BOKEH

c l e a r l y ⚫ u n f o c u s e d

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TABLE of CONTENTS

Interview with Designer Thomas Heatherwick

8

6 Letter from the Editor

17

Cities Around the Globe

are Eagerly Importing a

Dutch Specialty—

Flood Prevention

Björk Talks About

How Nature Inspired Her New High-Tech Album

22

27

Meet the World's Most

Dangerous Instrument:

The Tesla Coil

Bringing Back the Golden Days of Bell Labs

30

28

Sisters with Transistors:

Pioneers of

Electronic Music

What Did the Victorians See in the Stereoscope?

40

37

Do We Need Renaissance

People Any More?

The WWI Dazzle

Camouflage Strategy Was

58 So Ridiculous It Was Genius

64

Nature's Lens:

How Gravity Can Bend

Light Like a Telescope

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· A · S E Q U E N C E ·

· O F · L E T T E R S ·

· · · · F R O M · · · ·

· · · · · T H E · · · · ·

· · · E D I T O R · · ·

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CARLOS A. LÓPEZ EL MANKABADI

his

T

magazine began to take shape during the

summer of 2022 and follows one particular

pathway of discovery I took over the course

of a few weeks. I had not had much time over the

first year of school to feed my curiosity in subjects

outside of design—a pastime of mine for many

years. The idea occurred to me that a magazine

curated for the time-constrained, wandering mind

would be quite useful to many, myself included.

The actual content for any issue is imagined to

gently float through a range of topical neighborhoods,

powered by a sense of wonder, and led by the catching

of a slightly different breeze at each intersection, but

still following a traceable path. Each article springs

from a question, or thought, sparked by another,

slowly filling in a near-infinite number of gaps in our

understanding of the world.

For this inaugural issue, I sought out inspiration

from some of my favorites in the worlds of music,

science, and design, and drifted any which way my

questions led me. In retrospect, this issue focused

on vision—both in terms of how we perceive with,

or deceive, our eyes, and how we can visualize and

imagine things that are not yet real.

I hope this issue takes you on a similar journey and

inspires you to reach further into the subjects in focus,

or mentioned, or insinuated in the articles herein.

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· Photo by James Maltos · · · · · · ·

· · · · · · · · · · · ·

c l e a r l y ⚫ u n f o c u s e d

Carlos A. López El Mankabadi


Amy Frearson, Jim Morrison, Allyson McCabe,

Paul Sutter, Mario Livio, Jonah Bayer, Jason Richards,

Iulia Georgescu, Denis Pellerin, Patrick J. Kiger,


Fall | 2022

Volume Nº 1 | Issue Nº 1

fotoloslopez@gmail.com

Alegreya [Huerta Tipográfica], Macula [Bold Monday] ,

Underground [P22 Type Foundry]

InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

fall 2022 :: 7

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“there

was a real

worry about

whether we could

get people to come

inside”

an exclusive interview with

designer thomas heatherwick

by amy frearson

Designer thomas heatherwick

reveals how he overcame early

fears that no one would visit

the art galleries in his new Cape Town

art museum.

Zeitz MOCAA, or Zeitz Museum

of Contemporary Art Africa, opened

last week and is now South Africa’s

biggest art museum. Located inside

a converted 1920s grain silo, its centrepiece

is a 10-storey-high atrium

that has been carved out of the cellular

concrete tubes that make up the

building’s original structure.

Amy Frearson: Let’s start from the

beginning. How was it this project

came about.

Thomas Heatherwick: It came about

following the end of Apartheid and

the advent of containerisation in

the industrial handling of grains.

These buildings, made from gigantic

concrete tubes, suddenly stopped

being relevant and became derelict

in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in

Cape Town.

Over the years, the whole of the

waterfront was being regenerated and

developed, and there in the middle

was this strange problem structure

with a question mark getting bigger

and bigger, as office and residential

buildings all got closer and closer.

We were asked six years ago to do a

feasibility study—explore what could

be possible. I think there was a sense

fall 2022 :: 9

Originally built in 1921 to store and grade maize from all over South Africa.

that there might be some cultural

use but no sense at that stage what

that might be. So we began exploring

what the building might do and

how it could integrate into the public

landscape of the Victoria & Alfred

Waterfront, which is the most-visited

public pedestrian area in Africa. It’s

still a working port as well, so there

is this mix of residential buildings

and office space being built, but also

big Chinese ships being welded and

having barnacles removed.

While we were working on that,

looking at how to repurpose the site,

there was a group of people who

came together with a conviction. The

world of contemporary art has, in a

way, exponentially expanded in the

last couple of decades and almost

every major city in Europe and Asia

and North America has fallen over

themselves to have their own contemporary

art museum. There are

so many now, and that’s a real mark

of the success of projects like Tate

Modern and Guggenheim Bilbao. Yet

the whole continent of Africa, which

is the same size as Europe and North

America combined, didn’t have a place

for the African imagination, a public

institution to bring it all together. So

it was very galvanising—they were

looking for a way to create a building

and we had a building looking for

a purpose.

Amy Frearson: Where did the money

come from?

Thomas Heatherwick: There was a

man called David Green in charge

of the waterfront. Green is very forward-thinking,

and somebody willing

to dare to create an institution. There

was no national money—there is not

the same culture of philanthropy

there as there is in the US or even

in the UK—so the waterfront took it

upon themselves to say: “We have a

duty to the city and the country to be

creating more than just shops here.”

So we found ourselves making

Africa’s first ever African contemporary

“

So we found

ourselves making

Africa’s first-ever

African contemporary

art museum.

”

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art museum. The art eco system already

existed—there are incredible artists

with amazing work, but no major

public place to bring that together.

Many artists from the continent have

been sending their work abroad for

some time, or relocating themselves

to other parts of the world.

The budget by global standards was

minuscule, just over £30 million, but

in the African context that’s a serious

amount of money. So we really focused

our work and tried to look at how we

could make that go the furthest.

Amy Frearson: Can you explain the

design you came up with in response?

Thomas Heatherwick: There was a real

worry with his project about whether

we could get people to come inside, to

get over the inertia of a threshold, and

the apprehension of a contemporary

art museum.

We could have knocked this structure

down and just built an extraordinary

spaceship. But museum-going isn’t

a normal thing here, and there was

a great risk that people would come,

have their photograph taken outside,

and then go home saying they had

been. So chief curator Mark Coetzee

asked us: “How can we make someone

have to come inside?”

In our studio, we are passionate

about public interaction, so that was

very motivating—working out how

could we compel people to come inside

and allow curiosity to do the rest of

the work. Because once someone’s

inside, curiosity will make you explore

the galleries.

We’re used to buildings having

their iconicity on the outside, whether

it’s an Opera House or a Gherkin or

a Shard. These buildings have very

powerful identities, but it felt like

there was already a structure like that

here. It was from an era when black

people were oppressed, so you could

make an argument for demolishing

the structure completely, but you

could also counter that, by treating

it as a monument. From the top of

the structure, you can see Robben

Island, where Nelson Mandela was

kept prisoner. So it felt that there was

a lot of texture and soulfulness and

character embedded in the concrete

of what was the tallest building in

Sub-Saharan Africa for half a century.

fall 2022 :: 11

It is an early example of a slipformed

building. It had a shaped

mould on the ground that was filled

with concrete and slid upwards to

make this compartmentalised, cellular

structure. It had more than

100 tubes—there were square tubes,

circular tubes, cruciform tubes, rectangular

tubes—for the different grain

sections. So unlike an old, disused

power station, which has spaces for

giant turbines, this had no space, it

was just a cellular honeycomb.

We were interested in how we could

give a heart to the building and whether

that heart could be compelling enough

that you couldn’t say you’d been to

the museum unless you’d gone inside

it, unless you’d gone into that

heart, whether you thought you were

interested in art or not.

Amy Frearson: Can you tell me more

about this interior?

Thomas Heatherwick: The curator

was quite clear that the tubes were

pretty rubbish for showing art in,

so [the challenge] became how we

could retain the spirit of this tubularity

but also give functionality,

to create an A-grade gallery space.

The galleries have a job, not just to

make shows for here in Cape Town,

but to also make shows that could

travel the world, so they needed to

have a simplicity.

So we just did simple, really high

quality, calm spaces with great lighting.

The whole project really was

about creating a platform for the

work, to see it for the first time in a

space at this kind of scale. Because

many institutions have a contemporary

African art area, but this

was about having a place that is

only that. There are more than 80

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galleries here and we saw our job

as stitching them together.

When we first visited this building

full of pigeon droppings. We

had been completely lost in the

bewildering honeycomb maze of

cellular spaces,so we could see that

we needed to carve it out. It became

like archaeology, like excavating out

gallery spaces, but not wanting to

obliterate the tubularity completely.

The galleries are dropped in, almost

like very pure class–A gallery

boxes dropped into the space we

carved out. Then, in the heart, we

tried carving rectilinear spaces,

spherical spaces and even ovoid

spaces. We knew that tubes would

do something very interesting if

you carved through with a curving

plane, but that if you juxtapose very

pure forms with a very geometrical

grid, the two seem to sterilise each

other. We realised we needed to do

something that your eye couldn’t

instantly predict.

There was then this sort of funny

synergy when we then managed to

get hold of some of the corn that

“

We had been

completely lost in

the bewildering

honeycomb maze

of cellular spaces

”

Our role was destructing rather than

constructing, but trying to destruct

with a confidence and an energy, and

not treating the building as a shrine.

Amy Frearson: How much have you

changed the exterior?

Thomas Heatherwick: So we put these

new windows in, but we were interested

to see if we could somehow avoid the

clinical, two–dimensional flatness by

making them like pillows—as if the

building was breathing. The building

has so much pressure inside, because

the grain behaved like a liquid, and

these tubes were designed to take

those hydrostatic pressures. So we

felt like manifesting some of this

pressure in the glazing.

From a budget point of view, it’s

just flat glass. But by making three–

dimensional pillows with the glass,

they act slightly like mirror balls. You

look up at them, they’re reflecting

back at you, but the side part reflects

had been stored in the building.

The building had been used to store

trillions of grains of corn. We took

one of these original grains, digitally

scanned it to get the exact form and

then enlarged it to be 10 storeys high.

It made this extraordinary geometry.

Above: a close-up of one of the faceted glass panels;

image via Heatherwick Studio.

Left: construction progress; image via

Heatherwick Studio.

Table Mountain, the other side part

reflects Robben Island and the top

part reflects the clouds in the sky.

The other part of the project that

felt important to us was to take the

magnolia gunge off the outside of

the building and strip it back to

the raw concrete, because that raw

concrete has this warmth to it, like

carved stone. The stone within the

aggregate is from Table Mountain

nearby, so it is a different quality

of concrete then you would now

be able to buy. We’re so used to

the world around us being covered

in cladding—global procurement

has driven buildings with a very

smooth, polished feel—and in that

context, this raw material has an

almost prehistoric feel to it, like

raw adobe.

Amy Frearson: Did you ever feel

uncomfortable about the fact you

were a British designer working on

a building that is so closely tied to

African heritage?

Thomas Heatherwick: The studio

does projects all over the world and

in each place we focus on trying to

make a project specific to that place.

We take a different perspective everywhere

we work—our passion is

public projects, wherever they are.

The Waterfront had been looking

at proposals from people from

throughout Africa and South Africa,

so there had been many proposals

for the building. What we developed

was something that chimed

with them. We were certainly not

pushing anyone else aside. It was

African decisions driving what the

project became.

