Projection

About

Projected images are far older than cinema. The camera obscura, a darkened room or box in which a small opening throws an inverted view of the outside onto a surface, was analysed by the scholar Ibn al-Haytham in the 11th century and served painters as a drawing aid by the 17th. The magic lantern, developed in the 1650s and 1660s, cast painted glass slides for entertainment and teaching, and phantasmagoria shows used it to summon ghosts.

Artists brought the projector into exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone (1973) makes the beam itself the sculpture as a ring of light slowly forms in haze. Krzysztof Wodiczko projects faces and testimonies onto monuments and buildings, Tony Oursler throws talking faces onto dolls and spheres, and James Coleman's slide works unfold like still films. Look at how the beam, the surface and the room work together.