The Man with the Rubber Head: Camera Obscura

Formula for a Homunculus: Camera Obscura

Formula for a Homunculus

“Place human semen in a glass vial and nourish with blood for forty days and forty nights, keeping it at the temperature of a horses belly: and from it will be born a genius, a nymph, or a giant” (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim [1493-1541]).

- Tony Oursler "Optical Timeline"

Set: Camera Obscura

Red

Seth, the Egyptian god most associated with evil, is depicted in many guises: a black pig, a tall, double-headed figure with a snout, and a serpent. Sometimes he is black, a positive color for the Egyptians, symbolic of the deep tones of fertile river deposits; at other times he is red, a negative color reflected by the parched sands that encroach upon the crops. Jeffrey Burton Russell suggests that “it is possible that the redness of

Seth helped make red the second most common color, after black, of the Christian Devil.”

- Tony Oursler: Optical Timeline

Arnaud de Villeneuve: Camera Obscura

"In the thirteenth century, Arnaud de Villeneuve, showman and magician, utilized the camera obscura to stage presentations somewhere between shadow play and cinema: players performed warlike or murderous episodes outside in the bright sunlight, while inside the audience was shocked and delighted by sound effects linked to the dramatic gestures of the projected images. The fact that the audience would stay inside and watch such a mediated event when they could have gone outside and viewed the event directly points to a victory of the virtual image over reality. The disembodiment of the moving image and its removal from the recognizable physical laws that bind the body of the viewer imbue the image with a magical quality at once distant and intimate."

-Tony Oursler "Optical Timeline"