The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “In addition, Georges Lorin’s Paris rose of 1884 [Paris rose, Paris, Paul Ollendorf, 1884] innovatively incorporates silhouette images within the text to suggest movement from one page to the next. Lorin’s dynamic placement of silhouettes, in fact, predicts the effect, ten years later, of celluloid frames of a moving picture, as well as the bold black-and-white book illustrations of Vallotton. [Rassemblements, edited by Octave Uzanne, Paris, Paul Ollendorf, 1884, features thirty illustrations by Vallotton.]. “These publications by his Chat Noir colleagues introduced Riviere to the artistic potential of silhouettes and motivated his investigations into the shadow theater as a modern medium. Most important, the shadow theater was able to merge the two-dimensional aesthetics of the visual arts with characteristics intrinsic to theater: movement and the interaction of music and voice.”

  “Somm’s soon-to-be-famous thirty-second shadow sketch L’Elephant. was created almost immediately after the first performance of La Berline de l’emigre. Salis used this short, comic, scatological skit daily until his death in 1897 to introduce the cabaret’s shadow-theater performances: “No set; a lighted screen.

  “A Negro, his hands behind his back, is tugging on a rope. He advances, disappears, the rope stretches horizontally. Then, a knot in the rope. The rope continues to stretch, eternally.. Then, at one end, therea appears an Elephant who drops ‘an odoriferous pearl’, in the words of the Gentleman Cabaret Owner, from which a Flower springs up, then: Curtain!

  “By 9 December 1896, when Jarry performed Ubu Roi at Montmartre’s Nouveau Theatre, Somm’s Elephant had been performed at least four thousand times.”. page 58 “It was not until 1887 that Riviere replaced Somm and Auriol’s puppet theater with a real shadow theater. To do this it was necessary to break through the main wall of the Salle des Fetes and construct a screen and rear staging area. At first the screen measured almost one meter square. Eventually, it was enlarged to 1.12 meters high by 1.40 meters wide with a huge backstage attached to the outside of the building.

  “Essentially, Riviere created a system in which he placed silhouettes of figures, animals, elements of landscapes, and so forth, within a wooden framework at thre distances from the screen: the closest created an absolutely black silhouette, and the next two created gradations of black to gray, thus suggesting recession into space. Silhouettes could be moved across the screen on runners within the frame.

  “For instance, perspective was created by a succession of large to small silhouettes placed across the screen. The silhouettes were at first made from cardboard and then, in 1888 with the first full-scale production of Caran d’Ache’s Epopee, from zinc. Behind the three tiers of silhouettes were sliding structures supporting glass panels, which could be painted in a variety of transparent colors; and finally, at the rear of the work area was the oxyhydrogen flame, which served as the light source.

  “With the help of backstage assistants who could number as many as twenty, the perfectionist Riviere was able to develop complicated and sophisticated effects of color, sound and movement for the series of over forty eclectic plays that he and his colleagues produced during the eleven years that the shadow theater existed at the Chat Noir.

  “The Chat Noir closed in February 1897, a month before Salis’s death. It left no greater legacy than Riviere’s shadow theater, which was the cabaret’s biggest public attraction. From the very beginning, Salis was the improvisational narrator, or bonimenteur of each shadow performance. His eccentric, egocentric personality gave the performances added verve and excitement.

  “In 1887-88, the year after the shadow theater became fully established at the Chat Noir, Auriol published Le Chat Noir, Guide, which, with Incoherent annotations, lists the art on display in this cabaret-museum. With the following contemporary artists represented on the Chat Noir walls, one may assume that Riviere’s shadow theater played a crucial role in establishing the credibility of the cabaret with that other tier of the avant-garde, the Impressionists/Post-Impressionists: Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, and others.

  “The three most popular shadow theater productions were L’Epopee (1888) by Caran d’Ache, and Le Tentation de Saint Antoine (1887) and La Marche a l’etoile (1890), both by Riviere. It was Riviere who facilitated the technical requirements of all the plays produced at the Chat Noir.