Amy Frearson: Did the class divide in

Cape Town influence your approach

in any way?

Thomas Heatherwick: For me, this

was a thrilling project to be involved

with, because it is going to expose

work from this continent that has

never been seen. I think this is the

first project out of many that will

happen—a telling moment. So I see

this as a beginning, not an end. It

is a platform that will evolve over

many years and be something. Our

role was to make the platform, but

we’re not determining the contents

of that. It is a tough building that

can be appropriated and changed

and shifted as the years go by, as the

foundation running it grows and as

the whole ecosystem moves forward.

16 :: bokeh

cities

around

the globe

are eagerly

importing

a dutch

speciality—

flood

prevention

The Oosterscheldekering (Eastern Scheldt storm

surge barrier), between the islands Schouwen-Duiveland

and Noord-Beveland, is the largest of the 13 ambitious

Delta Works series of dams and storm surge barriers,

designed to protect the Netherlands from flooding from

the North Sea.

Norfolk, Virginia, was founded on the shores of the

Chesapeake Bay in the 17th century, but when the city

needed new ideas to deal with sinking land and rising seas

it turned to people with even more experience fighting

flooding: the Dutch.

Like the Netherlands, portions of Norfolk have arisen on

wetlands and even creeks buried beneath fill. And similar

to the Netherlands, where two-thirds of the country is

vulnerable to flooding, Norfolk is threatened by rising

tides and intensified storms.

So the city imported expertise, staging the Dutch

Dialogues, a traveling roadshow that is a cross between

a seminar on local hydrology and a design charrette. The

dialogues, initiated by Waggonner & Ball Architects, a

New Orleans firm, and the Royal Dutch Embassy, are just

one example of how a world increasingly imperiled by

water is turning for guidance to a country where there

is no retreat from rising seas.

architects and planners

from the netherlands

are advising coastal

cities worldwide on how

to live with water

Jim Morrison

A father and his daughter wade through farmland that is flooded by the Ijssel River. These high water levels

have led the Dutch to move river levees back to create more space for water. Source: Teake Zuidema.

“It’s self-evident that the Dutch have

developed an expertise in water

and water management that is unparalleled

in the world and this

was an opportunity for us to learn

from them,” says George Homewood,

Norfolk’s director of City Planning.

“The first Dutch Dialogue was done

in New Orleans right after Katrina

and became a model in the planning

world for how we think about our

watery future going forward.”

For the Dutch, consulting with

cities about their response to relative

sea–level rise has become a growth

industry. They’re the Silicon Valley

of water management, a laboratory

testing strategies that have evolved

over the centuries. No wonder. Water

has been both a daily threat and a

national identity for a country about

the size of Maryland. More than half

the nation’s 17 million people live on

land below sea level. The Netherlands

takes exporting water knowledge so

seriously that it has a Special Envoy

for International Water Affairs,

Henk Ovink, who travels the globe

on behalf of Dutch experts.

“

We’ve gone from

flood protection

to flood risk reduction

to flood resilience.

”

Lisette Heuer

“The Netherlands has a long history

of water management because

half of the country is based below

sea level,” says Lisette Heuer, global

director of flood resilience for Royal

HaskoningDHV, a firm with projects

on five continents that participated

in the New Orleans dialogues.

“From prehistoric times people have

learned to live with water and in

medieval times founded authorities

tasked with water management and

flood defense.”

The Dutch have learned there are no

easy solutions. As David Waggonner,

the founder of Waggonner & Ball says,

“They made a lot of mistakes, and they

learned from those mistakes.”

Their thinking about living with

water has evolved in recent decades.

In 1953, a storm flooded the country,

killing more than 1,800 people and

damaging 47,000 homes. The Dutch

call it the “Disaster.” That led to a

massive building boom, the Delta

Works, which created barriers, dams,

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Deepdale Marshes in Norfolk are among the

areas of wetland threatened by the rising tide. Jakarta flooding, 2013.

dikes, levees and two of the world’s

largest storm surge barriers at a cost of

$5 billion.

But over time—and after a series

of floods in 1993 and 1995—the Dutch

realized raising a fortress against the

inevitable invasion of water wasn’t

a solution. So they moved on to focusing

on water systems and ways

to store the water from flooding or

slow its discharge into rivers. The

country created a Room for the River

program to give rivers more space

to flood. Next, they began working

with nature, letting the water in and

creating lakes, garages and parks that

transform into emergency reservoirs

during flooding.

“We’ve gone from flood protection

to flood risk reduction to flood resilience,”

Heuer says. “Now we focus

on the third level, which is more like

flood resilience, what I see as a combination

of measures.”

Experts at Royal HaskoningDHV

have learned local involvement is vital,

whether it’s in Vietnam, Great Britain,

the United States or Australia, all

countries where the firm has projects.

“What fits local stakeholders and the

local needs best?” she adds. “Those

are key elements.”

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, for instance,

her firm’s plan allows the river

to expand, creating controlled flood

plains in the north while restoring

mangroves along the coast to provide

natural protection. Along the east

coast of England, sandscaping, something

pioneered in the Netherlands,

creates protection against erosion by

depositing sand so waves and winds

distribute it along the coast and create

dunes to buffer the soft cliffs.

Rising seas threaten 10 percent

of the world’s urban population so

there’s never–ending demand. Dutch

companies have worked in Houston,

Miami, New York, Charleston, Jakarta,

Bangkok, Dhaka and Shanghai.

In New Orleans, Waggonner and

his Dutch partners brought together

landscape architects, hydrologists, urban

planners, politicians, community

leaders and engineers first to talk and

then to design plans for the city. The

result is Living with Water, the Greater

The Oosterschelde Barrier, part of Delta Works DeAgostini/Getty Images

New Orleans Urban Water Plan, a 50–

year program of retrofits and urban

design strategies that emphasize

slowing and storing stormwater rather

than pumping, circulating surface

water and recharging groundwater.

The plan declares that “Water is a fact

of life on the delta. Making space for

water and making it visible across the

urban landscape allows it once again

to be an asset to the region.”

Waggonner says understanding

the local hydrology and then letting

design, not public policy, drive the

process was a new way of looking at

the city’s problems. “The benefit for

us was that over the period of time

of getting the Dutch Dialogues going,

we found people with similar minds

but who had different skills, people

As part of the Room for the River program, the Dutch city of Lent turned a peninsula at a bend in the Waal River into a seasonal island. BACA Architects

who know something that you don’t,”

he adds.

In the years since, New Orleans has

initiated more than $120 million in

green infrastructure projects, including

rain gardens and a requirement

passed by City Council in September

that businesses use permeable paving

in new parking lots. Mirabeau Water

Garden, a $30 million demonstration

project on a 25-acre site that will

provide both recreation and water

retention, is scheduled to begin construction

in the spring of 2020. But

challenges abound. An investigation

into 2017 flooding cited aging infrastructure

as a problem and urged a

more aggressive embrace of the Urban

Water Plan. Meanwhile, a retooled

levee system that cost $14.6 billion

is already sinking and doesn’t guard

against heavy rains.

The most recent Dutch Dialogues

was completed in Charleston, South

Carolina, this summer. Mayor John

Tecklenburg said at the conclusion of

the talks that the city hasn’t acknowledged

the power of water during its

350 years, filling in creeks and building

over marshes. Now, he says, the city

should consider where water wants

to go as it makes future planning,

land use, development and redevelopment

choices.

In Charleston, consultants, which

included the Dutch and Waggonner

& Ball, created a 250–page report.

Broadly, the plan advocates a combination

of man-made and natural

solutions. “Some hard infrastructure

has been and will always be needed to

sustain settlements in the Lowcountry,

but water and wetlands determined

historic patterns of living and building,”

it notes. “Land that was once

naturally wet, will be again.”

Among its specific recommendations

are to build the Low Battery

higher, and protecting downtown,

something already planned; consider

raising a street atop a sea wall in

the medical district; and create ways

to slow stormwater moving from

higher ground to the harbor on the

city’s eastside.

The report noted that three-quarters

of local businesses reported impacts

from storms and flooding and

44 percent reported loss of income.

“This is economically unsustainable,”

it concluded.

In Norfolk, Homewood says the

city’s thinking changed radically after

holding the dialogues in 2015.

“We were going to build walls. We

were going to build tall,” he says. “We

couldn’t figure out how we were going

to pay for it, but we were going to find

somebody. Then we have this Dutch

dialogue and we realized, wait a minute,

we have an opportunity to learn

to live with water. More importantly,

we can start thinking of water not as

this existential threat, but as an asset.”

The city looked at old maps and

found that it was flooding where it

had filled creeks and wetlands. “We

had the hubris to think that we could

20 :: bokeh

The Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan is a 50-

year program of retrofits and urban design strategies

that emphasize slowing and storing stormwater

rather than pumping, circulating surface water and

recharging groundwater.

Waggonner & Ball

engineer our way into a better city

and we ended up making it worse for

future generations,” he adds.

Living with water, not just flooding

from the occasional hurricane, is

what Norfolk is facing. Sunny day

tidal flooding is increasing. So is the

intensity and frequency of storms

that dump inches of water within

minutes. Couple that with an antiquated

stormwater system and the

city needed to explore new ideas.

That’s what it’s doing with a $112

million project funded by a Housing

and Urban Development grant to create

resilience for two neighborhoods,

one with 400 houses and the other

with 300 public housing units, in a

watershed. Early visions called for a

series of seawalls with five huge pumps

to drain the area, but consulting with

“

We can start

thinking of water

not as this

existential threat,

but as an asset.

”

george homewood

the Dutch changed directions. Now,

there will be a combination of hard

infrastructure, including a tide gate,

the raising of roads and improved

stormwater capacity, combined with

nods to nature. The plans include a

resilience park connecting the neighborhoods

that features a berm, a

restored tidal creek and wetland, as

well as sports fields, a picnic grove and

a “water walk” along a tidal creek. A

creek will be expanded, providing for

water storage. Green infrastructure,

including permeable pavers, will filter

runoff and reduce street flooding.

Construction on this project is scheduled

to begin soon.

Like the plans envisioned for New

Orleans, that means residents will

engage with water more often. That’s

the point.

“One of the things we keep saying

is that in some projections we will

have 45 days of nuisance flooding a

year,” Homewood says. “That number

sounds like, wow. But, on the other

hand, that means you’ve got 320 days

without nuisance flooding. That’s the

kind of thinking that came out of the

Dutch Dialogues. Don’t focus on the

negative. Look at the positive.”

The Ohio Creek Watershed Resilience Project aims to make neighborhoods in Norfolk, Virginia, more resilient to storm surge, sea level rise and flooding. SCAPE

By Jason Richards

THE ICELANDIC AVANT MUSICIAN

WORKED WITH APPLE TO USE

IPHONE AND IPAD APPS TO

RELEASE BIOPHILIA—A RECORD

THAT MIMICS LIGHTNING,

DNA STRANDS, CRYSTALS,

AND “ZOMBIE SNAILS”

Björk’s new album, Biophilia, is an expedition into the creative

canyon between science and technology. Conceived out of a simple interest

in the relationship between the nature and sound, like a rapidly evolving

organism itself, the scale of the project multiplied from there. Academics and

multimedia designers were consulted. Instruments were invented (including

a synthesizer that plays lightning). Three years later, the result is not only

Björk’s most musically elaborate record to date, but the first in history to be

released in a constellation of iPad/iPhone apps (though the album’s music

will be released as, yes, an album tomorrow). In an email interview, the

iconic Icelandic musician discussed the many dimensions of her latest work.

fall 2022 :: 23

With its multimedia aspect, Biophilia

seems to be one of the most ambitious

projects you’ve even taken on.

