and forward path, the objects visible “as far from the glass inward, as they stand from it outwardly, and clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth.” I have used variations of this statement to establish the terms of my film Pepper’s Ghost (2013), and its roots in renaissance thought and the crisis of perspective in art. Della Porta was dedicated, in his text, to the value of the undisclosed illusion. He concludes, “if an ingenious man do this, it is impossible that he should suppose that he is deceived.” For Della Porta, this phantasmagoria was an act of natural magic; it can be explained, but in the domain of perception, it casts doubt on reason. This ghost had entered into our knowledge of optics in the renaissance, alongside the camera lucida, also described by Della Porta and later named by Kepler, a device that shares some qualities with the ghost. In the nineteenth century, the illusion would at last be named upon its entry into the conventional grammar of stage theatrics. Henry Dircks, an engineer, had tamed it for public spectacle, through his Dircksian Phantasmagoria. John Henry Pepper later popularized it, when he adapted it from magic lantern performance to theatre, and the press gave the ghost his name.
Pepper's Ghost (2013)
passing within that chamber, causes objects to appear or disappear and to become transparent. “For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator's back, he will think to be in the middle of the house,” the distance collapsing background
In my work to date, much of it in Super8mm and 16mm film, I have explored perceptual enigmas, primarily through techniques of superimposition, frame alternation, and colour and line treatments that transform the image, flattening the picture plane, annihilating depth. When I began to work with video in 2013, I did so with a determination not to record realist images, but to either record or construct images of perceptual and perspectival difficulty. My interest in working with moving images is tied to my understanding of the evolution of perspective in the arts, and in particular, the impulse in modernism toward flatness and abstraction. In late 2012, I was appointed the Scholar-inResidence at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University. When I moved into my office, I discovered that it was one half of an observation room, the remains of a psychological testing unit. This is a unique