Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thoughtography Leon Marvell Published on: Nov 06, 2017 Updated on: Apr 13, 2018 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thoughtography Thoughtography: From Out the Great Darkness Leon Marvell Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media School of Communication and Creative Arts Deakin University Email: leonmarvell@gmail. com Reference this essay: Marvell, Leon. “Thoughtography: From Out the Great Darkness.” In Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22, no. 1, edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017. Published Online: May 15, 2017 Published in Print: To Be Announced ISSN: 1071-4391 ISBN: 978-1-906897-62-8 https://contemporaryarts.mit.edu/pub/thoughtography Abstract In the mid-1960s, an alcoholic, chain-smoking bellhop from Chicago found himself at the center of a psychic cyclone. Ted Serios could produce images on Polaroid film just by projecting his thoughts into the lens of the camera. Serios was an overnight sensation, and his unique abilities were the subject of worldwide attention. Famous prestidigitators, such as James Randi aka the Amazing Randi, endeavored to prove that Serios was—of course—a fake, and that the scientists who were studying Serios were gullible saps. The Amazing Randi even claimed to have produced ‘thoughtographs’ through simple stage tricks and misdirection, thus demonstrating that Serios was a charlatan. In fact, he accomplished no such thing. However, the popular press, tired of the hard-drinking Serios and his strange abilities, accepted the Amazing Randi’s claims and Serios quickly disappeared from public consciousness. Yet Serios continued to produce his puzzling, fantastical images under strictly controlled scientific conditions, and the fact remains that we have no ‘natural’ explanation for them— at least, no natural explanation that relies on a strictly materialist mode of explanation. To assist in the exploration of the post-material psychodynamics of Serios’s unsettling oeuvre, this paper calls upon a series of images to remediate the fractious geometry of Serios, his ‘thoughtography,’ and the ‘real.’ These images are found in Robert Fludd’s magnum opus of 1617, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atque Technica Historia (History of the Macrocosm), and offer a hermetically unsealed disquisition emerging from the very first image, The Great Darkness. Keywords 2 Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thoughtography Thoughtography, Ted Serios, Uri Geller, psychic, photography, Robert Fludd The invention of the daguerreotype in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the beginning of the spiritualist movement that had begun in the United States and quickly spread to Europe. Early experiments in photography revealed an efflorescence of what might be called an ‘evanescent aesthetic,’ something perhaps enforced by the unstable chemical reactions appearing on the glass plates of pioneering photographers. This evanescent aesthetic quickly became affixed to interest in the ‘spirit world,’ with spiritualist photographers producing a steady stream of what we might call psychic or paranormal photographs. This body of work can be divided into two broad classes of images: the first is what has been called spirit photography. Many will be familiar with this type of image: photographs of ghostly apparitions at séances, ectoplasmic manifestations appearing like psychic goo draped over the bodies of spiritualist mediums, and the shadowy appearance of long-dead relatives haunting family portraits. Many people of the time believed that these images provided proof of the survival of the spirit after bodily death, and thus early photography played a very large part in the feverish spread of spiritualism across the United States and Europe. Many of these images were undoubtedly fraudulent, the result of darkroom tricks that were unknown to the uninitiated. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most rational of heroes, Sherlock Holmes, became a supporter of the spiritualism movement, believing that the famous Cottingley Fairies photographs taken by cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in the early twentieth century were genuine. Today, we look at reproductions of these fairy photographs and wonder how it was possible for people to have been so ignorant of darkroom tricks. Yet this was an era in which the camera and the darkroom were not wholly seen as part of the technological imperative—that is, they were not immediately seen as scientific breakthroughs—but rather were appreciated as the most recent manifestation of a very long tradition, dating back to at least the Renaissance, wherein the camera obscura and the magic lantern were part of public entertainments that included prestidigitation, stage illusions, and magic-mirror tricks. In other words, at this time, photography was still a part of the world of ‘enchantment’ that Max Weber recognized was very quickly disintegrating. The second type of psychic or paranormal photography has no direct connection