Leon Marvell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughtography: from out the Great Darkness

In the mid-1960s an alcoholic, chain-smoking bellhop from Chicago found himself at the centre of a psychoid cyclone. Ted Serios could produce images on Polaroid film just by projecting his thoughts into the lens of the camera. Serios was an overnight sensation and his unique abilities the subject of worldwide attention. Famous prestidigitators such as the Amazing Randi endeavoured to prove that Serios was—naturally—a fake, and that the scientists who were studying Serios were gullible saps. The Amazing Randi even claimed to have produced thoughtographs through simple stage tricks and misdirection, thus demonstrating that Serios was a charlatan. In fact he accomplished no such thing, but the popular press, tired of the hard-drinking Serios and his strange abilities, accepted the Amazing Randi’s claims, and Serios quickly disappeared from public consciousness.

Yet Serios produced his puzzling, phantastical images under strictly controlled scientific conditions, and the fact remains that we have no “naturalistic” explanation for them—at least, any naturalistic explanation that relies on a strictly materialist mode of explanation. To assist in the exploration of the post-material psychodynamics of Serios’ unsettling oeuvre, this paper will call upon the help of a series of images to remediate the fractious geometry of Serios, his thoughtography and the ‘real’. These images are found in Robert Fludd’s magnum opus of 1617, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atque Technica Historia (History of the Macrocosm), and offer a hermetically unsealed disquisition emerging from the very first image: The Great Darkness.

Leon Marvell is Associate Professor of Film & Digital Media in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Originally trained as an art historian, he recently has had chapters published on Surrealism and Alchemy, Bataille and Masson’s image of the Acephale & Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet, the future technology of the Lifebox (with Rudy Rucker) and is the author of Transfigured Light: Science, Philosophy and the Hermetic Imaginary. He has produced work for the theatre, film and radio and has been kicked out of a well-known occult organisation twice for subversive activities.