Optical image systems, such as a historical magic lantern or a contemporary data projector, have always incorporated combined elements of the visible and invisible, of what is seen and unseen. In fact, their functionality depends on it. It is the interplay of the invisible and immaterial transfer of light with specifically shaped material form such as lenses, mirrors and the image source, which produces the projected image. The material hardware of the device presents a stark contrast to the imperceptible transfer of image light, or even the electronic components encased in the physical ‘black box’ of our screen-based image devices, which are continuously shrinking in scale and visibility.

But within all image systems lies another relationship between visibility and invisibility—one which is created through the controlled direction of our attention. Ever since the natural philosopher and natural magician Giovanni Battista Della Porta performed his theatrical optical image tricks for audiences in the sixteenth century, the developer or instigator of an image system often purposefully diverts our attention away from the material source or cause of the image.¹ Instead we are spellbound by the glow of the image itself, appearing before us as if by magic. We don’t see, or pay attention to how this image happens, yet somehow there it is.

Almost a decade ago, art historian Barbara Stafford warned that the then-current trend in technologies designed to utilise involuntary response mechanisms was contributing to a decline in conscious attention and awareness.² Stafford’s cautionary sounding has become even more pertinent in recent years with the widespread embedding of artificial intelligence and machine learning into our image technologies. In response to Stafford’s thesis, I researched and developed a series of optical image system artworks as a means of exploring ways in which to counteract this increasing scarcity of critical attention. Through these artworks, I endeavour to reframe our experience of a technologically produced image by revealing the optical histories and materialities of image making. In this article, I discuss three of my optical image device artworks: Depth of Field (2023), Hallway (2024), and The Hidden Image Life of Lenses (2024).³ Collectively, these image systems explore ways in which we can become consciously aware that we are attending and reflect on what it is we are attending to when we perceive a technological image. 

Philosopher Vilém Flusser in his short essay on the image and imagination, writes about the first material images in the Lascaux caves.⁴ While Flusser provides a European example, in Australia, we are privileged to have many significant cave and rock painting sites, such as Ubirr and Burrungkuy on the lands of the Bininj, Mungguy and Mirrar peoples in Kakadu National Park, and the Murujuga site on the lands of the Ngarluma, Mardudhunera, Yaburara, Yindjibarndi, and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo peoples in Murujuga National Park, Western Australia.

Flusser notes that these cave and rock drawings are the first human-made material images, where internal mental images were externalised through materiality and the body. These ancient painters used hand gestures to create symbols that stimulated a new level of consciousness—what Flusser describes as the ‘imaginative.’⁵ He argues that from this imaginative consciousness emerged the ‘universe of traditional images’, which, in order to be understood by others, relied on visual codes shared across communities.⁶ Reading Flusser’s text forty years after its publication led me to contemplate the imagination of the early image painters at the sites of Murujuga, Burrungkuy and Ubirr. I considered how these rock images are also a socially encoded materialisation of these painters’ inner or mental image life.

Shifting my temporal gaze across the millennia to our current-day image life, I am prompted to think about the impact of the images on the screens of our phone. Although vastly different from the hand-made images of the rock painters, these contemporary pixel-formed images are also dependent upon specific materialities and perform as carriers of socially encoded visual symbols. But rather than alluding to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘mediated message’, with which the technological image has become so associated, my image system artworks question whether it is possible to create novel ways for the technologically produced image to reconnect us to our ‘imaginative consciousness’.⁷ Instead of ochre or kaolin pigments used in combination with the bodily gesture of the rock painter, my artworks are a means of exploring how the materiality of the device can perform, what I term, an ‘optical gesture’ to produce the imagined image. Depth of Field, Hallway and The Hidden Image Life of Lenses therefore carry two underlying intentions. Firstly, they are an attempt to bring renewed criticality to our experience of the mediated image—by exposing the mechanism of how these devices generate their projected moving image. Secondly, the bespoke optical components of these works serve to externalise an imagined image, in the form of a materially generated image light.

