SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

detail. This is from a digital high-definition microscopic camera invented by the Japanese two
years ago and you notice what happens. The sharpened and concentrated visions appear doubly
real and hallucinatory at the same time just as they do when you pull them into our cabinet.
[Left please.] I want now to move through different kinds of instruments and to demonstrate
this issue of polyopticality and what has been lost by our not remembering these functions.
This is a sorcière mirror. I know you’ve never heard of it, wonderful strange mirror, part of that
excess which drove the entire Baroque machinery of transcendence. In order to show you the
ways in which, totally forgotten, these were glassy metaphysical devices. The Jesuit words for
mirrors were “crystalline machines,” crystal machines, and they were meant to put us, for an
ecstatic moment, in the presence of God. It gives a sense of an other world totally forgotten. We
think that [sounds like “Greg Kirkwild”?] invented the age of the spiritual machine. Well, he
did not but fantasy, religious anguish in a parade of extravagant metamorphic devices blurred
the lines between the natural and the supernatural, and I should tell you we do have still an
online active website which one a Weby Award. We won it in the weird category. I feel this is
the acme of my career that I finally got recognized for what I ultimately am basically weird
[laughter]. The Weby—actually there will be Oscars in the Internet and I can say all of this
because I didn’t design it. I had a lot to do with what went into it like Vicky Porter did it and I
will give you the URLs for it because all of these things—I’m sorry, not all of these things a
number of things that we can reproduce on the web. [Please make it dark.] A number of things
that we can reproduce on the web are interactive and the sorcière mirror is frankly one of them.
So, remind me and I’ll give that to you.
Now instead, we were in this baroque atmosphere of access where instead of providing a
smooth repetition of outward appearance, both please, cylindrical and parametal mirrors
exaggerated and tortured shapes, they thinned and thickened, fragmented and overturned
regular forms, warping them beyond recognition into irregular hybrid creatures only to
miraculously rescue to them again, by the deformations and monstrous transformation
shimmered in the glaze catoptrics of the Jesuits of which as I said, Samarus is a wonderful
example. Among the hundreds of hermetic mechanisms from the hydraulic to the magnetic
devised by that natural magician Athanasius Kircher the Jesuit museum in the Collegio
Romano, many were perception altering crystalline boxes. These glassy metaphysical
instruments [on the right please] manipulated in ocular demonstrations ingeniously probed the
hidden workings of creation and anamorphic apparatus and it goes into the realm of painting.
This is a so called big [UI] lent to us by none other then Umberto Eco, I feel this is very
appropriate. [UI] encrypted and decrypted information you know, this is where it used to. This
is from the web but this is information. These surfaces are so dense and complex that they are
literally encrypted and you need a key, a clavis to un-key it so that turning makes a difference
here, whether you see it as a landscape or as a portrait. So, it’s teaching us something about
the transposability of the human into the non-human and back again just as I suggested those
multiple on spectacles did.
This switching of the biological into the geological also occurred in the symbolic level with
mirrors. Mirrors are inverting and converting machines. They rectify and perspective. How do
you teach those of us who are Protestants and Catholics, who inhabit the fallen world, how do
you teach the fact that all our sight is skewed? You teach it through anamorphosis but then
how do you know that anybody else has an un-skewed point of view? You rectify it and
suddenly one is given this vision of clarity and you are able to make an analogy to how perhaps
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