30 September, 2016

Nicholas J. Wade

Seeing with two eyes and hearing with two ears

University of Dundee, UK
October 28th, Belas-Artes Auditorium

Stereo immersion in seeing and hearing is the normal condition of perception: objects are seen in depth and sounds are heard in space but these have not been the historical issues addressed. The unity of perceptual experience has masked attention to differences in the stimuli available to two eyes and two ears and to the ways in which they are processed. Contemporary approaches to stereo immersion are concerned with how the natural binocular and binaural processes can be simulated. Phenomena involving seeing with two eyes have been commented upon for several thousand years whereas those about hearing with two ears are a much more recent. The history of research on binocular vision and binaural hearing is compared with respect to the singleness of the percept, experimental manipulations of dichoptic and dichotic stimuli, eye and ear dominance, spatial localization, and the instruments used to stimulate the paired organs. One of the principal phenomena that led to studies of dichotic hearing was dichoptic colour mixing. Direction and distance in visual localization were analyzed before those for auditory localization, partly due to difficulties in controlling the stimuli. Experimental investigations began in the 19th century with the invention of instruments like the stereoscope and pseudoscope, soon to be followed by their binaural equivalents, the stethophone and pseudophone.

30 September, 2016

Denis Pellerin

The first movie ever was in 3-D

London Stereoscopic Company, UK
October 29th, Universidade Lusófona, Agostinho da Silva Auditorium

No enterprise seemed impossible for the Victorians. They wanted to capture images almost instantaneously and they invented photography. They wanted their photos to be in 3-D and they came up with stereoscopy. They wanted their 3-D photographs to be in colour, tried several processes and failed, but ended up tinting their photographs in such a delicate way that it is sometimes hard to believe that the final images are not colour images. They also wanted movement and devised the taumatrope, the phenakistiscope, and the wheel of life, or zoetrope. What is little known however is that they also experimented with 3-D moving images and that the very first movie of the history of the cinema (actually a moving loop) was in 3-D ! It was developed over 40 years before the Lumière brothers’ first public projection by a French optician and, to this day, only one copy of his work has been found. It is kept in Ghent, Belgium. The “film” itself has been seen by only a handful of people when it should be celebrated as a major step in the history of the seventh art.

30 September, 2016

Larry J. Schaaf

The Virtues of Reality: Henry Talbot, Nature and Imagination

University of Oxford, UK
October 27th, Agostinho da Silva Auditorium

Much more than a scientific breakthrough, Talbot’s invention of photography was a dramatic demonstration of his fertile imagination. He started out seeking a replication of reality – the image of Nature as she saw herself – and this he soon attained. But the unexpected expressiveness of her images unleashed a flood of other ideas about the very nature of representation. Henry Talbot found himself immersed in a landscape of images that he had never imagined existed. His enthusiasm – his sense of discovery – was infectious and his influence on subsequent photographers was significant.