‘Pseudonecromantic spectres’: dark media and the technological sublime in eighteenth-century phantasmagoria

Abstract

Debuting at the very end of the eighteenth century, the Phantasmagoria (La Fantasmagorie) was an astounding combination of art and science. By projecting painted slides onto a transparent screen, the Phantasmagoria gave the impression that the veil separating the living and the dead had been breached, with spectres summoned to appear before a thrilled audience. The Phantasmagoria has been described as an important milestone in the pre-history of cinema and as a precursor to Tom Gunning’s cinema of attraction. Likewise, the Phantasmagoria, appearing at the tail end of the Enlightenment, has been understood as an attempt to reconcile the waning superstition of earlier periods with the new sciences of physics and optics. While these are valid readings of the phenomenon and its popularity, this paper argues that the Phantasmagoria, with its iconography of spectres and spirits engendered from within the heart of a technical apparatus, represents an early manifestation of Mario Costa’s conception of the technological sublime. According to Costa, the technological sublime is primarily a feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetics, signalling the displacement of the natural by the technological. Where individuals might previously have experienced an overwhelming sense of awe and terror in the face of the natural world, those sensations are now felt most acutely when one is confronted by the extraordinary capacities of new technology. Our paper frames the Phantasmagoria as an early iteration of the technological sublime, exploring how the machine’s capacity to produce spectres engendered terror, awe and excitement in a late-Enlightenment audience.