Science, Hermeticism, and Visual Culture

AH600

Questioning the story of progress and the location of modernity, this course explores the shaping powers and transformative dangers of early modern to contemporary print culture with its magic alphabets, word labyrinths, and visual seductions of the printed page as well as the use of color and special effects or “tricks” in the beginnings of photography and cinema. What happens to the story of modernization as the progressive rise of technology and the assumed attendant rationalization and disenchantment of the world when we consider the double and seemingly contradictory function of technologies of representation and projection that were supposed to demystify and strip the aura away from marvels and yet trafficked in wonder and magic to produce effects of power?

From Isaac Newton’s experiments with the rainbow projections of the prism in a dark room to the beginnings of photography and cinema and finally to contemporary science fiction action films such as The Matrix, the course will also reconsider the development of cinema in relation to occult science, alchemy, and hermeticism. Specifically we will look at such films as George Méliès's early motion pictures of the 1890s such as The Fakir–Indian Mystery, The Smuggling away of the Lady chez Robert-Houdin, and The Hallucination of the Alchemist and his 1903 The Magic Lantern to The Wizard of Oz, the film that narrativizes the transition between black and white and technicolor film. The course will consider the discursive and material aspects of early technologies of representation and projection in the exploration of efforts to visualize the unseen and give form to the previously unimaginable, the search for transcendence through the machine, and the production and transformation of power and authority through the optical by going back to look at the telescope, the microscope, popular printing, and such "vision machines" on the boundary between science and entertainment as the camera obscura and the magic lantern.

The readings consist of a selection of interdisciplinary articles and book chapters. There will be no exams. Instead, course requirements include two short written response papers, one critical essay, and a final project that may take the form of an expository paper or an art project. Course participants will also be expected to actively engage the course material by contrib uting to in-class discussion and giving a presentation on one of the readings.