Having watched the shows by Manual Cinema and other course material, it is quite obvious the idea of puppetry is all but outdated. Or more broadly, shadow art is quite common in the contemporary artworld. However, how old are in fact these ideas and methods? They might be much older but they are at least 2396 years old for the ideas are connected to the thinking of one of the greatest philosophers and to a particular understanding of the world. Of course, I am talking about Plato and the theory of Ideas. When I encountered the examples in class, I immediately thought of Plato’s allegory The Myth of the Cave. The myth constitutes a metaphor through which Plato explained the idea of …. and he does so precisely in the way we saw the band in the talent show perform or as we were supposed to witness the chinese puppetry. The cave contains prisoners facing one of the walls with a fireplace behind them and in between a human-size wall. People are then passing with objects above their head and the prisoners get to see only the shadows of the object thrown by the fire as people’s’ shadows are blocked by the wall. The prisoners, having been in the cave since they were born, thus believe the shadows are the actual objects.
In a way, when artists use shadows they seek the audience to accepts the shadows as the objects of the performance rather than constantly interpret them through the objects that cast them. My understanding of the artist’s intention is thus resembled by Plato in the view that if prisoner escapes, experience the real world, and returns again, they would deem the world outside of the cave superior and would lost the ability to see the shadows again. Plato’s theory of Ideas takes the next step and characterizes 3D object by corresponding inexpressible forms (just like shadow reduces 3D to 2D, we could then speculate about the implications for existence of the fourth dimension).
As already discussed, the idea of Plato is very similar to how projection is used in arts. Shadow projection is basically stripping an item of many qualities. Most importantly, it reduces the dimension and in effect ability to reflect light, which varies color tones, and oftentimes the color itself. On the other hand, projection can work quite the opposite way, at least when buildings are used as canvases. Berna Ekim writes that facades have the power to increase the dimension of 2D projections. Other issues or similarities between shadow projection and videomapping include distances. With shadow projection, alternating physical distance between an item and a light source, can create abnormally sized shadows. Concerning videomapping, what I found riveting was that distance becomes essential with large scale projection (with distant audience) to calculate audio synchronization (as was described in the Istanbul’s Yekpare).
It was indeed bad luck that we could have not seen the Chinese puppet show (mostly for it would be interesting to see both the “real world” happening and the “projected version” just like Manual Cinema). However, there is one more instance of the similar techniques coming to mind that I would like to include in this post. In an iconic scene in Kill Bill, Tarantino uses technique approaching a shadow projection to achieve a similar goal as in the case when he uses black and white or animated scenes – to soften the situation and to add an element of humor (0:40) into the climax of drama. The video is relevant until 1:25. In the last seconds, Tarantino uses shadow projection yet in another way!
In conclusion, it is obvious that shadow projection is a particularly powerful tool given the technique or the idea has been around for centuries and is still heavily used and constantly enriched, including during tonight’s circus show I attended. So while projection might be “an important emerging tool,” the core idea has been around for a while.