Should We Put an End to Projection?

Abstract

OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 23–48. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Should we put an end to projection at the end of this century, at the end of this millennium? The advent of technological innovation both in art and in communication— we must be determined to inscribe these two words in their reciprocal proximity and their irreducibility—suggests such a possibility. Projection arises from a little known history belonging to the fields of physics, of geometry, of optics, of psychology, of pictorial representation, of show business [spectacle]. In its shortest definition, the most ordinary dictionary relays the equivocal character of the word: the action of projecting images on a screen and the representation of a volume on a flat surface. Spectacle and geometry, fields of activity far from each other, are mixed in the same word. With the slide or the film, it is nonetheless a matter of a comparable result: a volume transferred to a surface, illusion and geometric codification, mirage and science. To the word project, common sense associates the words envision, imagine, premeditate, foresee, as much as eject, expel, throw, push. Put otherwise, words that evoke the activities of thought as much as of physical or bodily exertion. However, if we narrow our use of projection, this is tied to the luminous transport of images, and if at the same time we try to list the greatest possible number of categories of image without consideration of the field of application or their practical or symbolic use, we spontaneously perceive two great modes of achieving the image: material supports to which the image indissociable from this support adheres, and luminous projection slides for which a spotless (or not) screen intercepts ephemerally (or not) the ray.