Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips

The paper investigates the 'motionless trips' enabled by 19th-century visual technologies such as the magic lantern, phantasmagoria, panorama, and diorama. Although these technologies are often held to have culminated with the appearance of animated photography (film) in the 1890s, we argue that they possessed their own autotelic significance. Paralleling the transformations wrought upon reality by cultures of transport such as the railway, the visual attractions referred to here also reconfigured reality. For whilst they were frequently employed to simulate the transportation of the spectator not only to distant locations but also through time, the most profound journey these developments accomplished was a voyage into the abstract fabric of space and time itself. The abstraction of space and time as a material independent of actuality, and its re-engineering into new configurations, was eventually perfected in the cinema: a space-and-time machine that spliced together the 'mobility' of the magic lantern, Phenakistiscope, and Praxinoscope; the 'space-lapse' of the panorama; the 'time-lapse' of the diorama and chrono-photography; the realism of photography; and the haptical obscenity of the stereoscope.