The Dead Media Notebook (22 page)

This was a pretty unique concept for the early 70’s. Technically speaking, the Optigan was a primitive sampler. Sort of. I tend to think of it more like an ultra-poor-man’s Mellotron or Chamberlin. These are two famous keyboards from the fifties and sixties which played back recordings of instruments on lengths of magnetic tape. These two became very popular despite some huge drawbacks. For one thing, the tapes only lasted a few seconds and could not loop. If you wanted your flute to keep playing, you would have to re-press the key after eight seconds. This also involved waiting for the tape to rewind, so fast playing was generally not possible. Also, the racks of tapes themselves were pretty huge and unwieldy = changing from a choir to an oboe was quite an undertaking compared to what today’s machines can do. Not surprisingly, these instruments were quite expensive to buy and maintain. But the sounds they made were worth it = at least at the time.

Mattel marketed the Optigan as something of an adult toy = the sound quality was simply not good enough for professional use. They sold mostly through stores like Sears and JC Penney and were relatively inexpensive = about $150 to $300 depending on which model you chose. They came with a “Starter Set” of four discs, and extra discs were marketed like records. Official Optigan music books were also available to help you make the most out of the minimal talent you probably had if you had bought an Optigan in the first place. The first thing you notice about the Optigan (if you have any imagination at all, that is) is how malleable this technology was. You can do all sorts of things with the discs to sabotage the sound = put them in upside down, put several in at once, manually stop and start them with your hands for record scratch effects, press all the buttons at once, and so on. Most of the sounds that were recorded for the keyboard section are different kinds of sustained organs. Since the disc spins constantly, the sounds just keep looping around and around. So the keyboard sounds can’t have a beginning and end per se. [.] Some of the discs even have non- musical sound effects (such as applause) on them. You would think that, since the discs are not played by physical contact, there would be no pops or scratches such as on vinyl records. But this is not the case = tiny scratches on the discs cause irregular diffractions of light which in turn end up sounding exactly like record scratches! Most of the time, though, this actually improves the sound. You get the weird feeling that you’re listening to a cheesy old Enoch Light record, but you’re actually controlling where the music goes!

Mattel only produced the machines (at a factory in Compton, nonetheless) for a couple of years. They didn’t sell very well because of several design flaws which made them amazingly unreliable and prone to breaking down. Eventually Mattel sold the whole works to the Miner Company of New York (an organ manufacturer). They continued production of the Optigan under the company name of Opsonar and also produced several new discs. But the design remained the same, and its inherent problems forced the Miner company to drop the machine as well.

Later, the technology was bought by a company called Vako which made an instrument called the Orchestron. This was designed for professional use, but the sound quality still sucked. They made about 50 of these machines before they folded.

Source: an essay by musician and collector Pea Hicks

From Bruce Sterling

[The justly famed Mesdag Panorama in Den Haag is one of the best-preserved examples of this dead form of nineteenth-century virtuality. THE PANORAMA PHENOMENON is an illustrated English-language historiography associated with the exhibit, with extensive notes on Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s own panorama of Old Scheveningen, and on the panorama in general.]

“An anecdote has it that in the year 1785 a young Irish painter in Edinburgh landed in prison because he could give no satisfaction to his creditors. He was the painter and draughtsman Robert Barker who, confined in his prison cell, perhaps through sheer boredom, accidentally invented the panorama.

His extremely uncomfortable quarters were situated in a basement, and the sparse daylight entered through a narrow opening in the ceiling, very near the wall, and so lighted up the vertical wall just underneath.

“Barker will not have had much contact with the world outside, but once he did receive a letter which gave him inspiration. He could only decipher the letter by holding it up against the dimly lit wall. The incidence of light from above on the letter, observed by Barker in the dark gaol, apparently presented such a peculiar effect, that it occurred to the civil debtor to illuminate paintings in a similar way.

“The patent obtained by him in 1787 defined this conclusively. The fact that he applied for a patent is typical. It may well be the first manifestation of the systematic mixture of art and technology.