  “In some cases the demands were extraordinary, especially when productions such as L’Epopee, La Tentacion, and La Conquete de l’Algerie (1888) by Louis Bombled called for forty to fifty different sets, or if they required subtle effects of color and movement such as Phryne (1891) by Maurice Donnay.

  “Georges Fragerolle, Albert Tinchant, or Charles de Sivry were most often responsible for the musical scores. The plays were varied in content; Caran d’Ache created a seriocomic monochromatic vision of Napoleon I’s military campaigns in L’Epopee, which included dramatic perspective views of the Grand Army. Riviere’s Symbolist- religious play La Marche a l’etoile evoked with minimalist tints of blue the mystical procession of believers to Bethlehem to worship the newborn Christ, and Donnay’s Ailleurs was a ‘poeme satirique, classique, gaulois, mystic, socialiste et incoherent’. “The fumiste character of the Chat Noir was maintained by such plays as Le Gils de l’eunuque (1888) by Somm, L’Age d’or by Willette, Le Secret du manifestant (1893) by Jacques Femy, and Pierrot pornographe (1894) by Louis Morin.

  “The forty scenes of Riviere’s Tentation de Saint Antoine visualize the odyssey of the hermit saint as the Devil presented him with myriad contemporary and ancient, worldly and other-worldly temptations, including present- day Paris represented by Les Halles (the meat market) and La Bourse (the stock market), science, and new technology, the awesome universe, a variety of ancient deities, and the seductress queen of Sheba. Quotations from Flaubert’s novel of the same name were recited and accompanied by selections of music by Richard Wagner, Fragerolle, and Albert Tinchant. The play reaches its crescendo with the apotheosis of the saint after he successfully rejects all temptations.

  “La Tentation de Saint Antoine was the Chat Noir’s first major shadow theater production. Its premiere performance on 28 December 1887 took place eighteen months after it was first announced in Le Chat Noir. It must have taken Riviere that long to develop the ability to obtain the great variety and nuance of color as well as the spatial effects that distinguish his adaptation of the traditional shadow theater concept from all those who went before his.”

  “However, it was also Riviere’s sophisticated technology that made the Chat Noir’s protocinematic productions ephemeral. While zinc silhouettes and preparatory studies remain today, it is only be means of the printed, color facsimile albums of plays such as La Tentation de Saint Antoine, La Marche a l’etoile, L’Enfant Prodigue (1894), and several others published at the time, and by means of the decorative programs designed by Auriol and Riviere that we can come close to understanding the content and visual impact of the Chat Noir’s shadow plays.”. page 63

  “Over the years, thousands upon thousands of individuals viewed the Chat Noir’s shadow theater productions: bohemians, aristocrats, politicians, generals, and members of the bourgeoisie sat side by side in the Salle des Fetes with artists, writers, actors and actresses, scientists, and adventurers.

  “Beginning in 1888 with the Theatre d’Application on the rue St. Lazare, shadow theaters eventually spread to other locations in Paris as well as to other Montmartre cabarets, Le Conservatoire de Montmartre and Les Quat’z’Arts, in particular. In addition. Salis took his shadow theater company on the road to the provinces. In 1893 Somm, Steinlen, and Michel Utrillo traveled to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to present their shadow plays. Thanks to Utrillo, by 1897 Barcelona’s avant-garde. had its own shadow theater at Ils Quatre Gats, the modernista cabaret that took its name from both Le Chat Noir and Les Quat’z’Arts. [During the Paris world’s fair of 1900] the journal Le Rire brought Montmartre shadow theater and humor to visitors around the world by ins
talling on the fairgrounds along the Seine the Maison du Rire, which performed a repertoire of Chat Noir shadow plays and cabaret revues.”

