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Las Meninas

Author: Diego Velázquez
Year: 1656 Edit Add
Book: Remediation

We can in fact find hypermediacy in individual works and individual painters throughout the period in which linear perspective and erasure were ascendant: for example, in Velasquez's Las Meninas, discussed by Alpers, Foucault, and, because of Foucault, many others (Alpers 1982,69-70; Foucault 1971,3-16) One could argue and this would simply be a version of a familiar poststructuralist argument-that hypermediacy was the counterpart to transparency in Western painting, an awareness of mediation whose repression almost guaranteed its repeated return.

Source type: picture
Info: Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez - Museo del Prado / Madrid
Original size: 900x1036 px. Edit

Phenakistoscope

Author: Joseph Plateau
Year: 1832 Edit Add
Book: Remediation

The phenakistoscope employed a spinning wheel and multiple images to give the impression of movement. The appeal to immediacy here was that a moving picture, say, of a horse, is more realistic than a static image. On the other hand, it was not easy for the user to ignore or forget the contraption of the phenakistoscope itself, when even its name was so contrived. The phenakistoscope made the user aware of the desire for immediacy that it attempted to satisfy.

Source type: picture
Info: Phenakistoscope - Joseph Plateau
Original size: 500x500 px. Edit
Source type: picture
Info: Phenakistoscope - Joseph Plateau
Original size: 475x475 px. Edit
Source type: picture
Info: Phenakistoscope - Joseph Plateau
Original size: 400x400 px. Edit
Source type: picture
Info: Phenakistoscope - Joseph Plateau
Original size: 1000x1000 px. Edit

Stereoscope

Author: Charles Wheatstone
Year: 1838 Edit Add
Book: Remediation

The same was true of the stereoscope, which offered users a three-dimensional image that seemed to float in space. The image was eerie, and the device unwieldy so that the stereoscope (fig. 1.4) too seemed to be a more or less ironic comment on the desire for immediacy.

Source type: picture
Info: The diagram of the stereoscope - by Charles Wheatstone
Original size: 1673x984 px. Edit
Source type: picture
Info: Charles Wheatstone
Original size: 1427x1000 px. Edit
Source type: picture
Info: Charles Wheatstone's stereoscope
Original size: 555x352 px. Edit