Would you say that this album is your

magnum opus? What does “magnum

opus” mean? Just Googled it, hmm...

To be honest, Biophilia started as me

thinking I would downscale from

Volta, that being a hooligan, flag-andtrumpet-on-a-top-of-a-mountain

kinda thing. So in autumn 2008 we

started programming the behaviour of

a pendulum on a Lemur touchscreen,

which we later then plugged into small

organ pipes we found on eBay. The

idea for me was to be self sufficient,

have the natural elements in my lap

that I could then play by plugging

into acoustic instruments. This idea

then multiplied and funnily enough

became one of the most multilayered

albums I have done. The original idea

is still very simple. And when you see

the show or play with the apps, most

people so far have commented on how

cut-the-crap it is and simple. It just

looks complicated on paper.

What were some of the greatest

challenges involved in the creative

process? Well, on a functional level,

no one had before made these

connections, and there were a lot of

people along the way that didn’t get

it. I don’t blame them, really. So it

became very DIY and without budget,

the three or four of us kinda hacked

through hindrances for a couple of

years. But once we could show people

the apps, folks have been incredibly

positive, and the last year or so has

been really fluid.

In terms of the way the album is

structured, it seems like it could have

been influenced by Gustav Holst’s

“The Planets.” Was it? Well, I did hear

it as a child in music school but haven’t

listened to it recently...

Biophilia is known as the world’s

first app album, in collaboration with

Apple. What has been the response

to this project from Apple? When I

met Apple, I made it very clear that

I am an old punk and I have never

done commercials or been sponsored.

And I wasn’t after their money. It was

simply to make sure that, technologically,

they could receive our app box

and distribute it. No one had done

an app box before, and they were

the only ones who could distribute it.

They were incredibly welcoming and

expressed excitement in the fact that

we had picked their tool. They then

had to program new stuff.

After producing an album this way,

do you think you’ll ever go back to the

“traditional” format for your next one,

or will you continue releasing music

in app form from here on out? Well,

this album comes out as an album

as well. That hasn’t gone away. If you

don’t have an iPad or iPhone, you can

still get the music only. I try not to

plan too far ahead as I very easily get

claustrophobic. So we’ll have to see…

Do you believe that apps represent

the future of how music will be released?

Do you anticipate that other

artists will follow in your footsteps?

Not sure, we will have to see. I think

connecting natural elements and

musicology is probably pretty idiosyncratic

of me, so it is hard to imagine

anyone else going down that route.

But I guess each musician could have

a little something visual he sees in his

or her songs. And a touchscreen is a

great way of sharing that.

24 :: bokeh

Have you read any of Ray Kurzweil’s

writing on The Singularity? What

do you think are the implications of

future technology on music, and what

do you make of the idea that one day

computers will be composing songs

on their own? Well they already can

and have been for a while. But are we

listening to it? I feel there has always

been that fear of the tool. Doesn’t

matter if man discovered fire, the

knife, nuclear energy or the computer.

“

With every tool

there will always

be the moral

question,

what will we

do with it?

”

With every tool there will always be

the moral question, what will we do

with it? And how will we include our

feelings and put soul into what we do

with these tools. And each and every

one of us will solve it for ourselves and

it won’t be once for all, we will have to

ask us this question again and again

through life. And I like that.

The “Crystalline” app is an interactive

musical game. Do you play video

games, yourself, or have you ever in

your life? Not really...

The album has a real scientific basis.

Have you always been interested in

biology and technology? Had you

not been a musician, do you think

you would have become a scientist?

Possibly?! I had never thought about

that... I wanted to map out on a touchscreen

how I experience musicology

and then write with it. The most natural

way I could make music visual

for me was to compare it to elements

in nature. So shapes of songs are

like crystals, arrangements multiply

like viruses, chords are like strata

in tectonic plates, rhythm like DNA

replicates, arpeggios like lightnings

and so on... sound is pretty abstract

and sometimes hard to explain it and

talk about it, unless you compare it to

something visual that everyone knows.

You’ve said that part of your research

in preparing this album was figuring

out where nature and music meet.

Specifically, which elements of nature

inspired you the most? Because of

the educational angle I went for the

most simple touchpoint. Arpeggios

and lightnings, rhythm and DNA

replication and so on...

How did zombie snails help inspire

the writing of the song “Virus”? That

song is about symbiotic relationships

in nature and zombie snails seemed

to be interesting enough... I hadn’t

really heard about that before and

got really excited when I watched it

on youtube...

Between your work on Volta, Mount

Wittenburg Orca w. Dirty Projectors,

and now Biophilia, it seems like your

music has become more earth-conscious

in the past few years. Why is

nature a theme that is important

to you in this phase of your career?

Nature has always been important to

me. It has always been in my music.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, where I was

born, you are in the middle of nature

surrounded by mountains and ocean.

But you are still in a capital in Europe.

So I have never understood why I have

to choose between nature or urban.

Perhaps it is just a different reality,

perhaps people that live in cities abroad

only experience nature for two weeks

a year in their holiday, and then they

experience it as some trip to Disneyland

or something. That it isn’t real. I have

noticed the magazine shelves in cities

have like music papers, porn and then

like [National Geographic] describing

some lost Utopian world people will

never get to see... Sorry, don’t mean

to get defensive, but you city folks are

the odd ones, not us. Nature hasn’t

gone anywhere. It is all around us, all

the planets, galaxies and so on. We

are nothing in comparison.

fall 2022 :: 25

Can you describe what the live shows

associated with this album will be like?

We are trying to keep them quite intimate.

The stage will be in the middle

and all the bespoke instruments and a

24-girl Icelandic choir. We are playing

the apps in real time. The touch screens

are plugged into the instruments

that play obviously in real time what

we do on the touch screens. Then we

have big screens for the listeners so

they can see in real time again what

is happening in the apps. So it is set

up in a way so the listeners feel like

they are inside the apps.

You worked with Dr. Nikki Dibben, a

musicologist, during your research.

What sorts of discoveries did you

make with her? She has been incredibly

helpful keeping her academic hat

on while I could more keep impulsive

and follow my gut.

What sorts of things (images, video)

did you send Michel Gondry

as reference points to inspire his

work on your Crystalline video?

Lot of nature YouTube links, DIY

chemistry stuff, and then played him

the songs and told him the stories

around them.

For people who don’t know, what is

the Gameleste, and why was it important

to you that this be made? It is

an old Celeste of mine that has been

gutted and the notes replaced with

bronze ones. It then has midi, which

basically means that it understands

digital information. Which means

that you can play a touchscreen (an

app) and the Gameleste will play

what you did while you do it.

And can you describe the Tesla coil

synth? It looks really powerful. Are

there any dangers associated in

playing it? Tesla coils have been

around for almost a century. So the

ones going around now are very safe.

26 :: bokeh

meet the

world’s most

dangerous

instrument

The Tesla Coil

by jonah bayer

usually, the most dangerous

thing about performing with a musical

instrument is the chance that

a guitar string will stick you in the

eye or, more likely, your bandmate

will accidentally smash you in the

face with a headstock. However there

is one instrument that’s inherently

incredibly dangerous and it’s called

The Tesla Coil.

The Tesla Coil was invented by

Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century

and features enough electric current

to stop the heart of someone using

it. Although this electrical resonant

transformer was originally designed

to produce electricity, the coils can

also be used to create music via the

high-voltage sparks they create. If

you don’t believe us, you can see and

hear below as two coils perform—

maybe somewhat predictably—the

theme to Super Mario Brothers.

However, video game enthusiasts

aren’t the only ones using the Tesla

coil to create music and through MIDI

controllers. In fact, these days, savvy

(and brave) enthusiasts are able

to manipulate the signal to create

music that’s been featured in everything

from the Disney film The

Sorcerer’s Apprentice to the Björk song

“Thunderbolt” from her 2011 album

Biophilia. Unfortunately, the mere

audio of this device really doesn’t do

its grandeur (or danger) justice.

As you may have expected, unless

you live somewhere incredibly fucked

up, you’re not going to just roll into

your local guitar shop and pick up a

Tesla Coil. We tried. Your best bet is

building your own and one site we

found with instructions on how to

do that it warned, “Unlike some other

high voltage experiments, a Tesla coil’s

streamers can be very harmful. If you

are shocked by the streamers, you will

not feel pain, but your circulatory and

nervous system can sustain severe

damage. DO NOT TOUCH IT WHILE

ON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

Yikes. The good news is that, like

making meth, it isn’t terribly expensive

to construct a medium-sized version

of the coil using household products if

you’re scientifically savvy and adventurous.

Just be aware of the dangers of

the coils as well as the defining volume

of the noise they can produce. All of

that aside, we can’t think of anything

heavier than playing a metal song

via Tesla Coils; just check out this

cover of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”

by ArcAttack if you don’t believe us.

Seriously though, don’t try this at

home. Do you really want to take the

chance that you’ll end up more fried

than Ozzy Osbourne as a possible

side-effect? We didn’t think so.

fall 2022 :: 27

sisters with

transistors

PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

IN THE 1920S, RUSSIAN PHYSICIST

Leon Theremin debuted an electronic

instrument that could be played

without any physical contact. Players

stood in front of a box and waved their

hands over antennas, summoning

otherworldly sounds seemingly from

thin air. The theremin might have

been regarded as a passing novelty

if not for the late Clara Rockmore, a

virtuoso who helped to refine the instrument’s

design, and wowed concert

hall audiences with her performances.

“

My creative

journey with

electronic music

has been centered

around trying

to find a voice.

”

yvette janine jackson

Rockmore is but a single figure in a

long line of women who have changed

the shape and sound of modern music—often

invisibly, says filmmaker

Lisa Rovner. “I think when most people

think of electronic music, in most

cases they’ll picture men pushing the

buttons, the knobs, and the boundaries.”

Rovner’s new documentary, Sisters

with Transistors, corrects the record.

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the

film celebrates the achievements

of early pioneers such as Daphne

Oram, who was hired by the BBC as

a studio engineer in the 1940s. After

hours, Oram began recording and

manipulating sounds on magnetic

tape, experiments that led to the

co-founding of the BBC’s Radiophonic

Workshop in 1958. Delia Derbyshire,

another pioneer, crafted sounds for

nearly 200 BBC programs, including

the iconic theme music for the sci-fi

series Doctor Who, which debuted

in 1963.

Modular synthesizers soon followed,

and the development of the first

commercially available models was

guided by women. Wendy Carlos

advised Robert Moog on the design

of the first keyboard-based

model, and introduced it to the

general public on her 1968 album,

Switched-On Bach, which sold more

than a million copies. Suzanne Ciani

realized the creative potential of a

contemporaneous system designed

by Don Buchla, which allowed artists

to patch components together

to control characteristics of sound

such as pitch and timbre.

Juilliard-trained composer Laurie

Spiegel describes these technologies

as revolutionary. “The way composing

was previously done was you wrote

on a piece of paper, with a pencil, a

set of instructions for someone else

to make music,” she recalls. Free to

realize her own creative vision, Spiegel

programmed computer-based music

generation systems while working as

a researcher at Bell Labs in the 1970s.

