I’m also going to try and suggest that there are interesting connections between early modern science, games and gaming and computer graphics, particularly computer animation, and remind you how delightful these early modern instrumentation games were. I’m showing you here on the left the portable diorama, from 1826 - the joys of games in a box and education in a box - and behind me the famous model of the Egyptian hall in London which is now been transformed into a game, as you see here from 1856, showing the ascent of Mont Blanc as a panorama.

I’m proposing that in the past, as today, an ‘industrialised light and magic’ were at the root of sophisticated and spectacular projections and animations that were intended at some level not just to delight but also to teach.

I want to suggest that in the past, as today, there was a steady and very dramatic rise, an exponential rise in optical equipment, not just all kinds of scientific equipment, but optical equipment. And I’ll show you on the left the difference, you can see something of the rise, a London trade-card from 1721, and behind me another trade-card from 1851, not even a hundred years’ difference which shows the increase in all kinds of aporadis that were directed to a large audience, not just to children, but what I want to call a kind of adult education audience.

At the heart of this optical display and delight in visual pedagogics already in the early modern period, however there was a scepticism. I want to introduce us to that issue because it’s also a scepticism I think that we need to examine today. The irony - there was an irony at the heart of experimental display and you can already see among the Fellows of the Royal Society - is that anything that involved a kind of demonstration and often involved some kind of machinery, at some level seemed a conflict with sober recording and demonstrating matters-of-fact.

I show you here an early print from the 1670 showing Valentine Greatrakes, the famous stroker, who is enacting, healing. And the problem with this kind of demonstration is that it looked to much like this. In other words, scientific demonstration was very, very difficult to separate even in the early modern period from magic shows, from conjuring.

I’m showing you here a very famous conjuring act. The criticism that was leveled was that the science demonstration, the scientist game, was not really that different from the mountebank’s act, from individual jugglery. And beyond that, I’m going to propose to you that this becomes a criticism that is leveled at all kinds of visual demonstration. And of course this is a criticism that is still very much in evidence today.

I’m showing you from one of the great creators of early, modern gaming, the Jesuits in the 17th century in Rome, particularly A. Kircher .

I’m showing you Kircher’s device which was displayed at the College Romanum of a listening device - of course, very important in a court society, given the secrets. And I’m showing you behind me Sir David Brewster’s great compendium in the early 19th century of all kinds of optical games and tricks which tries to debunk what he considered to be this sophistic, all these sophisticated images and imagery that were supposedly created to seduce credulous people.

I have no time this morning to go into it but there was a very definite anti-religious, anti-Catholic rhetoric in this. That is that this kind of imagery even though it purported to at some level go beyond entertainment or go beyond a purpose, was also duping it was for illiterates, it was for credulous gapers.

I think we have to pause on this accusation. This ubiquitous aura of a kind of fakery emanating from optical or acoustical devices surrounded both fashionable and absorbing entertainment, as well as scientific experiments. The spectre of the duping magician haunted technologists. I mean, it’s not just any kind of science demonstration but it’s science demonstration with machinery. It haunted technologists from Giovanni Baptiste Delaporte to somebody like A. Kircher and was revisited by David Brewster.

If we spend a moment on Sir David Brewster, letters 4-7 in his great compendium addressed to Sir Walter Scott published in 1833 called Letters on Natural Magic. This great compendium dealt in one way or another with a pagan and esoteric science clandestinely manipulated for purposes of secrecy. What interested Brewster particularly were all kinds of magical tricks performed with mirrors, aerial images projected on smoke and a miscellany of optical and acoustic illusions.

Brewster is a true son of the Enlightenment because his purpose is to show good illusion, to unmask the old tricks, the old tricks of the Jesuits and to show that there is not just one kind of illusion .

I want to spend a little time this morning, making the same kind of argument, I want to revisit some early science games and ask you to bear in mind that contemporary gaming/ media push very hard, I think, a kind of hyper-illusion that conceals how the joints or the junctures were made. I want to revisit some early games that show us that in a way Brewster is right, there are different kinds of illusion and you can actually show how things are made and therefore teach your audience about optics - and about the ways of perception, given the fact that we’re dealing with the Doors of Perception.

I want to examine just a handful of free science gamesters, if I can call them that; model makers. They were generally private tutors, in France. I want to look at some French examples and I’m going to contrast them to some English examples, just exactly on this issue of different kinds of illusion. Both of these classes of demonstrators exploited the inherited optical fascination with mechanisms, with gadgets that metamorphose, complex, invisible operations into spectacle, that were meant to attract as I said both children and adult audiences.

I’m beginning with a French Newtonian, Des Aguie, (a picture) from his famous course of experimental philosophy, which he taught not only in salons but in coffee shops; he taught it everywhere. I’m showing you a page illustrating the demonstration of gravity and magnetism and there you see Des Aguie himself looking quite charming. And on the left I’m showing you some street entertainers.

