Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Making People Disappear Part 2-Conjurers, Blank People and Anti-Blank People. Orson Welles, Robert Heller and J.J. Thomson
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #87

Following up on an earlier post on disappearing people (and making things disappear) is this slight abrasion on seeing things that aren’t there, and making other people see the same not-there things. This is good and bad, depending on what seats you have in the theater and what kind of theater it is that holds these seats. It is many times fabulous in the theater of science, where people like Democritus and Leucippus (5th century BCE Greek) proposed thinking of the world being composed of tiny, individual, non-solid and invisible elements—these elements were there, of course, because they reasoned that everything could not come from nothing, and thus they had to be so small as to seem to not exist at all. This was the beginning of the atomic theory which would be added to and subtracted from over the next 2500 years, encountering atomists-in-extremis like John Dalton (1766-1844, with the first truly scientific/experimental/useful atomic theory) and JJ Thomson (who in 1897 actually discovered a constituent element of the invisible universe called the electron, and then on to Max Planck (who complicated things enormously and fabulously with the quantum theory in 1900, and Planck’s constant =
h/2p)and on and on.

In the theater that we expect to be shown nothing and believe in it, humans have been happily deceived for thousands of years. Our gorgeous Orson Welles, for example, still semi young when he made his B-movie masterpiece Touch of Evil, transforms himself utterly with a little make up and a whole lot of acting, disappearing himself and producing Detective Hank Quinlan in his place. In this movie, witch is perhaps one of the greatest black-and-white, sheerly, unstoppably black-and-white, with no grey tones and contrasts sharp enough top cut your pinkies on black-and-white, the most noire of flim noires, Orson manages to hide himself in the shadows and let Det. Quinlan take his disappeared place, right there in front of you.

Another wonderful illustration of empty, waiting-to-be-filled-up humans, human tabula rasa so to speak, was employed by the “second sight” conjurer Robert Heller. He abandoned his wig and his French accent, along with his piano, to become a conjurer, and became one of the “best” of his day. Heller (born Palmer, 1826-1878) took advantage of people’s lack of scientific background and inventive acuity, and their need to believe ion something mysterious and larger than themselves, in some sort of simple primordial goo that might hold together the vastly differentiated universe, to trick them into believing that he could somehow divine a manner of objects and thoughts with his razor/divination vision.

Unfortunately, all he was doing was working with confederates and employing a slightly elaborate signaling system to communicate his so-called deep vision. (For example in this manikin image, Heller woul dbe able to signal his confederates the number he was “divining” by touching these parts of his body as he was setting the foundation for the trick.) It was a smart idea, a two-beer idea, that he acted on and parlayed (along with a broad theatrical stage presence)into a significant bankroll. He had other sorts of magical helpers and automata to push his sleight show forward, but mostly, it seems, it was his ability to “force” people to know something that they couldn’t, all worked with secret alphabets and hidden associates. It was easy and a little feeble, and it worked for years until his will just gave out. He was a local to the vicinity of my old shop in Georgetown, and it is perhaps appropriate that his magic was worked and also gave out in Washington, D.C.

To tidy things up, it was the scientists who found the things that are there but can’t be seen but couldn’t make the vast percentage of the population “see” the unseeable, while people like Heller and other magicians couldn’t find their unseen things anyway but could make people “see” their non-existent unseeables—all of which seems fairly paradoxical.

(“I see”, Patti Digh just brightly said.)(Below I’ve attached the opening scene from Touch of Evil–it is one continuous single take, one of the greatest opening shots in film history I think. And old Uncle Orson was able to do all of the magic on a buck-two-eighty.)
```
 
```
```
 
```
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perception
Blank & Missing People—Pelerin, Schoen and Marey and Picturing Absent and Empty People for the Study of Perspective.

JF Ptak Science Books Post #85

In some of the elementary thinking on perspective in the history of art and science there is a certain amount of subtraction that must occur before addition and advancement can be made—these experiments have resulted in some very unusual-singular even—images, which when viewed apart from their proper context and considering the times in which the images were made make them seem revolutionarily modern.
Take for example the extraordinary work of Jean Pelerin (also called “Viator”) in his De artificiali perpectiva, a very rare woodcut-illustrated book printed n Nurenberg in 1509. In illustrating what he referred to as his “three point perspective” Pelerin removed much of the gothic-tradition bric-a-brac that is so heavily favored in these early books and replaced them with outlines from his rather astonishingly expressive notebooks, and replacing people, individual humans, with what may be the first “almost-entirely-absent” human forms. These roundish, ghost-like figures are just meant to hold the outlines of space, meant to function in the role of a simple comparative unit. This works quite well as an artistic technique—a solicitation tool which I think gives his reduced, “empty” humans an incredible, ethereal look unlike any other in the history of the first 60 or so years of printing. It is difficult to imagine what the observer of these images back there in 1509 was thinking when they looked at these figures, and perhaps removed them from their textural context—it would have been a unique visual experience for them
.

Just a little while latter Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg (as well!) in 1538, presented another unique way of representing the human form in model for the sack f studying perspective. He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body n space and in proportion to other things. Again like the Pelerin, I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way.

Dashing into the 19th century we find another superb image of the empty man from Etienne Marey in his photographic and moving-photographic studies of motion. This is actually a little odder, as the man in this image can be either completely empty or the convex, being completely filled up.

Marey would fit sensors at moving/jointed parts of the human body, affixed to a black-cloth-wearing experimental helper. The point was to collect simply *movement* images and not necessarily-at this point at least—the parts of the body responsible for the movement. At this time Marey was interested in the effects of motion, and used his empty man to do just that.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perception — Perspective — Photography, history — Technology, History of
Maps of Emptying Humans of Blood, II: Johann Stoeffler, 1518

JF Ptak Science Books LLC
I couldn’t let yesterday’s bloodletting images pass without reference to this excellent woodcut for Johann Stoeffler’s Calendarium Romanum Magnum, printed in Oppenheym by the redoubtable Jacob Koebel, (24 March) 1518. It is a glorious display (entitled Simulcarum humani corporis) of seasonal (!) purgative and bloodletting locations on the body, meant to accompany a longish essay by Stoeffler on the practice in general. The bulk of the book, however, had very little to do with this practice and was actually commissioned as a reform to the Julian calendar, provided with the impetus of the Lateran Council (1512-1517). The result was a series of forty-one propositions on the calendar and calendar-related practices, including work on eclipses, the zodiac, the occurrence of leap years, the Alexandrine and Roman calendars, the calculation of the occurrence of Easter, and so on, including the seasonal practices of bloodletting.

Stoeffler was an astronomer and map maker, and among his other works are included 1482’s Ephemerides (being allocations for eclipses and astrological events to the year 1518), and the Elucidatio fabricæ ususque Astrolabii, published in Oppenheim in 1513, in which he presents a new astrolabe design and usage that was extremely popular throughout the 16th century. Later, in 1536, he invented the Stoeffler quadrant, publishing on it in On artful measurement of all sizes, planes and declines in length, height, breadth and depth (1536), and which became a staple instrument in the surveyor’s intellectual and practical arsenal. (Stoeffler’s portrait is on the right.)

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Medicine, History of