She was able to fashion entirely new

sounds, as well as variations within

sound itself, and share her music directly

with audiences.

In 1977, Spiegel’s work caught the

attention of NASA. Her musical interpretation

of Johannes Kepler’s

“Harmonices Mundi” was included on

the Voyager Golden Records, launched

into space to represent all of humankind.

However, she is quick to point

out that she is too often seen as an

anomaly. Spiegel recalled being part

of an active community of women

who were affiliated with university

and non-profit based electronic music

studios in and around New York

City. Some of those studios, such as

Harvestworks, are still around today.

In a sense, all music is “electronic”

now, since digital technology is an

ubiquitous part of how tracks and

albums are made and consumed.

But composer Yvette Janine Jackson,

whose work explores historical events

and current social issues, says there

is still plenty of room for innovation

and legacy building.

“My creative journey with electronic

music has been centered around trying

to find a voice,” says Jackson, “an

African American voice, a queer voice,

a female voice, the intersection of

these voices.” She hopes tomorrow’s

creators will have expanded access to

tools, and receive greater recognition

for their work.

Having premiered at SXSW in 2020,

Sisters with Transistors has screened

at prestigious U.S. and international

festivals, including Sundance and the

AFI. It is slated for national release

on virtual cinema platforms early

this spring.

28 :: bokeh

BY ALLYSON MCCABE

Laurie Spiegel at Bell

Labs studio.

Below: Clara Rockmore

playing the theramin.

Above: Daphne Oram at the

BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Right: Delia

Derbyshire

composer

of Dr. Who

theme song.

30 :: bokeh

Bringing Back the Golden Days of Bell Labs

by iulia georgescu

established almost 100 years ago, Bell

Labs made a great contribution to

advancing both fundamental science

and technology. Was that the result

of a unique set of circumstances or is

there a reproducible recipe for success?

If there ever was a place to rival

the scientific might of national labs

or organizations like CERN, it was

Bell Labs. That is where information

theory was born, the transistor was

invented and the cosmic microwave

background was discovered.It is also

where the first algorithms (Shor’s

factorization and Grover’s database

search) that kindled widespread interest

into quantum computing were

developed. Many have wondered how

an industrial lab could have had such

a tremendous impact on both fundamental

and applied science. Its recipe

for success is now well understood,

but whether it could be recreated in

today’s world— that is a different story.

fall 2022 :: 31

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter H.

Brattain, co-discoverers of the transistor, received the

1956 Nobel Physics Award for their invention.

Basic research is the

foundation on which

all technological

advances rest.

THE RISE AND FALL

OF BELL LABS

A hundred years ago, a new technology

was coming to the fore: telephony.

In 1915, Alexander Graham Bell’s

American Telegraph & Telephone

Company (AT&T) demonstrated the

first transcontinental call, between

New York and San Francisco. The

breakthrough was possible thanks to

the vacuum tube repeaters developed

by physicist Harold D. Arnold. Arnold

was one of the hundreds of scientists

who, together with many more

engineers and staff, were to be part

of the Bell Telephone Laboratories,

Inc., funded by AT&T and Western

Electric in 1925. From Arnold’s vacuum

tubes and the establishment of

Bell Labs, AT&T went on to build the

infrastructure that would ensure the

company’s monopoly over the US

long-distance telephone market for

half a century.

AT&T had a clear vision, that of

offering universal connectivity to

its customers. To achieve this well

defined long-term goal, the company

consistently invested in R&D,

planning ahead in terms of decades

rather than years. Thanks to its government-supported

monopoly, it could

also afford to maintain the long-term

thinking for half a century. Bell Labs

was funded by what physicist, and

historian of science and technology

Michael Riordan called “essentially a

built-in ‘R&D tax’ on telephone service,”

an enviable position akin to a publicly-funded

institution like CERN. The

similarity runs deeper, because as in

the case of CERN, Bell Labs produced

both fundamental breakthroughs that

changed our understanding of the

Universe and technological advances

that have shaped the modern world.

The achievements of the Bell Labs researchers

have been recognized by nine

Nobel prizes and four Turing awards,

the best-known inventions being the

transistor, laser, charged-coupled

device and photovoltaic cell. Bell Labs

was the birthplace of information theory,

the UNIX operating system and

C programming language. Bell Labs

researchers not only made fundamental

breakthroughs in understanding

the electronic structure of materials

and discovered new phenomena such

as the fractional quantum Hall effect,

but they also created new technologies

that enabled great discoveries, for

example radio astronomy and the

discovery of the cosmic microwave

background—the relic radiation from

the early Universe. Other Nobel prizes

recognized the importance of the

development of methods that are

now essential tools in many fields of

research: electron diffraction, laser

Elizabeth Armstrong Wood, PhD, working at

Bell Labs in 1942.

32 :: bokeh

Bell Labs drafting room in 1942.

cooling, optical tweezers and super-resolved

fluorescence microscopy.

However, AT&T “maintained its

monopoly at the government’s pleasure,

and with the understanding that

its scientific work was in the public’s

interest” so it could not fully exploit

the technology Bell Labs developed.

So these very advances ultimately led

to AT&T’s demise, as other companies

made use of the technologies. At the

dawn of the Internet age and rise of

mobile phone networks, after having

faced an almost decade-long antitrust

lawsuit, AT&T lost its monopoly in 1982

and was restructured into a number

of subsidiaries. It was the end of an

era and funding of Bell Labs started

to dwindle. By 2008 only a handful

of scientists were left. In 2016, Nokia

acquired Alcatel-Lucent, then the

parent company of Bell Labs, which

was resuscitated under the new name

of Nokia Bell Labs.

THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Riordan attributed the success of Bell

Labs to the “combination of stable

Bell Telephone’s Picturephone went on display at the 1964 World’s Fair.

funding and long-term thinking.”

These are certainly key factors, also

for big science projects. But there

were other ingredients articulated in

1950 by Mervin Kelly, director of Bell

Labs. Kelly’s core belief was that “basic

research is the foundation on which

all technological advances rest.” He

called the labs “an institute of creative

technology” and had a very clear vision

of how such an institution should be

run, from the people he hired to the

layout of the rooms of the building

he helped design.

Like many big tech companies and

start-ups today, Kelly believed that to

achieve outstanding results an organization

needs a critical mass of talented

fall 2022 :: 33

people with different skills. He was

looking to hire men (remember this

is the 1950s!) “of the same high quality

as are required for distinguished pure

research in universities.” Attracting

such talent was not a problem, rather

the challenge was to create the right

environment for it to thrive. “We give

much attention to the maintenance

of an atmosphere of freedom and an

environment stimulating to scholarship

and scientific research interest. It

is most important to limit their work

to that of research.” Kelly believed

that any distractions would make

researchers lose “contact with the

forefront of their scientific interest”

and decrease their productivity in

research. Above all, Kelly saw research

as a “non-scheduled area of work,”

“

We give much

attention to the

maintenance of

an atmosphere

of freedom and

an environment

stimulating to

scholarship and

scientific research

interest.

”mervin kelly

translating to no deadlines, objectives

or progress reports.

Kelly was also very particular about

the physical environment these bright

minds would thrive in. Like Steve

Jobs decades later, Kelly had a handson

involvement in the architectural

design. For the Bell Labs Murray Hill

building in New Jersey Kelly devised

‘Bell Works’ building circa 2013

flexible modular rooms along long

corridors to accommodate offices,

labs and other workspaces. This layout

brought together theorists, experimentalists

and technicians. The policy of

keeping the office doors open fostered

an atmosphere for the free exchange

of ideas where newcomers could go

and talk with researchers like William

Shockley, one of the inventors of the

transistor, or Claude Shannon, father

of information theory. The Murray

Hill building also had labs and machinery

available to try out new things.

It hosted an amazing repository of

scientific and technical know-how.

RECREATING THE RECIPE

Today, building a fully-functional

quantum computer with thousands of

qubits seems as daunting as building a

country-wide telephone network must

have seemed a hundred years ago. It

was clear that it was technologically

possible, but not all the devices and

interconnects had yet been developed.

It was unclear what materials would

work best, how they could operate in

real-life conditions and how things

could be scaled up. AT&T understood

that a lot of R&D would be required,

involving a huge workforce of engineers

and technicians. Quantum computing

is in a similar position today. Several

technologies have been demonstrated,

some platforms boasting over a hundred

qubits, but which one will scale

up best and prove to be most robust

remains to be seen. Quantum computing

has become primarily an engineering

challenge that will require

a large, highly-skilled workforce

to tackle.

Is it time to revisit Kelly’s lessons?

Recreating his recipe for success will

be challenging. In some respects, we

are now better placed than Bell Labs

was in its days of glory. Whereas Kelly

would only hire white men, today a

company can potentially hire from

a larger and more diverse pool of

Bob Willett and Gerardo Gamez with a new

molecular beam epitaxy machine, which is used

to grow ultra-pure gallium arsenide crystals.

34 :: bokeh

talented people. However, there is a

worldwide shortage of specialists to fill

the increasing demand for a quantum

workforce. Bringing everyone under

one roof will be difficult given the

predominant trend to work remotely

and have divisions in most big tech

companies spread across continents,

even before the changes brought by

the COVID-19 pandemic.

In theory, there is a lot of money:

the combined market value of the big

tech companies is several trillion US

“

We need to try

out different

things, and use

the innovation

ecosystem to test,

learn and build

machines.

”

jacob taylor

dollars (USD). Some of these companies

already invest 10–15% of their

ever-increasing revenue (tens to over

one hundred billion USD) in R&D.

How much big tech, or venture capital,

investment goes into quantum

computing is hard to estimate, but the

public-funded quantum initiatives

worldwide alone could amount to

~24 billion USD. To put this in context,

the total cost of the recently deployed

James Webb Space Telescope was over

10 billion USD, and the next generation

CERN particle accelerator is

estimated at around 24 billion dollars.

But it’s hard to predict whether this

level of funding will continue and

for how long.

Perhaps, most importantly the freedom

and time to pursue any research

interest is a luxury very few scientists

in academia or other research organizations

can afford. Unlike Bell Labs in

the past, “most industry labs today lack

the freedom to pursue projects that

are divorced from nearer-term commercial

objectives, and the resulting

knowledge is often kept proprietary.”

All considered, Kelly’s recipe no longer

seems universal and the success of

Bell Labs appears to be the result of

a set of unique circumstances. But

perhaps one should not be so swift

in discarding Kelly’s lessons.

A NEW WORLD

In quantum computing thinking is

shifting from a government-funded

big science approach to an exploration

and exploitation of the more dynamic

start-up innovation ecosystem. “We

need to try out different things, and

use the innovation ecosystem to test,

learn and build machines. That’s the

sort of most effective path,” says Jacob

Taylor, former assistant director

for quantum information science

at the White House and one of the

people behind the creation of the US

National Quantum Initiative, who

recently joined the UK quantum software

company Riverlane. Although

a start-up innovation environment

is aimed at tackling engineering

challenges, “there is science to be

done in the start-up world,” says

Taylor. Considering the example

of the tools that enable quantum

error correction, he points out that

“as you engineer a solution, a new

set of research opportunities arise,

that in turn drive the next round

of engineering. This loop is seen

throughout the tough-tech space.”

Taylor contends that the incentives

to hire the best people and to ensure

that solutions are usable can organically

drive publication and disclosure,

making certain that the progress is

scientific, not just commercial.

In a recent Comment in Nature,

Adam Marblestone and colleagues

introduced the concept of ‘focused

research organizations’, non-profit

start-ups employing full-time scientists

and engineers to pursue clear

milestones over longer periods than

those allowed by most academic or

commercial projects. Perhaps these

new ideas can be married to Kelly’s

philosophy to create a modern research

ecosystem, different, but as

successful as that of Bell Labs.

fall 2022 :: 35

do we need

renaissance

people

any more?

by mario livio

even in an age of

ultra-specialization,

we absolutely do.

36 :: bokeh

in our age of

narrowly focused specialization the

impression is that the polymath—a

person with wide-ranging knowledge

and broad interests—has been totally

overshadowed by the highly technical,

career-driven individual. In fact, the

term “Renaissance person” itself, often

applied to Leonardo da Vinci, seems

to suggest such people no longer

exist. Having spent the past four

years investigating human curiosity,

however, I discovered that people with

a burning curiosity and a passion for

exploration, experimentation and

investigation do exist—and they are

fascinating. What drives these free

spirits? What makes someone want

to master two, three or more disciplines?

Is there a way the rest of us

can stimulate, acquire or nourish that

kind of curiosity? Here is one example

of a polymath I interviewed for my

book, Why?: What Makes Us Curious.

fall 2022 :: 37

Brian May is the famously poodlehaired

lead guitarist of the rock band

Queen, and the composer of such

megahits as “We Will Rock You,” “I

Want It All,” “Who Wants to Live

Forever” and “The Show Must Go

On.” Believe it or not, he also holds

a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial

College London; was the chancellor

of Liverpool John Moores University

from 2008 to 2013; is a science team

collaborator on NASA’s New Horizons

mission to Pluto; is an avid collector

of and an expert in Victorian stereo

photography; and is a passionate

activist promoting animal rights.

I was curious to know what path led

May to being so eclectic, so I started

by asking: “Why did you become a

musician after having completed your

bachelor’s degree in physics?”

May did not hesitate: “It was a call.

I loved physics and astronomy, and

the fact that I studied those subjects

pleased my parents. But the call of

music was so strong I couldn’t resist

it. I was also afraid that if I didn’t

respond, it would never come back.”

This answer naturally led to an

even more intriguing question: “Why

then did you decide to do your PhD

studies in astrophysics after decades

in music?” To be clear, May registered

for his doctoral degree after an interruption

of 33 years!

“That was a very fortunate thing…

even though I kept my interest in

astronomy… I didn’t think that was

possible but I mentioned it in an

interview and suddenly I got a phone

call from the head of the astrophysics

group at Imperial College. He told

me that if I was serious, he would be

my supervisor.” May laughed, “Being

famous does open doors.” After a

brief pause he added: “This was not

easy. You have to reenergize those

parts of your brain you haven’t used

for a long time.”

“Do you see any connections between

your interests in music and

in astrophysics?” I asked.

May replied promptly: “I think

that my abilities in each field were

definitely enhanced by my openness

to the other field. I don’t think that

science and art need to be separate…

I know now of many scientists [he

mentioned the head of a European

space mission as an example] who

are very interested in music.”

I couldn’t agree more, but there

was still one huge puzzle: “Why did

you agree to become chancellor of

Liverpool John Moores University?”

38 :: bokeh

May laughed. “Because I was curious.

I had no idea what would be

involved and I decided to check it

out. I was also wondering if being a

chancellor changes you. The answer,

by the way, is no! It doesn’t.”

I found it fascinating that similar

attitudes characterized other prodigiously

curious people I have interviewed.

They all seemed to possess a

certain openness to recognizing and

getting excited by unfamiliar problems

and challenges, even in entirely new

domains. May’s vigorous activism

for animals is an excellent case in

point. Physicist and author Freeman

Dyson provides another example. In

an interview to Quanta Magazine a

few days after his 90th birthday, Dyson

revealed that he had taken on a new

task: to formulate a mathematical

model for effective clinical trials with

minimal loss of life. How is that for

maintaining one’s intellectual energy?

University of Chicago psychologist

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is known for

his studies into the nature of creativity.

Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with

creative people in many disciplines,

he concluded: “If being a prodigy is

not a requirement for later creativity,

a more than usually keen curiosity

about one’s surroundings appears

to be. Practically every individual

who has made a novel contribution

to a domain remembers feeling awe

about the mysteries of life and has

rich anecdotes to tell about efforts

to solve them.”

Indeed, creative individuals often

borrow schemes and concepts

from one field and transpose them

into another. Charles Darwin, for

instance, came up with the notion

of gradualism—the idea that evolutionary

changes span hundreds

of thousands of generations—after

“

I don’t think that

science and art

need to

be separate…

”

understanding how geologic action

shapes Earth’s surface. George Lucas

borrowed from sources as diverse as

the American Western lore, Greek

mythology and even the ideologies

of totalitarian regimes to create the

epic Star Wars saga.

All of these realizations argue for

a reevaluation of a novel version of

the “Renaissance person.” Just as

abandoning the dogmatic pretension

of knowledge that characterized humanity

during the Middle Ages and

replacing it with curiosity ushered

in a new way of life, recognizing

the value of broad knowledge can

inspire and generate creativity in the

modern world.

Does this mean we should give

up on specialization? What about

those 10,000 hours or so that we are

supposed to invest in a topic in order

to become experts? Those should be

respected. Brian May was and remains

a virtuoso musician. Dyson is still

primarily known for his achievements

in fundamental physics. With humans

living longer then ever before, however,

there is sufficient time for people

to be both experts and Renaissance

characters in one lifetime.

As the celebrated physicist and

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman

once put it: “I am always looking, like

a child, for the wonders I know I’m

going to find—maybe not every time,

but every once in awhile.”

fall 2022 :: 39

What Did the

Victorians

See in the

Stereoscope?

WHAt Did the

Victorians

See in the

Stereoscope?

by denis pellerin

a world of

wonder

a world of

wonder

Is it possible, for us who live in the 21st century, to imagine

or—probably even more difficult—understand what the Victorians saw in

the Stereoscope? In 1980, literary theorist, philosopher, and semiotician

Roland Barthes, confronted to a similar issue, exclaimed, “I want a History

of Looking.” Ten years later, art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary was

certain that “we will never really know what the stereoscope looked like to

a nineteenth-century viewer.” Even when we were not specifically looking

for them, we have been bombarded with pictures from an early age

and we have seen, looked at, glanced at, stared at, scrutinised, millions

of photographs, in albums, on print, on television, and, more recently,

on the displays of our smartphones or computers. Can we erase all those

photographs from our memory, forget about our image-based culture and

get back to the state of mind of a middle-class Victorian seeing their first

photograph or viewing their first binocular picture in a stereoscope?

We can at least try.

fall 2022 :: 41

a philosophical toy

Although invented as early

as 1832 but only known at

the time to the small circle

of friends of its creator,

brilliant polymath Charles

Wheatstone (1802–1875), the

stereoscope was presented

publicly on 21 June 1838

before the Royal Society

of London. On that day

Wheatstone read a paper entitled Contribution to the

Physiology of Vision—Part the First. On some remarkable

and hitherto unobserved phenomena of binocular

vision. He also brought with him a rather crudely

built device which he called a “stereoscope,” a term he

had coined himself from two Greek words meaning

“solids I see.”

“…had either

shading or colouring

been introduced it

might be supposed

that the effect

was wholly or in

part due to these

circumstances…

”

Wheatstone’s stereoscope consisted

of two mirrors joined by one of their

edges and forming an angle of 90º.

On either side of the mirrors and

at an angle of 45º were two wooden

boards on which images could be

inserted or pinned. Those side boards

could be moved away from or closer

to the mirrors by means of a wooden

endless screw, and that was it. Since

photography had not yet been revealed

to the world, Wheatstone could only

illustrate his theory of vision with simple figures he had

to draw himself or ask someone to draw for him. The

purpose of Wheatstone’s stereoscope was to demonstrate

that our perception of depth can be simulated by two flat

perspectives of the same object as perceived by each of

our eyes and presented in such a way that only the left

eye can see the left image and the right eye the other one.

Even if photography had been known then, Wheatstone

would probably have used the same outline drawings.

His intention was to eliminate any other depth cues

for “had either shading or colouring been introduced it

might be supposed that the effect was wholly or in part

due to these circumstances, whereas by leaving them out

of consideration no room is left to doubt that the entire

effect of relief is owing to the simultaneous perception

of the two monocular projections, one on each retina.”

Wheatstone illustrated his paper with twelve of these

outline figures, a couple of which have survived to this

day. The scientific world welcomed his discovery “as one

of the most curious and beautiful for its simplicity, in the

entire range of experimental optics” and the stereoscope

entered the physics laboratory. It would most certainly

have remained there had not photography been invented.

Photography on metal and on paper appeared in 1839 but

despite Wheatstone’s early efforts at having photographs

made for his instrument by William Henry Fox Talbot,

Henry Collen (paper), Hippolyte Fizeau and Antoine Claudet

(metal), it wasn’t before the Great Exhibition of 1851 and

the modifications brought to the original instrument by

Sir David Brewster (1849) and optician Louis Jules Duboscq

(1859) who replaced the mirrors with half lenses and made

it more compact and portable, that the stereoscope became

known to the general public. When the London Exhibition

closed its doors in November 1851 only the well-off could

buy their daguerreotype portraits

for the stereoscope or stereoscopic

views on plate of the interior of the

Crystal Palace. Everyone else had to

be content with series of lithographs

featuring white outline geometrical

subjects on a black background which

were published by Jules Duboscq in

France and by Frederick Hale Holmes

in Britain, some of them inspired by

Wheatstone’s original figures.

The stereoscope was no more then

than another philosophical toy, like the

kaleidoscope or the phenakistiscope, used to illustrate the

principles of binocular vision. Although these diagrams

may seem fairly lame to us, they were of great interest

to the Victorians whose ever-curious mind was always

trying to understand the world around them. They are

also the first stereoscopic pictures they could afford and

own, which made them important and precious.

Wheatstone’s 1838 reflecting stereoscope. Photo by the author.

42 :: bokeh

Geometrical outline published by Louis Jules Duboscq in France.

Author’s collection.

Geometrical outline published by Frederick Hale Holmes in Britain.


fall 2022 :: 43

capturing depth and time

Fortunately for everyone, photography made fast progress

and soon stereoscopic images could be bought not only

on plate, but also on glass and on paper. When we look

at those early stereos and compare them with what was

written about them in the press at the time, we cannot

but be surprised by the discrepancy between the praises

one can read and the photographs we are viewing in

the stereoscope. We mustn’t forget; however, that for

the Victorians any stereo was a good stereo as long as it

showed some depth, whether in a portrait, a group, or a

landscape. They had very few images to compare with and

were satisfied with compositions which, to our modern

eyes, do not seem very impressive.

At the time, each half of the stereoscopic pair had to

taken sequentially which added to the third dimension of

the resulting image a fourth one, the passing of time. It

is possible to see in a large number of those early stereoscopic

photographs that things have happened between

the two exposures: people or horse–drawn vehicles have

moved or vanished; expressions on people’s faces have

changed; the hands of clocks indicate a different time;

shadows have moved to the left or to the right, seeming

to poke into or out of their source; movement has become

blurred and crowds look like ghosts. The latter were

described in 1861 by American philosopher and essayist

Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the few people to have

written extensively about the experience of looking at

stereoscopic images:

Where are all the people that ought to be seen here?

Hardly more than three or four figures are to be made

out; the rest were moving, and left no images in this slow,

old-fashioned picture […] Ghost of a boy with bundle,

—seen with right eye only. Other ghosts of passers or

loiterers,— one of a pretty woman, as we fancy at least,

by the way she turns her face to us.

One of my favourite of these sequential images is a view

of the Cluny museum in Paris which shows a carriage

drawn by a black horse on one half and, nearly at the same

spot, a carriage drawn by a white horse on the other half.

Another very curious example, among dozens of others,

is a still life taken in a garden in which something seems

wrong. It is only when you blow up the image that you

realise that in one of the pictures a fly has landed on the

handle of the watering can but is nowhere to be seen in

the other one. That tiny insect causes a visual disruption

which is in itself fascinating because although the eyes

do not really see it the brain perceives something is not

as it should be.

Roland Barthes was probably not thinking of stereo

images when he claimed that, at the beginning of photography,

“cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing,”

but the first cameras used to take stereos were just that.

…they were of great interest to the

Victorians whose ever–curious mind

was always trying to understand the

world around them.

A lot of people do not appreciate the changes that occur

between the two images in sequential stereos and it is true

that sometimes they can be a bit too much, like a scene in

Berne, Switzerland, by French photographer Alexandre

Bertrand. On the whole; however, I find them very interesting

to study on account of this fourth dimension

they give to the image and the information they provide

about the time that elapsed between the two exposures.

a substitute for the real thing

Travelling for pleasure in the Victorian era was only

available to a small wealthy portion of the population

and was not without risks. It soon became evident that,

thanks to the stereoscope, a large number of people who

could not afford the expense of going on a Grand Tour,

could at least buy stereo cards of the places they wished

to visit. By the end of 1859 most of the known world had

been photographed for the stereoscope—even such mysterious

lands as China and Japan—and commentators

insisted on the pleasure that could be found travelling

to far away places without leaving one’s fireside, even or

especially when one was feeling poorly. Photographer

Henri de la Blanchère wrote:

Thanks to the portability of these small prints the

public like to travel quickly and safely to the familiar

or totally unknown countries where the photographer

takes them; they find it all the more enjoyable as the

fatigue and the dangers are for others but the interest is

44 :: bokeh

Alexandre Bertrand. No. 62. La Fontaine de l’Orgre à Berne (Suisse). This is what Oliver Wendell Holmes

wrote about this image in 1859:

Here is the Fountain of the Ogre, at Berne. In the right picture two women are chatting, with arms

akimho, over its basin; before the plate for the left picture is got ready, “one shall be taken and the

other left”; look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur where the other

is melting into thin air as she fades forever from your eyes.

And he did not even mention the tub which is either upside down or the right way up.

Rebecca Sharpe’s collection.

Anonymous. Boulevard du Temple at Paris.


A lot has happened between the two exposures. On the left half, the two ladies next to the press

kiosk have moved. On the right half, a man has sat on a bench for a little while and left; a man

has answered a call of nature and relieved himself in one of the Rambuteau columns that were

strewn along the boulevards for that purpose; someone has had time to sweep part of the road

or sprinkle it with water; a horse and cart have stopped for a short while next to a pile of dirt and

have moved away.

fall 2022 :: 45

Léautté frères. Shadows poking out of the Palais Royal in Paris.


theirs. The world will soon be fully explored, and it can

be explored repeatedly without one’s curiosity getting

weary or satiated; nature is huge and, thankfully, the

thirst for knowledge has no limits.

Columnist La Gavinie, from the photographic journal

La Lumière, was one of the many armchair tourists who

took advantage of the stereoscope to go on dangerless

journeys. After all he was on the payroll of the Gaudin

firm to advertise their stereoscopic viewers and cards:

I have just taken a long trip through a stereoscope—I

have successively visited the remotest corners of Greece

and Egypt. The sick, and there are many of them this

winter, must have, like myself, been plentifully entertained

by the magical instrument. It played a great

part in their recovery, and the cleverest doctors now

prescribe it along with their medicine.

As more and more stereo photographs became available

it became apparent that not only those binocular images

could bring back fond memories of past journeys, but

also that the illusion they provided was strong enough to

make the observers think they had actually seen the site

or monument they were looking at, even if they had never

laid eyes on it. The illusion was turning into a “memory”,

as Hermann von Helmholtz himself explained in his book

Physiological Optics:

[…] these stereoscopic photographs are so true to nature

and so lifelike in their portrayal of material things, that

after viewing such a picture and recognizing in it some

object like a house, for instance, we get the impression,

when we actually do see the object, that we have already

seen it before and are more or less familiar with it. In

…a large number of people who

could not afford the expense of

going on a Grand Tour, could at

least buy stereo cards…

46 :: bokeh

Adolphe Frédéric Grau, No. 6. Salon de la Paix (Palais des Tuileries).


cases of this kind, the actual view of the thing itself does

not add anything new or more accurate to the previous

apperception we got from the picture, so far at least as

mere form relations are concerned.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was even more radical in his

views when he wrote that matter was now no more than

a mould and that stereo images could literally replace

anything worth seeing:

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a

visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould

on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing

worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that

is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please.

It unfortunately pleased the rebels of the Commune to set

fire to the Tuileries Palace, which was completely destroyed

in May 1871 and was deemed too strong a symbol of past

monarchies to contemplate re-building. The palace, however,

was extensively photographed for the stereoscope during the

reign of Napoleon III so that it is still possible to get a fairly

precise idea of its exterior and interior. There are actually so

many images that we can virtually go through all the reception

rooms—and even look around them sometimes—from the

Pavillon de Flore, next to the Seine, to the Pavillon de Marsan,

along the rue de Rivoli.

Charles de Beaumont, Le

Charivari, 24 February 1864.

Caption:

—How pretty … All those

views …; one could almost

imagine one was there !…

—I totally agree with

you… which is why, this

summer, instead of

visiting Switzerland, as

you expressed the desire

to, I will buy you views

of that country and you

will have a great time

looking at them through

your lorgnette !…


fall 2022 :: 47

Eugène Lamy, No. 17. Perspective, vue du Salon Louis XIV (Palais des Tuileries).


Francis Frith. No. 427. The Pool of David, Hebron.

London Stereoscopic Archive.

48 :: bokeh

Gradually in the mind of amateurs of stereoscopic images

the photograph came to be a proper substitution for the subject

represented. This is clearly shown in the lithograph by French

artist Charles Édouard de Beaumont (1821–1888) published

in the satirical magazine Le Charivari on 24 February 1864.

Another French cartoonist, Henri Alfred Darjou (1832–1874)

chose to represent an artist on holiday, tired after the day’s

hike and wishing he had stayed home and taken his ongoing

trip virtually.

fuel for the imagination

The Victorians loved stories and especially imagining new

ones from a few given clues. It is no wonder the most

popular paintings of the time were of the narrative kind,

a genre which gradually came to be considered as too

sentimental and has been looked down upon for far too

long. Apart from a few famous canvases, like Henry Wallis’s

The Death of Chatterton, William Powell Frith’s Derby

…details that could easily go

unnoticed often become more

important than the main subject…

Day, and a few others, these works are rarely studied or

displayed any more. Hundreds of narrative paintings, a

lot of which unsurprisingly inspired staged scenes for the

stereoscope which were hugely popular in their time, have

been gathering dust in the storage rooms of museums

and galleries, their current location a mystery. In the

August 1864 issue of London Magazine of Entertainment

and Instruction for General Reading, Leslie Walter tells

a very strange tale which only becomes clear in the last

few lines of his text when we discover that the hero of the

story has been dreaming after falling asleep over some

stereo pictures brought to him by his nephews.

Here, take away the stereoscope, my dears, and the pictures

that I fell asleep over, after they had put so much

folly into my old head. Put away the Spanish Girl, and

Dressing for the Ball, and that foolish, Moonlit Balcony,

and the Sea-scene, and the Ball Room, and Mr. Fechter

as Hamlet, and the Refusal, and the Young Lady with

the Fan, and the other on an ottoman. Put the Bride

at the bottom of the box, and the Bridegroom out of my

sight; and that fine view of Madrid also, and the picture

of a parlour; and heaven forbid my seeing again the

Nice Young Man, or the Pair of Lovers! I believe that

was what did the mischief, after all.

There, put them all away, children, and never tell your

aunt what nonsense your uncle talked in his sleep, after

seeing your stereoscope.

the end

Stereo images did not have to be staged, however, to take

hold of the buyers’ imagination, and start the narrative

process. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his iconic text The

Stereoscope and the Stereograph, describes how details

that could easily go unnoticed often become more important

than the main subject of the picture examined

in the stereoscope, making the mind wander:

We have often found these incidental glimpses of life

and death running away with us from the main object

the picture was meant to delineate. The more evidently

accidental their introduction, the more trivial they are in

themselves, the more they take hold of the imagination.

Alfred Darjou, “Les Artistes en Voyage” in Le Charivari, 10 septembre 1860.

Caption:

—I wish I had bought a Stereoscope and a selection of 30 views instead ! …


fall 2022 :: 49

Claude Marie Ferrier. No. 1080. Lake of Brienz.

London Stereoscopic Archive.

Charles Paul Furne and Henri Tournier, Souvenir de Cherbourg. “No. 53. PORT MILITAIRE. Un Vapeur en

rade, pris des Cavaliers.”

50 :: bokeh

Looking at a stereo glass slide by Francis Frith showing

the Pool of David, at Hebron, then at a view of the Lake

of Brienz by Claude Marie Ferrier, also on glass, the same

Holmes cannot get his eyes off “a muffled shape” in one

and “vaguely hinted female figure” in the other:

There is before us a view of the Pool of David at Hebron,

in which a shadowy figure appears at the water’s edge,

in the right-hand farther corner of the right-hand picture

only. This muffled shape stealing silently into the

solemn scene has already written a hundred biographies

in our imagination.

In the lovely glass stereograph of the Lake of Brienz, on

the left-hand side, a vaguely hinted female figure stands

by the margin of the fair water; on the other side of the

picture she is not seen. This is life; we seem to see her

come and go. All the longings, passions, experiences,

possibilities of womanhood animate that gliding shadow

which has flitted through our consciousness, nameless,

dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly real than the

sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand.

On the other side of the Pond, poet Charles Baudelaire

was describing something very similar while looking

out over the roofs of Paris at a lit window. Isn’t looking

into a Brewster-type stereoscope a very similar

experience? Our eyes gaze through the darkness of a

closed wooden box at an image which, illuminated as

it is by the light that comes through the trap door at

the top of the instrument, appears as seen through a

closed window (the window is definitely closed since

we cannot touch the subject we are looking at however

real and palpable it may seem).

Looking from outside into an open window one never

sees as much as when one looks through a closed window.

There is nothing more profound, more mysterious,

more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than

a window lighted by a single candle. What one can

see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than

what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or

luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman,

her face already lined, who is forever bending over

something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her

dress, and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all,

I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend,

and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.

If it had been an old man I could have made up his just

as well. And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have

suffered in someone besides myself.

Perhaps you will say “Are you sure that your story is

the real one?” But what does it matter what reality is

outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to

feel that I am, and what I am?