Des Aguie was a Frenchman working in London, using machines and instruments of his own and other’s manufacture, who envisaged a whole new science education, a demonstration of science that was anti-metaphysical. He was writing against Descartes. He said that he wanted to use simple ordinary language and not difficult, hard words a la Descartes’ philosophical romance. He didn’t want to use Latin. He wanted to be absolutely understood by ordinary people. At the same time he wanted to use his illusionising tricks to unmask charlatans. And it is extremely interesting to look at his lecture 4 which is on the left where he teaches the workings of pulleys and weights, but he teaches it in order to expose what he calls the ‘flummery of common street entertainers, straw men and pretended Samsons’ who were performing in Covent Garden and tricking people. He debunks the antics of, I quote: ‘the Kentish fellow Joyce and the German’, who were the street entertainers, who had their supposedly marvellous feat in the Haymarket debunked. As the illustrations make clear, he illustrates the mechanical actions of muscles and demonstrates that this was something that occurred through the use of the body rather than any hidden kind of magic. In other words, how the muscles of the body themselves were capable of lifting great weights and that this was not really a secret, magic trick.

If we turn to another demonstrator, there was no more assiduous enlightenment demonstrator who excited both the wealthy, scientific amateur, while at the same time educating an international and upwardly mobile bourgeoisie than the French Abe Nolet, who taught all things electrical to the French royal family but he also taught it to an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. It’s interesting that Nolet was neither Cartige nor Newtonian but he desired to bring problems and instruments into diverting relationships in a kind of interactive way. He was known for his prodigious dexterity, his unusual habit of demonstrating while lecturing, which is extremely difficult to do. And also using multimedia presentations, drawings and advanced equipment like the Leyden jar to his turning of scientific objects into fashionable society games that at the same time would educate a public that was easily bored.

Significantly he was also interested in retailing products. Nolet published portraits of apparatuses, I’m showing you here. He published books of apparatuses like the solar microscope, which he then put out into the world, encouraging people to build their own equipment which they could then use.

But I want to make a distinction; I want to talk about the style of this. It’s interesting, the look of this page - the kind of anatomised, laying out of the parts. The absence of ornament, the economical simplicity. I’m going to contrast this with the English.

English demonstrators made it rather difficult to build your own equipment. It’s also interesting that it sort of hides the way in which one can put all of this together. I’m going to suggest that the French actually put forward a system of illusion that hides the seams, unlike the English, and I think that in a way the English are in a direction that we ought to be going, which actually demonstrates the difficulty of putting things together.

I think it’s ironic and I’m going to give you another example. This was the instrument maker to Louis XV, a man by the name of Byon. And I’ll show you a page again laid out, you notice the kind of economic minimalism. It’s very elegant, very abstract, very French. The way in which the wares, the drawing instruments are laid out, verges on the abstract and again it’s extremely difficult to conceptualise how all of these things, these compasses, pens and rulers might be put together and taken out of their isolated configuration and put together into a whole. Now let’s contrast this for a moment with the English.

I’m going to take another demonstrator. This is Benjamin Martin, who was an itinerant - many of these people were itinerants; they roamed the provinces as well as transfixing London, teaching science, to everyone from artisans, to children to interested adults. They also frequented coffee-houses.

I’m showing you here again a plate of these lectures were accompanied by textbooks. This one is entitled the Effluvia of Odours. How do you teach something as difficult and as complex as the dissemination of odours from a flower? And you notice that even though this seems to be rather abstract, how very carefully the engraver has actually visualised the diffusing scent emanating from the blossom’s centre.

If want to take a look at another demonstrator. This is Adam Walker. I want to particularly call your attention to the anthropomorphisation of objects. In this case, the way in which things are not abstract at all, they’re laid out on the plate like paratactic vignettes, where the illusion is constantly broken. There is a kind of episodic nature; you have windmills, a reaping machine activated by a horse. Each little vignette tells a story. In that I think it’s not that far removed from interactive hypertext programs, where the viewer is constantly reminded of ways in which the illusion can be broken.

Let me conclude with a final thought and that has to do with the difference of the audience of the past and today’s audience. I’m going to take a tiny little book by John Newbury which is called The Newtonian System of Philosophy, which is actually written by a child, Tom Telescope - and here he is in the piece. Actually captured in performance, little Tom is whipping his instrument top and as himself the demonstration incarnate of matter in motion. You notice that he is surrounded by parents. There is a delightful little story that’s woven around this. Here is his little telescope.

I want to conclude on this idea that there is a profound difference between the kind of global, anonymous audience for contemporary, interactive games and the kind of gaming culture of the early modern period which was predicated on conversation that occurred face-to-face. You notice again that the book is conceived in a kind of question-and-answer mode which constantly breaks the illusion of a kind of seamless flow of images that can be easily ingested.

In this little book, which is actually meant to be held by children, there’s text above and text below so that actually the illusion of the image is constantly broken by the text. The way we are told, the interested adults constantly interrupt and query little Tom Telescope about his demonstration. So to conclude, I want to argue that we can learn an enormous amount off these early modern attempts to teach science through games and to do it in such a way that they are truly interactive and that they also break through the notion that the only visual modality is a kind of hyper illusionising modality.

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