with psychic survival after death. This form has been dubbed “thoughtography.” The term was first introduced in 1910 by a Japanese professor of psychology, Tomokichi Fukurai. [1] Fukurai was working with a clairvoyant who could manifest Japanese ideograms on a photographic plate. This discovery came about by accident; Fukurai had asked the clairvoyant to identify an ideogram that had been impressed on an undeveloped photograph. After the clairvoyant accomplished this, Fukurai noticed that another plate lying nearby had also been impressed with the same ideogram. Fukurai suspected that this had occurred through some sort of inadvertent psychic transmission on the subject’s part, so he then proceeded to see 3 Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thoughtography whether the clairvoyant could be encouraged to do this deliberately. The results of these experiments were positive, and often the experimental setups were ingenious. For example, Fukurai created a sealed container in which three photographic plates were stacked, one upon the other. He then asked his clairvoyant subject to imprint an image on only the middle plate. [2] The important point here is that even though Fukurai was very careful in the design of his experiments, and despite his rigorous attempts to exclude any possibility of fraud on the subject’s part, Fukurai was severely criticized by his peers and the scientific community. Eventually, he had to abandon his research and resign from the university where he conducted his work. By this time, of course, the disenchantment of the world was already in full swing. Experiments in thoughtography continued in Europe and the US, however, but allegations of fraud always curtailed these experiments before they could really amass a substantial body of evidence. Then, in the 1950s, interest in thoughtography was galvanized by the appearance of one man, Ted Serios. This interest was due to the fact that Serios produced his images in a way that ruled out any possibility of fraud. The key to this was that Serios used a comparatively new technology to register his images: the Polaroid camera. Previous experiments and experimenters had to use the darkroom to develop their psychic images, and thus there was always suspicion of darkroom tricks. But the Polaroid camera, in which the registering and developing of the image were all self-contained, precluded the possibility of most darkroom sleight of hand. Ted Serios was in his mid-thirties when he became famous. He worked as a bellhop and elevator operator in a Chicago hotel, and had developed an interest in hypnotism. He discovered that he had the ability to manifest images onto film, first using an ordinary box camera and then a Polaroid land camera. Serios demonstrated these skills to various researchers in the Chicago area for several years, but it wasn’t until he drew the attention of Jule Eisenbud, a Denver psychiatrist and psychic researcher, that Serios’s star began to rise. From May, 1964 until 1967, Eisenbud conducted and supervised thousands of scientific trials exploring Serios’s remarkable abilities, and these experiments were witnessed by at least one hundred different observers, nearly all of whom were scientists or academics. Of the other witnesses, some were professional conjurors or prestidigitators who were called in to rule out any trickery on Serios’s part. The trials produced around one thousand Polaroid photographs, all of which have been preserved in the Special Collections section of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. More than four hundred of these Polaroids contain specific images; that is, images chosen by Eisenbud and his team to be the specific target of the experiment. Typically, Eisenbud would choose an image at random (from a copy of National Geographic, for example) and conceal it in a sealed envelope so that Serios could not see it. The target images were usually of buildings. Typically, Serios would manifest Polaroid images that 4 Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thoughtography were blurry and rather distorted, but that were all recognizable as variants of the target image. I use the term “variants” because one of the most peculiar aspects of these particular experiments was that the images Serios produced seemed to be from perspectives that were considerably different than the original image. For example, many of Serios’s images of the target buildings appear to be from a perspective that would be physically impossible in the real world, and were certainly different from the angle at which the target images were taken. It is as if Serios’s images were registered by someone floating in space or circumnavigating the structure in a hot air balloon. Even stranger, when Eisenbud concealed an image of one of the barns on his property in an envelope, Serios, who was certainly familiar with the barn as it existed, produced an image of the barn that resembled the appearance of the barn twenty years in the past, with various contemporary additions missing—an image that he could not possibly have been familiar with.