“In 1787 he brought an unusual picture to Londin, unusual both for its size and form; a large oblong semi-circular canvas depicting a View of Edinburgh. Compared to his later work, it was only an initial effort to create what he described a little later in his patent application as a ‘View of Nature’ (La Nature a Coup d’Oeil). In the artistic community his first effort had no success whatsoever. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Society, advised Barker courteously but explicitly to stop his useless experimenting, an advice completely disregared by the modernist. His invention was patented on the 3
^rd
of July 1787.

“He defined his invention: ‘An entire new contrivance or apparatus, which I call La Nature a Coup d’Oeil, for the purpose of displaying views of Nature at large by Oil Painting, Fresco, Water Colours, Crayons, or any other mode of painting or drawing.

The word panorama does not figure in the patent. It is reported that the term would have been introduced by a classical scholar among his friends. At any rate, Barker himself mentions the word panorama in 1792 in an advertisement in The Times. Henceforth it quickly became the definite style for a circular picture.”

“Quite simply, the secret of the panorama lies in the elimination of the possibility to compare the work of art with the reality outside, by taking away all boundaries which remind the spectator that he is observing a separate object within his total visual field. Not without reason the panorama used to be called the ‘all-view’ or ‘the picture without boundaries.’

Barker’s patent achieved this effect by incapsulating the spectator inside a total view. “The circular canvas envelops him like a cylinder. When he glances upward, the light source and the top edge of the picture remain hidden from view by an umbrella- like roof over the platform (the so-called velum), and at the bottom of the picture his view is blocked by a cloth or another kind of foreground, placed between the balustrade and the lower edge of the painting.

By means of these provisions the spectator is deprived of the possibility of comparison. He can no longer correctly judge size and distance. He only sees the objects on the painting surrounding him in their relative proportions. and all this lead the spectator to experience his fictitious surroundings as a reality. This technique, invented by Barker, was a complete novelty at the time, and its amazing effect was the cause of the enormous success scored by the panorama during more than a hundred years.

“It goes without saying that in the course of time the optical effects have been further doctored. The corridor leading from below to the platform was therefore darkened, so that the visitor, whose eye had been adapted to this darkness, gets caught unprepared by the fully lit panorama picture. A winding staircase was mostly chosen for entering the higher situated platform with the preconceived intention of making the visitor lose his bearings.

“Numerous experiments were necessary to establish how the spectator should be fitted into the whole,. and the distance to be allowed between the platform and the canvas. The lighting of the canvas via the roof dome = an essential element of panorama technique = was no simple matter.

Experiments were made with smoked glass, with ‘skirts’ of cloth encircling the light dome, with transversely screened sheets, all this with the aim of making the light from above shine from the picture by reflection.

“It was a certain Colonely Langlois who broke new ground by using the horizontal space between the platform and canvas to perfect still further the optical illusion. He ‘filled’ this space with a setting of tri-dimensional objects which constituted integrating parts of the display. Without this ‘faux-terrain,’ the foreground- setting, including the objects, the so-called ‘attrapes’ (hoaxes), a panorama later on was no longer a real panorama. Gradually this technique was further refined to the extent that the tri-dimensional attrapes faded perfectly into the bi-dimensional canvas, thus creating a very realistic effect.”

“In the initial period, panorama painters looked for existing large premises in which their work of art could be hung, but soon afterwards they began to construct special small round wooden buildings, primitive sheds, constructed = or so it appears = around the circular canvases. These kinds of contraptions could be found in many towns around 1800. The simple sheds in Hamburg, Leipzig and Amsterdam which housed the first panoramas were examples.”

“Barker’s first rotunda was 11 m. high and had a diameter of 26 m. In the big capitals of the time, London, Paris and Vienna, where one could count on a steady number of visitors, there arose, in due course, more professional wooden or stone structures. The exteriors of these rotundas were simple, undecorated, cylindrical or polygonal in shape, like the twin panorama buildings at Montmartre (Paris) or Barker’s ingenious two- storied rotunda on Leicester Square.

