A magic lantern show at the Headland Theatre, Tathra, New South Wales, 16 April 2026. With Martyn Jolly, Anita Pollard, Andrew Gray, Dean Gray, Nick Keeling, Steve Fitzgerald, and special guest April Phillips. Including a chromatrope meditation by April Phillips, a special effect of a magic poster produced with a slide painted by Waratah Lahy, and a series of special effects produced with food dye dropped into a water tank.
This tiny panoramic magic lantern slide, hand-painted in the early 1890s and just 180mm long, was designed to be projected over another slide of a rocking ship’s cabin so the scenes appeared to float past the porthole like a dream.
Lantern slides from the 1880s with music by Alexander Hunter
My essay ‘Light Sources in Australia’ from the catalogue to the 2025 Drill Hall Gallery exhibition Light Source is available at:
https://www.academia.edu/144553090/Light_Sources_in_Australia
Reconstruction of
The Dream Tent
Handout for Participants
You are about to experience some mind therapy from the late nineteenth century. The Dream Tent was invented by the New York neurologist James Leonard Corning in 1899, the same year Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.
Corning’s idea was that the brain was susceptible to chromatic and sonic vibrations in the drowsy state before sleep. While in that state, doses of pleasurable colour and sound could induce pleasant dreams and thereby improve the patient’s waking life.
He reported to the International Review of Electrotherapy and Radiotherapy that with the aid of the Dream Tent he had cured Miss L of her Matutinal Depression and Inertia (not wanting to get up in the morning), Mr S of his Insomnia, Mr L of his Morbid Dreams, Mr S of his Imperative Conceptions, and H of his Nervous Irritability.
The pleasant colours were delivered to the patient’s retinas via a motor-driven chromatrope, a well-known optical device popular since the 1830s where two discs of glass painted with cycloidal patterns were rotated against each other in a magic lantern, optically mixing their colours and pulsing them off the screen. Our reconstruction uses authentic chromatropes and a magic lantern from the period.
The therapeutic musical vibrations were delivered to the cells of the patient’s brain via a canvas and leather ‘acoustic helmet’, into which Corning had stitched padded metal saucers supporting above each ear hollow metallic nipples connected by a long india-rubber tube to a wax cylinder phonograph, a machine for playing recordings popular since 1888. Our reconstruction uses a Bela Mini computer, programmed with three circular sonic layers, breathily resonating with the optical logic of the spinning chromatrope discs.
In Corning’s words, ‘pleasing scenes, fantasies, and combinations of color form and fade before [the] eyes’, while ‘the musical waves, surging into the labyrinth and onward to the sensorium, produce effects alike transcendent and indescribable’.
126 years after it was first used on sick patients, will you also experience some of the therapeutic benefits of our reconstructed Dream Tent? It’s time to find out.
Take off your shoes, lie on the divan, put on the headphones, and we’ll zip you up. