Projection: Vanishing and Becoming

Abstract

In Pliny's account of the origins of painting, projected light is the medium traced by the maid of Corinth. In Leroi-Gourhan's account's of palaeolithic art, projection plays a key role in the definition of hands as petroglyphs. Gorky's memoir of the first film screenings in Russia speaks of 'the land of shadows'. Projection is the medium of perspective in all its forms, and of cartography. In these later, more rigourously abstract and mathematical forms, projection reveals one of its key qualities: anamorphosis. On the one hand then, projection is the most direct record that previous ages had of light ? a function it had in the art of the silhouette, for example. But at the same time, the projection of three dimensional objects like the globe onto two dimensional planes like maps meant that all projection was also distortion. The evidence of presence is always open to the anamorphic vision so integral to cinemascope and other photographic technologies. By looking at some examples of the use of projection in contemporary art, I want to contest the hegemony of the four-square, flat projection and its pretence at the cinematic, and to ask whether the field of projected light has more to offer than the emulation of the real. Is projection, after all, a kind of psychological fantasy? Or is it a quality of the visible world that enters deeply into all our metaphors but as yet only marginally into our arts?