“Later again, a specific rotunda architecture developed, narrowly linked to the construction of circuses. By employing new materials (iron combined with glass) the rotundas became even more spectacular towards the middle of the 19
^th
century. With the building on the Champs Elysees designed by Hittorf (the creator of the Place de la Concorde), Paris became the model for numerous later buildings.

“Most rotundas bult later in the 19
^th
century were monumental, pompous buildings, often abundantly decorated, on which the then fashionable neo-styles were appled with great zest..

In the earlier days London had its enormous Colosseum (1829), Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Salzburg, Vienna, Brussels, Milan and Madrid all had their own baroque panorama homes. They were also to be found in the Netherlands. At one time Paris boasted at least 13 of this kind of round art temples.

“When later on panorama companies were founded, a certain uniformity in construction developed so as to facilitate the exchange of the paintings. The dimensions were also considerably larger than before. Standard building norms were a diameter of 40 m. and a height of 15 m.”

“Early in the 20
^th
century, the age of the panorama definitely came to an end. It was impossible to fight the competition of the oncoming cinema..

Also the new photoprinting technique, by means of which photographs could appear in illustrated periodicals, was a nail in the coffin of the panorama, which was not any longer susceptible to innovation.

The panorama buildings were mostly pulled down. but sometimes adapted to other uses. They were transformed into theatres, cinemas, riding- schools, artificial ice-rinks, mosques and suchlike. Untold numbers of rotundas burnt down, sometimes well insured, for inexplicable reasons. With the buildings the numerous Societes Anonymes disappeared as well. But the panorama has not been entirely relegated to history.

The Mesdag Panorama and a number of other circular displays have survived in spite of adversity.”

Source: The Panorama Phenomenon: Mesdag Panorama 1881- 1981 Published by the Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Mesdag Panorama (September 1981)
Den Haag, Holland
editor Evelyn J. Fruitema written by Paul A. Zoetmulder Mesdag Panorama, Zeestraat 65b, 2518AA The Hague

“March 8, 1839. Louis Daguerre, a French painter and inventor, for some seventeen years had been the proprietor of one of the most popular spectacles in Paris. It was a theatre of illusions called the Diorama.

“No actors performed in Daguerre’s Diorama theatre. It consisted of a revolving floor that presented views of three stages. On each stage was an enormous canvas (72’x 48’) with scenes painted on both sides. Through the clever play of light, Daguerre could make one scene dissolve into another. Parisians were treated to the sight of an Alpine village before and after an avalanche, or Midnight Mass from inside and outside the cathedral, accompanied by candles and the smell of incense.”

[This strikes me as a very early precursor to Heilig’s Sensorama machine, due to the sensory augmentation of candles and incense. As a side note, as Daguerre went to meet with his colleague Samuel Morse to discuss his new device called the telegraph, the Diorama burnt to the ground. ]

Source: Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making. by Kiku Adatto, Basic Books, 1993,

Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America (New York, Dover, 1976 (an excellent source for information on Daguerre).

From Bruce Sterling

KNOWN SURVIVING PANORAMAS (circa 1981)

AUSTRALIA

“Panorama Guth”, painted 1975 by Guth and Pieters
65 Hartley Street, Alice Springs

AUSTRIA:

“View of Salzburg from the Fortress Hohensalzburg” painted circa 1824 by Sattler,Loos and Schindler
Cafe Winkler, Monchsberg, Salzburg

“The Battle Near Mount Isel in 1809” painted in 1895 by Diemer, Burger, Flaucher, Neidermaier and Pezzey
Rennweg 39, Innsbruck

BELGIUM

“The Battle of Waterloo” painted in 1812 by Dumoulin, Desvareaux, Malespina, Robiquet, Meyer and Vinck
340 Route du Lion, Eigenbrakel, Waterloo

“The Battle of the Yzer” painted 1920 by Bastien
Royal Museum of the Army and of War History
Cinquantenaire Park, Brussels