorial poetry, or combinatorial text - the creation of poems that can be changed around by the reader, usually based on some mechanism in the book form. I decided that I would try haiku, since the form is so fixed. This would a) allow me to work within a specified framework, so I didn't have to also create (and get tangled up in) my own system; and b) would keep the poems from wandering off on a tangent, keeping them simple and clear. I also decided I would specify the number of links so as to keep it as structured as a traditional haiku.

What I came up with, using the simplest tools I could, was an HTML frameset system in a set window size. The top frame held the top line, the middle frame held the middle line, and the bottom frame held - well, you get the picture. Then in each line I chose one word which would be emphasized, making that the link word. When the reader clicks on that link, the line changes, creating a new haiku. (more about my process here)

It's difficult to describe it, and I can't actually insert one here in the blog, so I suggest you try one. Here's my little MetaHaiku site, where you can see a few that I've written.

The thing I like about these is that it enlarges the tiny window of a haiku without compromising its essential qualities. By nature, haiku are traditionally supposed to describe a moment, and they are supposed to contain some clue about season, and they are supposed to speak only of small things - which of course capture something much larger. So when you make a haiku with hypertext, you are creating a series of moments, a progression of snapshots which move slightly through time, describing a longer moment than a regular two-dimensional haiku. It's not so much that they describe more as that they describe longer, and the reader can unveil the moment in a way that is pleasingly exploratory.

The haiku have five links on the top line, seven on the middle, and five on the bottom, echoing the syllabic line-structure. The experience is a lot like our experience of real moments - in other words, you can't go back. There is a starting haiku and and ending haiku, and any number of ways to get there. In the present structure, you have more than 175 ways to get from the beginning to the end, so the process is surprisingly repeatable.

What I've decided is that I'd really like to share these, and see if others are interested in writing some. What I'd really like to do is to find a simple way to do it, given that mine are done in a clunky and complicated way, and then broadcast the template for everyone to use. I'm working on having a friend make a Flash interface to simplify things, but in the meantime if anyone wants to know the more lame way I did it you can email me (look in the sidebar for the address) and I'll do my best to define it for you.

Vive la Interactif!