From Near to Far: Maria Short and the Places and Spaces of Science in Edinburgh from 1736 to 1850

A relatively unknown woman named Maria Theresa Short opened a popular observatory in 1835 in Ed inburgh - a time and place where men of science and property had long failed to make a viable space for astronomy. She exhibited scientific instruments to a general public, along with a great telescope and a walk-in camera obscura that projected live views of the city and continues to delight audiences to this day. To better understand Short's accomplishments, achieved as scientific and public life became increasingly closed to women, this study explores her largely untold story, and maps some of the places of science around it. Finding local contingencies, multiple sites and practices by diverse groups, it proposes that tensions within the connections between science and spectacle and the use of popularization to promote its professionalization produced gaps that even a marginal figure like Maria Short could inhabit and exploit

The Anamorphic Cinema

The Anamorphic Cinema is a research/creation project that proposes new ways to engage with moving images by applying digital imaging and animation to catoptric anamorphosis, a perspectival technique from the seventeenth century that deforms pictures so they ap-pear to re-form in the reflection of a curvilinear mirror. Culminating in Ghosts in the Ma-chine: The Inquest of Mary Gallagher, a looping fifteen-minute, site-specific video installa-tion investigating the culpability of a working class woman in the 1879 murder and be-heading of another, this project problematizes representation as re-presentation. Dra-matic performances of witness testimonies and newspaper texts, layered with diverse ar-chival images, form a network of narratives that re-vision the case within a context of nineteenth-century spectatorship, visual culture and disciplinary discourses. Made for ex-hibition in Griffintown, the location where the events it depicts took place, Ghosts emplac-es and embodies multi-perspectival views, encouraging mobile spectatorship and passive interaction. Audience members cannot alter the work directly but their experiences are dependent on their relative positions and angles of view. The anamorphic cinema literally re-presents partial perspective and situated knowledge, materializing theory into phe-nomenological practice

Willful Spectacles: The Splendid Camera Obscuras & Popular Observatories of Miss Maria Short

Histories of old media generally locate women on view and in the audience, but rarely position them as owners or operators in control of a screen. An archival study of the forgotten founding of Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura by Maria Theresa Short addresses this shortcoming and explores a device that is itself marginalized by media scholarship. Whereas most accounts abstract the camera obscura as a teleological forerunner and foundational component of inscriptive optical media, or as a metaphor of disembodied and distantiated vision, they overlook its use as a nineteenth-century exhibition apparatus, especially in connection to women and scientific spectacles. Yet one of the foremost and oldest purpose-built attractions in Edinburgh boasts an extraordinary history that speaks directly to such absences. In a towertop walk-in optical device, spectators stand in the dark around a touchable tabular screen while operators manipulate the capture and projection of a live, vivid and moving image of the city, which they present as a virtual guided tour. My research, pursued from a perspective of feminist media studies, explores how an unknown but willful spinster came to display this splendid apparatus and exhibit “the sublime truths of science” before the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of public museums and in defiance of municipal leaders, who would see to the demolition of her first venture. It comprises an in-depth inspection of Scottish archives that details the tactics, tensions and controversies surrounding the mysterious Miss Short and her popular observatories, and uncovers a history of scientific ambition and struggle that helps illustrate the culture in which they operated. Like the optical devices it investigates, “Willful Spectacles” reveals a complex and miniaturized monad that stands in for a shifting world where public space, its views and viewers were gendered, classed, and open to contestation