{"id":2227,"date":"2014-07-13T22:56:33","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T05:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/?page_id=2227"},"modified":"2014-07-13T22:56:33","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T05:56:33","slug":"leon-marvell-2014","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/leon-marvell-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Leon Marvell 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/files\/2014\/07\/Marvell_Leon-300.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-2228\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/files\/2014\/07\/Marvell_Leon-300.jpg\" alt=\"Leon Marvell\" width=\"300\" height=\"232\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h1>Thoughtography: from out the Great Darkness<\/h1>\n<p>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\u2014naturally\u2014a fake, and that the scientists who were studying  Serios were gullible saps. The Amazing Randi even claimed to have  produced\u00a0<em>thoughtographs<\/em> 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\u2019s claims, and Serios quickly disappeared from public  consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>Yet Serios produced his puzzling,  phantastical images under strictly controlled scientific conditions, and  the fact remains that we have no \u201cnaturalistic\u201d explanation for them\u2014at  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\u2019 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 \u2018real\u2019. These images are  found in Robert Fludd\u2019s magnum opus of 1617,\u00a0<em>Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atque Technica Historia<\/em> (History of the Macrocosm), and offer a hermetically unsealed disquisition emerging from the very first image:\u00a0<em>The Great Darkness<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Leon Marvell<\/strong> is Associate Professor of Film &amp;  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\u2019s  image of the Acephale &amp; Eliphas Levi\u2019s Baphomet, the future  technology of the Lifebox (with Rudy Rucker) and is the author of <em>Transfigured Light: Science, Philosophy and the Hermetic Imaginary<\/em>. He has produced work for the theatre, film and radio and has been kicked out of a well-known occult organisation <em>twice<\/em> for subversive activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43221,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":23,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2227","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2227"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2233,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2227\/revisions\/2233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/tiic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}