The Magic Lantern as a Creative Tool for Understanding the Materiality and Mathematics of Image-Making

This chapter relates the exploration and development of optical image systems inspired by Laurent Mannoni’s exhibition on the magic lantern. It investigates changes in conceptual and mathematical understandings of image formation that were emerging around the time of Christiaan Huygens’s lantern design. Detailing how Johannes Kepler’s introduction of light into the theory vision transformed concepts of image, it considers how subsequent changes during early modernism influenced the optics of the lantern. The mathematical principle of optical equivalence is considered through its connection to the image slide in the lantern. This chapter relates through studio practice how virtual images are mathematically equivalent to real images, and how objects can be conceptualised in the same way as real images, providing insight into Huygens’s innovative inclusion of the image in his lantern system. Through the development of optical image devices, it explores how concepts of image are still confounded in the current digital era and how historical and contemporary understandings continue to effect the materiality of image formation. Investigating Huygens’s rejection of his lantern and based on witnessing optical systems in the studio, it proposes that the lantern demonstrated to Huygens an uncomfortable resemblance to medieval concepts of image