Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Augmented Reality in Art: Aesthetics
and Material for Expression
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes
6.1
From Cinematic Apparatus to Augmented
Reality Apparatus
Stephen Heath begins his introduction to the collection of essays,
The Cinematic
Apparatus
, with an observation on proto-cinema advertisements: “In the first
moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the
immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine,
the apparatus. The Grand Café programme is headed with the announcement of 'Le
Cinématographe' and continues with its description: 'this apparatus, invented by
MM. Auguste and Loius Lumiére, permits the recording, by series of photographs,
of all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of
time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by
the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience'; only
after that description is there mention of the titles of the files to be shown, the 'sujets
actuels', relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet” (Heath
1980
).
The context here, in a compilation of essays inspired by Jean-Louis Baudry's
essay “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” is that after 60
years of critics analyzing film on the basis of dramatic text, aesthetic composition,
photographed subject, and psychology, Apparatus Theory in the 1970s had finally
codified an analysis of cinema based on its essential unique elements—it's material
for expression taken as a whole; what McLuhan would term the Medium not the
Message. In Baudry's 1970 essay, he draws a diagram of the 'cinematographic
apparatus' delineating the path that the spectators' perceptions normally travel,
noting what is emphasized and what repressed. I redraw it here in Fig.
6.1
.