By our modern standards, the two pictures described by

Holmes are far from outstanding, and for most of us they

would probably pass unnoticed or not be worth a second

look. Would you, reader, write “a hundred biographies”

from the silhouette on the right in Frith’s picture or think

of “all the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities

of womanhood” from the blurred shape on the left of

Ferrier’s image? I know I would probably not—at least

not from these two images. Have we lost that power of

Maybe we should always follow

in Lacan’s footsteps and look at

every stereo with our soul, heart,

and imagination...

writing a story in our mind from a mere shadow? Have

we been fed too many “processed” narratives in the shape

of TV series or films that few of us can do what Holmes,

Baudelaire and their contemporaries did so easily apparently?

I wonder.

In case you might think that only a human presence

could trigger the Victorians’ imagination here is another

example not directly involving any men, women, or

children. This paragraph was written by Ernest Lacan,

the editor of the photographic journal La Lumière, after

examining a series of stereoviews taken in 1858 at

Cherbourg by Charles Paul Furne and his cousin Henri

Tournier and published under the generic title Souvenir

de Cherbourg:

fall 2022 :: 51

William Herman Rau, Reflected Beauty. “In her Boudoir”. 1903.


There is amongst Mr. Furne’s prints a true masterpiece:

it is simply the view of a steamer in the Cherbourg

harbour. Is it arriving? It is leaving? Is it on its way

to Kamtchatka, or getting back from Honfleur? It

doesn’t matter; it is sailing and floating so lightly on

the transparent sea, its masts are so coquettishly tilted,

the smoke from its funnel is so gracefully billowing, that

our imagination feels drawn to it, and without further

ado, we get on board and let ourselves be carried away

towards the unknown, into the enchanted land of dreams.

Shortly after this piece was issued in La Lumière, one of

Lacan’s colleagues, a journalist from another photographic

journal, Le Photographe, could not help exclaiming:

Speak of an amateur like Mr. Ernest Lacan to look with

the eyes of a poet into that so unpoetical box which is

called a stereoscope. Once the oculars of the instrument

are close to his face, the witty editor of La Lumière does

not only look into them with his eyes but also with his

soul, his imagination and a little of his heart.

Maybe we should always follow in Lacan’s footsteps and

look at every stereo with our soul, heart, and imagination

if we really are to understand what the Victorians saw in

them. One thing is certain: we mustn’t judge Victorian

stereo images by our modern standards but try and

understand what their appeal was at the time they were

taken, reviewed and sold, especially when they surprise

us. It is very often I find myself wondering while looking

at a stereo card in the stereoscope: “Why on earth

was this image taken? Who would buy such an image?”.

This is another thing which bears keeping in mind at all

times: most stereoscopic photographs were meant to be

sold. They were the first mass-produced photographic

images, several years before the cartes-de-visite and

decades before the first postcards. Someone took those

photographs with a commercial purpose in mind and to

entice more than one person to buy them. There must;

therefore, have been some appeal in every single card on

the market. Sometimes we have lost the original references—the

key so to speak—or we must accept that our

tastes are different from our forefathers’. I know for a

fact that I often find that Victorian humour leaves me

52 :: bokeh

Charles Paul Furne and Henri Tournier. Untitled period scene, using an early version of the “split screen”

technique, in which a man is looking at a woman’s ankles through a keyhole. Author’s collection.

indifferent or that comic songs of the 1830s–40s, even

the most popular ones, fail to amuse me.

voyeurism or “concentration

of the whole attention”?

Some modern commentators have insisted on the voyeuristic

nature of the stereoscope and the picture copyrighted

by American photographers William Herman Rau in 1903,

clearly showing that photographic artists were aware of the

fact and used it to their advantage. There was a booming

underground industry which specialised in the making

of nudes for the stereoscope in the Paris of Napoleon III

and exported its productions all over the world. Despite

the re-establishment of censorship, the fines, and the

prison sentences they received, a lot of photographers

and female models found this very specific branch of

stereoscopy very lucrative and most of them bore the

consequences with equanimity. The main drawback of

this state of things was that it gave the stereoscope a

bad name which, to this day, has not been totally cleared.

Even when stereo photographers were not featuring

women in various states of undress, they still managed

to emphasise the voyeuristic nature of the stereoscopic

observation in scenes such as the ones below. In two

images we are looking at a man gazing at the ankles of a

young woman (a highly erotic part of the female anatomy

in the Victorian era), who is totally unaware of his presence.

…people felt the need for

something to make them

stop and introspect…

This could be called double voyeurism in a way since the

stereoscopic observer can see both the looker and the

person looked at and even has a better view of said ankles.

These images are not; however, representative of the

stereoscopic production. What could be termed a “voyeuristic

gaze” for some, was for the majority of observers,

more a “concentration of the whole attention” which

fall 2022 :: 53

produced “a dream-like exaltation of the faculties; a kind

of clairvoyance in which we seem to leave the body behind

us and sail away into one strange scene after another like

disembodied spirits.”

It would be difficult otherwise to explain the existence

of dozens of pictures featuring open bibles. These images

are mostly to be found in Britain and in the States,

two countries where bibles would at the time have been

found in the great majority of homes and were for many

the only book they would read. Why then would anyone

take the trouble of photographing an open book with

some selected accessories (the most common ones being

a bookmark, candles, an hourglass, a pair of glasses, a

magnifying glass, a glass of water, an ink well with a quill

dipped in it, some flowers)? Who would buy them? My

guess is that, in a world which was expanding and with

a pace of life which was quickening,

people felt the need for something

to make them stop and introspect,

something very similar in a way to

today’s meditation apps. These images

suited that purpose perfectly.

Once inserted in a stereoscope they

became a sort of private and portable

little chapel in which one was alone

with one’s thoughts and one could concentrate on one’s

life and meditate on the words that could easily be read

on the displayed pages. In most pictures the bible is

open at different places (the Book of Isaiah, the Book of

Proverbs, or the Prophecy of Haggai) but the majority;

however, feature some part of the Book of Psalms. This

is definitely no voyeurism and totally a concentration of

the observer’s whole attention.

a personal note

I have met people who, because they have seen a couple of

hundred stereoscopic images, think they know everything

about stereoscopy and become self-appointed “experts” on

the subject. I have been studying, researching and writing

about these images for over forty years; I have literally seen

millions of them in public and private collection; I think I

know a thing or two about them and the people who took,

published, or distributed them, but there is even more that I

do not know and I certainly do not see myself as an

“

…a kind of

clairvoyance in

which we

seem to leave

the body behind…

”

expert—only as a perpetual and humble student on a never-ending

quest (the best kind). There is not a week that goes

by without my finding images I have never seen before or

coming across snippets of information that make me question

what I thought I previously knew. The most important

thing; however, is that after all those years the magic is still

intact and I feel the same elation when I insert a new image

in the stereoscope and spend some time exploring its various

layers. I bought a cartoon recently because it is always

nice to find new images showing people looking through a

stereoscope. However, I don’t agree with the caption which

reads: “The thrill that comes once in a lifetime!” For me the

thrill—thrills, actually—come every single time I insert a

card in a stereoscope. First there is a thrill of anticipation

and then; hopefully, comes the thrill of being drawn into

the picture and of discovering another world. Occasionally

there is a third thrill—the one that

comes when you unexpectedly find an

inscription—a detail that could not be

seen in the flat card (like Fenton’s photographic

carriage in a view published in

the Stereoscopic Magazine), the face of

a familiar model in a staged scene, etc...

All stereos are interesting—to

a point, of course. And all stereograms,

great or shabby, should be given the chance to

be free-viewed or examined in an appropriate viewer. And

not just once—for I agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes when

he writes that “it is a mistake to suppose one knows a stereoscopic

picture when he has studied it a hundred times by the

aid of the best of our common instruments.” Images that look

grubby and faded have a way of “fixing” themselves when seen

in a stereoscope. Our wonderful and malleable brain picks up

pieces of data in each half and fuses them into something that

is much more than the sum of their parts. Simply because we

are not looking at the surface of the picture but at something

beyond it, the grubbiness usually disappears—not completely,

but enough to make the image more appealing and to enable us

to discover details which had been invisible before. After all, the

grubbiness is part of the card’s history. It speaks of all the hands

it has gone through, of the parlour table it has been lying on, of

the soot that fell on it. Unlike framed photos and images stuck

in albums and rarely looked at again, most stereo cards have

had a busy social life and have been shared over and over again.

I have read a lot about the Victorian era and I guess it

helps me understand, most of the time, what I am looking

54 :: bokeh

Michael Burr. Untitled view of a Victorian man discovering an unexpected and pretty sight while taking

his “constitutional”.


Anonymous. Stereo card showing an open Bible.


fall 2022 :: 55

Bassist John Deacon (left) and drummer Roger Taylor (right) of the band Queen.

Photo taken by Brian May.

Brian May collection.

at and appreciate the value of each image. Not the monetary

value, of course—although there are some very greedy

sellers around who would have you believe that any stereo

card which is more than fifty years of age is worth more

than its weight in gold—but the historical, sociological, or

photographical value of the image, the information it brings,

the details it reveals, its composition along the depth axis,

or the simple stories it often tells about the subject photographed

and, occasionally, about the photographer. There

are still plenty of occasions when what I am looking at baffles

me and I wish I could get more clues from the view itself or

from the faces of the people I discover there. If stereos could

speak! How much more would be understood about these

fascinating images. Since they cannot, we must keep looking

for more clues, more information, more facts; publish more

articles, more books; because from time to time, something

comes up that adds a piece to this gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

Can I experience stereo cards the way the Victorians did? I

don’t think so, but I strive to find some tips in the writings

of the time that can help me better understand their state of

mind, what made them tick, what captured their attention

and grabbed their imagination. I keep trying and will keep

on doing so. And in the meantime, I can only second Oliver

Wendell Holmes’ passionate declaration:

Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this

small library of glass and pasteboard!…

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the WWI

camouflage strategy

if you can’t hide

from the enemy,

confuse them.

One of Germany’s most feared and

effective weapons during World War

I was its fleet of submarines—known

as U-boats—that roamed the Atlantic,

sneaking up underwater on British

merchant ships and destroying them

with torpedoes. During the course of

the war, they sank more than 5,700 vessels,

killing more than 12,700 non-combatants

in the process.

The British weren’t sure what to do.

Camouflage worked in land warfare,

but it was another matter for an object

as big as a cargo ship to blend into

the ocean, especially when smoke

was billowing from its stacks.

However, a Royal Navy volunteer

reserve lieutenant named Norman

Wilkinson—a painter, and graphic

designer, and newspaper illustrator

in his civilian life—came up with a

radical but ingenious solution: instead

of trying to hide ships, make them

more conspicuous.

was so ridiculous it was genius by patrick j. kiger

Left: British gunboat HMS Kildangan, 1918 | Middle: 1 st Aero Squadron | Right: USS Nebraska ,1918

By covering ships’ hulls with startling

stripes, swirls and irregular abstract

shapes that brought to mind Cubist

paintings of Pablo Picasso or Georges

Braque, one could momentarily confuse

a German U-boat officer peering

through a periscope. The patterns

would make it more difficult to figure

out the ship’s size, speed, distance

and direction.

Wilkinson’s idea was a startling

contrast to those of other camouflage

theorists. The American artist Abbott

Thayer, for example, advocated painting

ships white and concealing their

smokestacks with canvas in an effort

to make them blend into the ocean,

according to Smithsonian.