  Source: The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 edited by Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1996 LC 95-81835

  Camera Obscuras Existing Today

  From William Gibson

  My friend, the artist Rodney Graham, has been building and using camera obscuras for 20 years. His first, constructed in Rome after his camera was stolen, was a matchbox with a lot of black tape. They got bigger, some of them becoming purpose-built buildings with projection screens on the rear wall, positioned to capture the image of a particular tree. The latest, commissioned by the French government, is mounted on a museum-grade reproduction of a U.S. Post Office horsedrawn delivery wagon. He makes huge prints with the bigger CO’s, and travels the world looking for perfect trees to photograph this way. Nice images, the faint inverted tree, and so odd somehow there’s no lens.

  There is a Camera Obscura built into one of the base-pylons of the SF-Oakland Bay bridge. You stand inside in utter darkness and see an inverted Bayscape. This is just a rivet-hole but it’s presumed to have been left deliberately open. One of the most secret monuments of the Bay Area.

  Immortal Media

  From Jonathan Prince

  [Jonathan Prince remarks: Not dead media, but media for when we are all dead] A PROPOSAL FOR A PERMANENT RECORD OF OUR CIVILIZATION “J. Lovelock (Oxford University, UK) presents an essay on catastrophe, civilization, and information storage. The author makes the following points:

  1) We try to guard against local hazards, but we tend to ignore threats global in scale.

  2) We fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of the species. Civilizations are ephemeral compared with the species: humans have lasted a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years.

  3) As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.

  4) What we need is a primer on science, clearly written and unambiguous in its meaning, a primer for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and how to survive and live well on it. One that would serve also as a primary school science text. It would be the scientific equivalent of the Bible.

  5) Modern media are more fallible instruments for long- term storage than was the spoken word. They require the support of a sophisticated technology that we cannot take for granted.

  6) What we need is a book written on durable paper with long-lasting print, a book written with authority and readable enough to ensure a place in every home, school, library, and place of worship, on hand whatever happened.

  Source: Science-Week, 29 May 1998

  Pigeon Post in Paris

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: I discovered a charming exemplar of dead media on the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. This small glassed-in diorama is an infotainment tourist attraction. It contains a miniature group of period-clad French enthusiasts, two-dimensional colored cut-outs with beards, slouch hats, cloth coats and large wicker baskets. They are releasing their homing pigeons from the top of Eiffel’s creation, with the following legend.]

  “La Socie’te’ Colombophile de Paris utilise au mois d’aout 1891 La 3e plateforme de la tour Eiffel pour y faire des experiences de communication aérienne par pigeons voyageurs.”

  Source: Diorama in the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris

  Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph

  From Stephen Herbert

  Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph

  In 1876, English barrister Wordsworth Donisthorpe patented and had made a plate-changing camera for recording moving pictures. In 1878, in a letter to ‘Nature’ he suggested that his ‘Kinesigraph’ and Edison’s recently-invented phonograph could be combined to produce talking pictures on the screen. In 1889, Donisthorpe and his associate William Carr Crofts patented a novel camera and projector for taking and showing moving pictures on ‘film’(initially paper). In 1890, they shot a film of Trafalgar Square, London,of which ten celluloid frames survive. They were unable to obtain funding to perfect their projector. That’s the story as told in those few film history books that mention Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W C Crofts.

  New research provides evidence for their motivation, and a link with the technology of the industrial revolution. Donisthorpe, and Crofts (his cousin) were both political activists, passionate Individualists fervent in their anti-socialist crusade. Both men were born into a linked dynasty of technologists; Donisthorpe’s father had been an inventor of wool-combing machines, and it was the technology of the textile industry that provided the inspiration for the cameras. By 1890, only three or four people in the world had managed to obtain sequence pictures on sensitised bands (paper or celluloid film). Could it really be just a coincidence that two of those people, Donisthorpe and Le Prince, came from the same industrial community in the same English city, Leeds?

  Naragansett Drum Rocks

  From Alan Wexelblat

  According to an item in the 3 April Boston Globe, the Narragansett Trail (a New England historical and recreational way) has several examples of ‘drum rocks.’ Supposedly (I have not investigated first-hand) these rocks emit a booming sound when jumped upon.

