Susan Hiller’s installation piece, Magic Lantern, is a contemporary adaptation of the old animation technique known also as magic lantern. The piece was made by Hiller in 1987. Hiller was interested in unmasking the human body’s instinctual response to color. Hiller attempted to explore this reaction by projecting three circles made up of the primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, onto a wall using three channels of 35mm slide projections accompanied by sound. The way in which Hiller projects the pure colors creates a retinal after-image for the viewers as the colors dissect and intersect with one another. The audio that goes along with the visual is a combination of Hiller’s own voice as well as parts of audio recordings done by the Latvian scientist Konstantine Raudive who claimed to have recorded ghosts. Hiller’s installation only has a duration of 12 minutes, during which Hiller used automatic projectors, an updated form of the original apparatus used on the original magic lanterns. Additionally, rather than using a candle as her light source or hand painted glass slides, Hiller used the bulbs within the projectors for light and photographic slides. Hiller’s intention behind this piece was to use imagery that didn’t have any predisposed emotions behind them as a means of an invoking a subjective response from viewers.
I do believe Hiller’s Magic Lantern is successful in producing a natural emotional reaction to the visual, which doesn’t have any sentiment behind it; however, I find that the audio has an opposite effect. The audio, which is supposed to be a mixture of the voices of ghosts as well as Hiller’s own voice discussing the said voices, has an eerie undertone that changes the piece from being that of an objective installation creating a subjective, intuitional reaction, to simply being a subjective piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj3Ma49ULqI