Dazzle camouflage, as Wilkinson’s

concept came to be called, “appeared

to be counter-intuitive,” explains

Roy R. Behrens, a professor of art

and Distinguished Scholar at the

University of Northern Iowa, who

writes “Camoupedia,” a blog that’s

a compendium of research on the

art of camouflage. “For Wilkinson

60 :: bokeh

to come up with the ideas of redefining

camouflage as high visibility

as opposed to low visibility was

pretty astonishing.”

As Peter Forbes writes in his 2009

book Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry

and Camouflage, Wilkinson—who

commanded an 80-foot motorboat

used for minesweeping off the British

coast—apparently was inspired during

a weekend fishing trip in the Spring

Photo of Lte. Norman

Wilkinson

of 1917. When he returned to the Royal

Navy’s Devonport dockyard, he went

straight to his superior officer with

his idea.

“I knew it was utterly impossible to

render a ship invisible,” Wilkinson

later recalled, according to Forbes’

book. But it had occurred to him that

if a black ship was broken up with

white stripes it would visually confuse

the enemy.

“The idea had precedent in nature,

with the pattern disruption in the

coloration of animals,” Behrens says.

As a study by British and Australian

researchers nearly a century later

would reveal, zebras’ stripes seem to

serve that purpose, turning a herd into

what appears to be a chaotic mess of

lines from a distance, and making it

tougher for lions and other predators

to intercept them.

As Behrens explains, when submerged,

the Germans’ only way of

sighting a target was through the

periscope, which they could only

poke through the water for a fleeting

moment because of the risk of being

detected. They had to use that tiny

bit of visual data to calculate where

in the water to aim the torpedo, so

that it would arrive at that spot at the

same moment as the ship they were

trying to sink.

Wilkinson’s camouflage scheme

was designed to interfere with those

calculations, by making it difficult to

tell which end of the ship was which,

and where it was headed. With torpedoes,

there wasn’t much margin

for error, so if the dazzle camouflage

threw off the calculations by only a

few degrees, that might be enough to

cause a miss and save a British ship.

“It was exploiting the limited view

of the periscope,” Behrens explains.

An art-lover today might assume

that dazzle camouflage was the brainchild

of a cubist painter, not someone

such as Wilkinson, a representational

artist who liked to paint ships and

seascapes. Claudia Covert, a special

collections librarian at the Rhode

“

None of the

camouflaged fighting

ships were sunk.

”

PETER FORBES

Island School of Design and author

of a 2007 article on Dazzle camouflage

in Art Documentation: Journal

of the Art Libraries Society of North

America, says that Wilkinson “was

probably aware of these contemporary

Left: U.S. warship, circa 1914-1918 | Right: USS Leviathan, April 1918

fall 2022 :: 61

movements—Cubism, Futurism, and

Vorticism. In fact, one of the Vorticist

painters, Edward Wadsworth, oversaw

ships being dazzled in Liverpool

during the war.”

Additionally, “you have to remember

that Wilkinson was not only a

seascape painter but also a poster

designer,” Behrens says. “So he had

to work with abstract forms, colors

and shapes.”

Though the British Admiralty probably

didn’t include too many modern

art enthusiasts, the losses from

U-boat attacks were so devastating

that they soon authorized Wilkinson

to set up a camouflage unit at the

Royal Academy in London. He recruited

other artists, who were given

Naval Reserve commissions, and

they got to work.

Wilkinson made models of ships

on a revolving table and then viewed

them through a periscope, using

screens, lights and backgrounds to

see how the dazzle paint schemes

would look at various times of day

and night. He used one of those

models to impress a visitor, King

George V, who stared through the

periscope and guessed that the model

ship was moving south-by-west,

only to be surprised to discover that

it was moving east-by-southeast.

By October 1917, British officials

were sufficiently convinced of dazzle’s

effectiveness that they ordered that all

merchant ships should get the special

paint jobs, according to a 1999 article

by Behrens.

At the request of the U.S. government,

Wilkinson sailed across the

Atlantic in March 1918 and met with

Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D.

Roosevelt, and then helped to set up a

camouflage unit headed by American

impressionist painter Everett Warner.

By the end of the war, more than

2,300 British ships had been decorated

with dazzle camouflage. How successful

dazzle actually was in thwarting

U-boat attacks isn’t clear. As Forbes

explains, a postwar commission concluded

that it probably only provided

a slight advantage.

“When the US Navy adopted

Wilkinson’s scheme for both merchant

and fighting ships there is statistical

evidence to support Wilkinson’s technique,”

Forbes says. A total of 1,256

merchant and fighting ships, were

camouflaged between March 1 and

November 11, 1918. Ninety six ships

over 2,500 tons were sunk; of these

only 18 were camouflaged and all of

them were merchant ships. “None of

the camouflaged fighting ships were

sunk,” he says

“It’s important to remember that

ships didn’t just rely upon dazzle camouflage

for protection from U-boats,”

Behrens explains. “It was used in combination

with tactics such as zig-zagging

and traveling in convoys, in which

the most vulnerable ships were kept in

the center of the formation, surrounded

by faster, more dangerous ships

capable of destroying submarines.”

The synergy of those measures was

“wonderfully effective,” he says.

Dazzle camouflage was resurrected

by the U.S. during World War II, and

was used on the decks of ships as well,

in an effort to confuse enemy aircraft.

Today’s electronic surveillance technology

makes dazzle pretty much

obsolete for protecting ships, but as

Forbes points out, the concept of visually

disruptive patterns is still used

in military uniforms.

62 :: bokeh

fall 2022 :: 63

lbert Einstein’s

vision for how

gravity works

was, to say the

least, a radical

departure from the older, Newtonian

perspective. Under Einstein’s framework,

the space–time coordinate system

that we use to mark out the events of our

universe isn’t just a static backdrop, but

a fully dynamic, live creature in its own

right. Space-time can bend, flex and

warp under the influence of mass and

energy, and it’s this rugged geometry

that gives us the force of gravity.

And nothing knows the difficulty

of that terrain better than light itself.

Forced to follow every hill, valley, bump

and wrinkle in the universe, light’s

path is constantly jostled back and

forth as it tries, in vain, to follow a

straight and narrow path. The presence

of a nearby massive object will

deflect light from its original path.

Even though the photon, the carrier

Nature’s

by paul sutter

Lens

HOW GRAVITY CAN BEND LIGHT LIKE A TELESCOPE

of light and the electromagnetic force,

has no mass of its own, the influence of

gravity is universal. Once that spacetime

terrain is shaped, everything in

the universe must work to navigate

the geometry.

Perhaps the most visually striking

example of this effect is the curious

phenomenon of gravitational lensing,

in which a massive object can… well,

act like a lens. This effect can bend

the path of light to such a supreme

degree that background objects take

on a fun–house mirror appearance,

their images distorted to the point

that they’re almost unrecognizable.

64 :: bokeh

fall 2022 :: 65

By pure coincidence, the base of a

typical wineglass is a good approximation

to the gravitational lensing

behavior of a simple, (relatively) small,

spherical object like a star. If you

look through a (hopefully empty)

wineglass at the room around you—

and you may want to do this sober

so it makes more sense—you’ll see a

very distorted picture. If you point

the wine glass straight at an object,

you’ll see the object stretched into a

ring surrounding the center of the

glass’s base. In less extreme cases,

you’ll see arcs or the same image

repeated on multiple sides of the base.

When we look deep into the universe,

sometimes we come across a

chance alignment. Something truly

massive, like a giant cluster of galaxies,

will lie in front of many unassociated

background galaxies. The

light from the distant background

must follow the twisted and warped

gravitational path set by the cluster,

and the result is a curiously beautiful

set of images. Like looking through

a giant wine glass, we’ll see multiple

images of the same galaxy, bent in

long thin arcs, odd blobs and sometimes

even perfect rings.

These warped and distorted images

give us important clues about

the contents of the cluster—the

massive object between us and the

background that’s providing enough

gravity to make a decent lens. By

comparing the grotesque images

of the galaxies behind the cluster to

normal galaxy images, we can build

a fairly reliable estimate of the mass

of the big cluster. We can even estimate

how that mass is distributed

within the cluster.

This method provides another

key piece of evidence for the existence

of dark matter. That’s because

the effect is totally independent

of other approaches to measuring

cluster mass, like galactic rotation

curves and galaxy cluster gas temperatures.

Take away the presence of

dark matter, and the bending path

of light from background galaxies

around clusters wouldn’t be nearly

as severe as we see it to be.

It’s not just through big, fat clusters

that we get useful cosmological information.

At the opposite end of

the spectrum from the strong lenses

are the, you guessed it, weak lenses.

By definition, everything in the

universe can act like a gravitational

lens; your observational technique

just has to be sensitive enough to

detect the lensing.

As light flies to us from the distant

reaches of the universe, it filters

through near and around any intervening

sources of mass. If you took

only a quick glance at any random

distant galaxy—especially not one

that’s stuck behind a big cluster — it

won’t look any different than a nearby

galaxy. But it will be different, if

only minutely. A slight tweak here. A

small distortion over there. Perhaps

a mild elongation or bending.

These effects are too small to see

in any one galaxy, but if you analyze

thousands, better yet millions of galaxies

across the universe, you can reconstruct

the distribution of matter

between us and those galaxies. Taken

to the extreme, we can do this with

the cosmic microwave background,

the light from the early universe

66 :: bokeh

The combined mass of the galaxies and dark

matter act as a cosmic telescope, creating magnified,

contorted, and sometimes mirrored images of

individual galaxies.

that has been filtering through the

coffee grounds of our cosmos for

13.8 billion years. We have been able

to use incredibly tiny deformations

in that image to complete an even

bigger project: reconstructing the

distribution of matter in the entire

universe between us and that background

light.

But that’s just a single image, giving

us the total bending that the

light has experienced in its journey

through the history of the universe.

upcoming missions like WFIRST,

to map out the growth and evolution

of structure in our universe—

providing another window into the

hidden realms of dark matter and

dark energy.

There’s one more major application

of lensing that I need to mention. At

the top, we have the strong lenses,

Two different types of masks to be used in NASA's upcoming Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or

WFIRST, conograph instrument.

To make a 3D map, we need to repeat

this process using a series of concentric

shells of galaxies surrounding

us, carefully mapping the minute

distortions in their images and noting

the differences in adjacent shells.

That technique, known as weak

gravitational lensing, is in its relative

infancy but quickly gaining steam.

It’s currently used extensively in

cosmological surveys like the Dark

Energy Survey, and in (hopefully)

like giant clusters of galaxies, able to

noticeably warp the image of a galaxy.

Below that, we have weak lensing,

which can be detected through careful

statistical analysis. Below that, we

get the class of so-called microlenses,

which are too small to even cause a

visible distortion.

Instead, when a small object like

a black hole or brown dwarf passes

in front of a distant star by chance

alignment, we see a momentary

increase in brightness due to the

lensing around the interloper. While

this occurrence is very rare indeed,

if you stare at enough stars long

enough, you’re bound to see it happen.

And when you do, you can catch

all the lonesome wanderers of our

galactic landscape that aren’t otherwise

visible.

You can also spot planets. When a

star itself is the interloper, if it carries

any planets in orbit around it, they

will change—ever so slightly—the

momentary brightness during the

microlensing event.

From the largest to the smallest

scales, our universe is full of twinkling,

glittering lenses. And just like

the glass lenses that sit inside our

telescopes and microscopes, these

cosmic lenses give us views into parts

of our universe that would otherwise

be too difficult to see.

fall 2022 :: 67

68 :: bokeh

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