Dead but still/moving the slide show and documentary, a space between photography and cinema

From magic lantern shows to PowerPoint presentations, the slide show has cast a long shadow on documentary film. In the 1880s the New York Police reporter, Jacob Riis, barnstormed America with magic lantern images of urban poverty, hoping to rouse sympathies and eventual relief for the city's underclass. In mid 2006, An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary woven around Al Gore's slide show PowerPoint presentation, screened to audiences around the world. This article examines links between the slide show and documentary. It argues that this connection is illuminating in thinking about the relationship between stillness, movement, cinema and photography. It also argues that a characteristic of slide show documentaries is their preoccupation with time, memory, mortality and death

Haunted

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.From magic lantern shows to PowerPoint presentations, the slide show has cast a long shadow on documentary film. In the 1880s the New York Police reporter, Jacob Riis, barnstormed America with magic lantern images of urban poverty, hoping to rouse sympathies and eventual relief for the city’s underclass. In mid- 2006, An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary woven around Al Gore’s slide show PowerPoint presentation, screened to audiences around the world. My film, Siberia, is a memory of a time and place but it could also be thought of as a ‘slide show documentary’. This exegesis investigates my own fascination with slide shows and films made from still images. Beyond this personal focus, the exegesis looks more generally at the ‘still/moving’; that is, creative work that occupies a space between still images (photography) and moving pictures (cinema). Recently there has been a wave of interest in the still/moving in installation art and feature films but there has been virtually no written commentary on the still/moving in documentary, and even less on the slide show and documentary. This exegesis explores this gap in knowledge through a combination of biographical, historical and theoretical approaches. The ghost of the slide show haunts many still/moving documentaries but to equate all still/moving works as being ‘slide show documentaries’ misses the mark. In this exegesis, I analyse how stillness operates within a range of still/moving works and argue that ‘still/moving-ness’ is also about punctuation, expression, rhythm and music. My examination of the intersection between the slide show and documentary prises open the relationship between stillness, movement, cinema, photography and auto/biography. It reveals that a characteristic of ‘slide show documentaries’ is their preoccupation with time, memory, mortality and death

Hollins Columns (1989 Apr 20)

Table of Contents: ‘A Little Bit of Magic’: Cotillion 1989—The Little Saints—Too Much Emphasis on Money—Ring Night Not Greatly Changed (Letter To the Editor)—Hollins Columns Staff—Geology Lecture on Continental Drift Scheduled—Phonathon Thank You’s—A Little Bit of Magic (Cotillion 1989 Pictures)—A Hollins Legend Retures—Hollinsnews is Born—New Age Pianist to Perform—Official Dedication of Gym—Hollins Students in Jamaica: A Slide Show—Senior Section: Reminiscent Rumorshttps://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/newspapers/1226/thumbnail.jp

Picturing the Demon Drink: How Children were Shown Temperance Principles in the Band of Hope

The UK Temperance movement attracted millions of members in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including children. Probably the most successful of the many groupings was the children’s organization, the Band of Hope (1847–1995), and there is a rich legacy of teaching materials, including magic lantern slides, which enables later generations to discover and evaluate its use of visual discourse. This article explores the visual means by which the message was spread and members were gained, sustained, and given material for their own missionary endeavors. The argument highlights the importance of the pioneering visual tools for communicating these messages used by the Band of Hope

Developing a Sufficient Knowledge Base for Faces: Implicit Recognition Memory for Distinctive versus Typical Female Faces

Research on adults' face recognition abilities provides evidence for a distinctiveness effect such that distinctive faces are remembered better and more easily than typical faces. Research on this effect in the developmental literature is limited. In the current study, two experiments tested recognition memory for evidence of the distinctiveness effect. Study 1 tested infants (9- and 10-month olds) using a novelty preference paradigm. Infants were tested for immediate and delayed memory. Results indicated memory for only the most distinctive faces. Study 2 tested preschool children (3- and 4-year-olds) using an interactive story. Children were tested with an implicit (i.e. surprise) memory test. Results indicated a memory advantage for distinctive faces by three-year-old girls and four-year-old boys and girls. Contrary to traditional theories of changes in children's processing strategies, experience is also a critical factor in the development of face recognition abilities

DoctorEye: A clinically driven multifunctional platform, for accurate processing of tumors in medical images

Copyright @ Skounakis et al.This paper presents a novel, open access interactive platform for 3D medical image analysis, simulation and visualization, focusing in oncology images. The platform was developed through constant interaction and feedback from expert clinicians integrating a thorough analysis of their requirements while having an ultimate goal of assisting in accurately delineating tumors. It allows clinicians not only to work with a large number of 3D tomographic datasets but also to efficiently annotate multiple regions of interest in the same session. Manual and semi-automatic segmentation techniques combined with integrated correction tools assist in the quick and refined delineation of tumors while different users can add different components related to oncology such as tumor growth and simulation algorithms for improving therapy planning. The platform has been tested by different users and over large number of heterogeneous tomographic datasets to ensure stability, usability, extensibility and robustness with promising results. AVAILABILITY: THE PLATFORM, A MANUAL AND TUTORIAL VIDEOS ARE AVAILABLE AT: http://biomodeling.ics.forth.gr. It is free to use under the GNU General Public License

Method for milling and drilling glass

A process for machining glass by placing a rotating carbide working surface under minimum pressure against an area of glass to be worked is described. Concurrently the region between the working surface and the area of glass is wet with a lubricant consisting essentially of a petroleum carrier, a complex mixture of esters and a complex mixture of naturally occurring aromatic oils

Ars magna lucis et umbrae

120 modern day ‘magic lanterns’ grouped in a series of narrative sequences and photographic tableaux are distributed unevenly throughout the cavernous space of the former church. Two types of images are projected. The first type are from the collection of images that Mark Ingham has been using for the past few years in his research. These images will occupy the smaller rectangular space at the end of the church. The second type of image will use photographs taken over recent months of the inside and outside of Dilston Grove and its locale. These latter images will create a site specific installation that will attempt to deconstruct the physical and political dimensions of the space and will be sited in the main body of the building. 'The Great Art of Light and Darkness' is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon by Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a leading scholar in his time of natural sciences and mathematics. In 1646 he published the first edition of this book and in it he described a projecting device, equipped with a focusing lens and a mirror, either flat or parabolic. Kircher described the construction of this ‘magic lantern’ by writing: "Make ... a wooden box and put on it a chimney, so that the smoke of the lamp in the box is on a level with the opening, and insert in the opening a pipe or tube. The tube must contain a very good lens, but at the end of the tube...fasten the small glass plate, on which is painted an image in transparent water colours. Then the light of the lamp, penetrating through the lens and through the image on the glass (which is to be inserted... upside down) will throw an upright, enlarged coloured image on the white wall opposite.” When Mark Ingham started to use SLR film cameras as projection devices he wrote: ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image.’ He sees his camera projectors as the direct descendant of those early ‘magic lanterns’, but instead of a wooden box and a lens he uses an SLR film camera. Replacing the smoky lamp he has cool running Light Emitting Diode spotlights and the ‘transparent water colours’ are replaced by photographic transparencies. The transparency is still inserted upside down in the device and enlarged colour images will be projected on to the walls of the Dilston Grove exhibition space in May-June 2008