  The Narragansett Indians used drum rocks to summon others, give information, and mark trails. Legend has it that a sound from a drum rock could be heard up to 35 miles away. The Globe’s brief blurb notes that rocks were used by “leaders of the Indian nation, including their sachem, tribal medicine men, elders, and even spirits of the ancestors.”

  Curious necronauts might contact John Brown, tribal historic preservation officer of the Narraganset Indians (reservation near Charleston, R.I.), or the Warwick Historical Society, which is apparently responsible for labeling the drum rocks found on this trail.

  Source: Boston Globe, April 3, 1998

  Pneumatic Mail in London

  From Dan Howland

  “The transmission of matter through closed tubes by means of a current of air flowing therein is not by any means a novel idea, although its successful application to commercial purposes is of recent date. For the earliest suggestion of pneumatic transmission we must go back to the seventeenth century and search among the records of that venerable institution, the Royal Society of London.

  “Here we find that Denis Papin presented to the society in the year 1667 a paper entitled the ‘Double Pneumatic Pump.’ He exhausted the air from a long metal tube, in which was a traveling piston which drew after it a carriage attached to it by means of a cord.

  “At the close of the eighteenth century a certain M. Van Estin propelled a hollow ball containing a package through a tube several hundred feet long by means of a blast of air; the device, however, was regarded more as a toy than a useful invention.

  “Of more practical value were the plans of Medhurst, a London engineer, who published pamphlets in 1810 and 1812 and again in 1832, when he proposed to connect a carriage running inside the tube with a passenger carriage running above it.” [Jules Verne’s recently unearthed 1863 novel, Paris in the 20th Century proposed a similar transit system, in which a train would be pulled by magnetic attraction to a metal object in a pneumatic tube.] “The distinction of being the first city to install a practical pneumatic tube system belongs to London, where in 1853 a 1 ½ inch tube was laid between Founder’s Court and the Stock Exchange, a distance of 220 yards. The Carrier was drawn through the tube by creating a vacuum, a steam pump being used for the purpose. The roughness of the interior of the iron tubes gave much trouble, and when subsequent extensions of the system were made in 1858 and later, 2 ¼
inch lead tubes were used, the carriers being made of gutta-percha with an outer lining of felt.”

  [”Gutta-percha” is a sort of early plastic made from the latex of Malaysian trees; it is not the punchline to a Chico Marx joke about fishing.]

  “The London system has grown steadily and now includes 42 stations and 34 miles of tubes. The latter are of cast iron and lined with lead. On the shorter lines, the inside diameter is 2 3/16 inches, and on the longer lines, 3 inches. The lines are laid out radially, air being compressed at one end and exhausted at the other. Similar systems are used in connection with the telegraph service in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Dublin and Newcastle.

  “Mention should be made here of the underground pneumatic railways constructed in London, the first built in 1863, 1,800 feet in length and 2 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 8 inches in section; the latter tunnels built in 1872, running from Euston Station to the general post office, a distance of 2 ¾ miles. The latter was in duplicate and D-shaped in section, measuring 4 ½ feet wide by 4 feet high, the straight portion being of cast iron and the bends of brick. It was operated by a fan which forced air into one tunnel and exhausted it from the other. The capacity of the line was about one ton per minute. It was not satisfactory and was ultimately abandoned.”

  Source: Scientific American, December 11, 1897

  Pneumatic Mail in Berlin

  From Dan Howland

  In 1865, Seimens & Halske, of Berlin, laid down in that city a system of pneumatic tubes for the transmission of telegraph messages. The wrought iron tubes, 2 ½ inches in diameter, were in duplicate, one being used for transmitting and the other for receiving messages. They ran from the telegraph station to the Exchange, a distance of 5,670 feet. The tubes were looped together at the Exchange and a continuous flow of air was maintained by a compressor at one end and an exhauster at the other.”The modified system now in use is worked by means of large storage tanks, containing either compressed or rarefied air, and it comprises 38 stations and more than 28 miles of tubing 2.55 inches in diameter.