The history of projected images at the turn of the seventeenth century
reveals a changing perception of chance and order, contingency and form.
In Projecting Spirits, Pasi Väliaho maps how the leading optical media
of the period-the camera obscura and the magic lantern-developed in
response to, and framed, the era's key intellectual dilemma of whether
the world fell under God's providential care, or was subject to chance
and open to speculating.
As Väliaho shows, camera obscuras and magic lanterns were variously
employed to give the world an intelligible and manageable design. Jesuit
scholars embraced devices of projection as part of their pursuit of
divine government, whilst the Royal Society fellows enlisted them in
their quest for empirical knowledge as well as colonial expansion.
Projections of light and shadow grew into critical metaphors in early
responses to the turbulences of finance. In such instances, Väliaho
argues, "projection" became an indispensable cognitive form to both
assert providence, and to make sense of an economic reality that was
gradually escaping from divine guidance. Drawing on a range of
materials-philosophical, scientific and religious literature, visual
arts, correspondence, poems, pamphlets, and illustrations-this
provocative and inventive work expands our concept of the early media of
projection, revealing how they spoke to early modern thinkers, and
shaped a new, speculative concept of the world.
