Observations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes collection

Cubitt, Sean (2008) Observations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes collection. Animation, 3 (1), 49-65. (doi:10.1177/1746847708088735).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The 500 items selected from Werner Nekes' collection of 20,000 (accompanied by a judicious selection of recent works) in the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions (at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Thursday 2 November 2006 - Sunday 11 February 2007; previously shown at the Hayward Gallery, London in the winter of 2004-5) sketch a 400-year history of optical tools, toys and tricks. To consider them as 'pre-cinema' is to do them an injustice, pre-empting their intrinsic fascination by delivering them over to a technology their makers could scarcely have imagined.Their abiding fascination is as much about the possibility of playing with them in the present as with a Benjaminian dislocation of the recent past. It belongs, so, to a shared history of technique, and a common concern with what constitutes us as human, rather than to a catalogue of failed attempts to produce La Sortie des usines Lumières.

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