Material practice of image making


To provide some additional context for these three artworks, I will briefly elaborate on my artistic research practice in general. My practice endeavours to create scenarios where human and technology meet, where the world seen and pictured intersects with the inner image life of our imagination.⁸ I explore histories of optics, magic and media, and the ways in which a viewer can be transported to the origins of an apparatus, while remaining connected to current image technologies. A key aim of my practice-enabled research is to develop and present unfamiliar encounters with technologically produced images in order to facilitate a renegotiation of our relationship with the contemporary screen-based image. My optical systems explore the continuously changing interconnections between what media historian Siegfried Zielinski eloquently describes as, ‘what is imagined and what in fact exists, between (mere) fantasy and (actual) reality’.⁹ As media theorist Eric Kluitenberg suggests, these works blur the boundaries between technological imaginaries and actual technological development.¹⁰

Depth of Field and Hallway

Depth of Field and Hallway explore how an apparatus can materially produce a moving image with an illusionary depth of field. When installed in a gallery, these works establish a triangulation between the image, its generating device, and the viewer. Exposing the material mechanism that generates the image encourages the viewer to consider how they are seeing it.

The aesthetics of each system’s image emerges from the interaction of light and the specifically shaped material components. Having previously worked with glass and the projected moving image, my knowledge of how light interacts with material form, translucency and reflectivity informed each system’s conjured image. Thinking and imagining through light and materiality allowed me to craft devices that produce images with illusory depth and movement.

Depth of Field is a two-part work featuring a pair of optical image systems incorporating an LED light source, series of lenses, a micro-milled polygon mirror and carousel of 3D-printed image frames. Combined, these components dynamically produce a projected moving image, geometrically abstract in form and exuding an illusionary depth of field. In Depth of Field I, different facets of a three-dimensional surface appear to grow and recede. While Depth of Field II features a series of 3D concentric ripples moving from the centre to the outer edges of the image frame. Hallway works on a similar optical principle but features a projected moving image of a hallway. In this system’s projected image, the viewer peers through an illusionary portal to a stairwell receding in the background. A small sphere moves around the foreground of the image, tracing the edge of the entrance to the hallway. 
 

The translucent 3D printed components and polygon mirror rotate on a shaft in between a series of condensing lenses, a second mirror, and an objective lens. Light, emanating from an LED, travels through the condensing lens system and image frames, reflects off the surfaces of the different mirrors, and is then refracted through the lens to project the magnified animation onto the wall. The entire mechanism is revealed for the viewer to see how the image is dynamically generated before them. 

Depth of Field and Hallway emerged from an earlier work, Ghost in the Machine (2019), which applied the optical premise of a nineteenth-century image apparatus, the Théâtre Optique (Optical Theatre). Created by the artist-engineer Charles-Émile Reynaud, the Théâtre Optique is an animation device comprising a sequence of image frames that move through an optical system. When viewed, the apparatus produces the illusion of movement through the viewer’s perceptual engagement. Of relevance to my image system artworks is the way in which Reynaud conjured a system of optical mechanics—merging light and materiality to generate an illusionary moving image.

Adapting Reynaud’s use of a mirrored polygon to create an optical shutter, my works apply a similar optical mechanics. This development in my practice prompted my interest in how a projected image can present illusionary depth as well as movement. Therefore, in addition to adapting Reynaud’s optical mechanics to form the illusionary movement, the newer works extend this opto-perceptual premise to also explore illusionary depth of field in the image. I achieved this by developing a series of translucent 3D printed objects instead of 2D hand painted glass slides or image frames used by Reynaud in his Théâtre Optique. The 3D object enabled me to establish multiple focal planes in the projected image light. Using a fixed lens system in my apparatus, the viewer perceives the focused plane of the image as the foreground (the rotating sphere in Hallway), while the more blurred part of the image (the stairwell) is perceived as being in the background or further away. In other words, the multiple focal planes of the material object produce an apparent depth of field in the image. In reality, however, it is a projection of light onto the flat surface of the gallery wall.

The Hidden Image Life of Lenses

The Hidden Image Life of Lenses also explores the materiality of image making. However, instead of illusionary movement and depth of field, it investigates ways to reveal images invisibly cached in the material substrate of a lens.¹¹ This artwork emerged from a project exploring the concept of a charged object, which considers how performative agency is activated in certain objects when a viewer engages with them.¹² I began to ponder this idea after a visit to the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, where I encountered a set of seventeenth century telescopic lenses made by the mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695). I was impressed by the quality of the centuries-old glass in these lenses, and by Huygens’ skill in hand-making forms with such large radii of curvature required to produce long focal lengths used in refractive telescopes at the time. But what struck me most was how these lenses commanded my gaze. I reflected on how they had captured light from the night sky over three centuries ago, and how it now seemed that all they had seen was looking back at me. The lenses appeared to emanate an invisible charge.

Developing a response to this experience, I considered how, when Huygens’ lenses still functioned as a telescope, they performed as optical intervenors, allowing us to see beyond the physical limitation of the eye. In doing so, these lenses established a meeting place between the world seen and the world pictured.¹³ In other words, their engagement with light enabled us to see what they see through the optical formation of an image. I questioned if this meeting place was key to how, centuries later, I had sensed the lenses charge. Did it facilitate the transfer of this charge from the material objects to my sensory realm? Contemplating these questions, I made a series of lenses while navigating between seventeenth-century understandings of optical images and contemporary framings of the interconnections between materiality and the human sensorium.

I collaborated with the physicist Dale Otten (Laser Physics and Photonics Devices Laboratory, Adelaide University) to calculate the radius of curvature for the lenses, and with glass scientist Yunle Wei (OptoFab Laboratory, Adelaide University) to 3D print the lens designs in glass. These forms were then polished by the optical fabricator Danny Yung using traditional lens-making techniques. I later worked with Mark Cherill (Australian National Fabrication Facility, ANFF-SA) to micro-mill two larger-diameter lenses from transparent acrylic.¹⁴ When testing the different lenses in the optics laboratory, I discovered that the variety of materials and processes used significantly impacted the images they produced. The internal layering of glass filament in the 3D-printed glass lenses caused light scattering and produced images with high levels of chromatic aberration. Although the micro-milled lenses produced higher quality images, they had a different aesthetic quality due to the material substrate being a synthetic polymer rather than glass.

In the end, I decided to use the large-diameter lenses in a new image system artwork, with the aim of establishing a dialogue between my contemporary artistic practice and the charge I had experienced emanating from Huygens’ lenses in the Boerhaave Museum. Progressing the project through a kind of ‘material thinking’,¹⁵ I questioned whether the charge of an optical object accumulates from an entanglement of material, immaterial and invisible phenomena, as well as from what the lenses have seen. I wondered if my contemporary lenses might hold a charge similar to Huygens’ lenses or whether my lens-making process could offer new insights into the charge of these historical artefacts.

While developing The Hidden Image Life of Lenses, I continuously reflected on how, without light, Huygens’ lenses can no longer actively ‘see’. Consequently, these objects no longer serve as optical intervenors, where their specifically shaped materiality enables us to see (what would otherwise remain imperceivable to us) through their optical formation of an image. Without light, these lenses lie dormant in their museum vitrine like sleeping objects. I imagined Huygens’ lenses holding memories of all they had seen and that these memories are invisibly embedded in their transparent material form. While the lenses sleep, my newly developed artwork allows the viewer to witness these memories in the form of the lenses’ dreams, reactivating all they have seen. The lenses’ dreams are presented for the viewer in the form of moving images of light projected through my optical system.

In The Hidden Image Life of Lenses, light from an LED travels through a series of condensing lenses and an LCD screen, on which a dream sequence plays, disclosing fragments of what the lenses have seen. This image of light is then further transported through the micro-milled lenses, which project the dream sequence onto the gallery wall. In contrast to today’s high-definition screen-based images, the imperfections of my bespoke lenses create a dreamlike aesthetic in the moving image, with spherical aberration rendering the overall image increasingly blurred at the edges of the frame.

As I stand in the gallery observing the projected moving image produced by my optical system, I witness the dreams of the sleeping lenses, visually recalling all that they have seen. Like the charge I experienced emanating from Huygens’ lenses in the Boerhaave Museum, the charge of my contemporary lenses is discharged into the physical space of the gallery. In the darkened exhibition environment, I notice how light passing through my experimental lenses enables me to perceive the performative power of these objects. I witness their material form produce the projected moving image, as these conjured images of light intertwine the inner image life of the lenses with my own imagination.

Concluding Remarks

Depth of Field, Hallway, and The Hidden Image Life of Lenses establish a triangulation between image, device, and viewer. Although resulting in immaterial projected images–or what a physicist would describe as a ‘real’ image–they are dynamically produced in front of the viewer through the material components of the apparatus. These revealed systems, produced using both old and new fabrication techniques and technological ideas, invite a critical attentiveness in the viewer, who no longer attends exclusively to the image. By also attending to the device and its image source, the viewer becomes aware of their role as an active participant in the system that produces the image. My devices and their images therefore act as a conduit between what is imagined, perceived, and real. They connect the inner world of the imagination to the realm of the visible through image light created by intentionally formed material conditions.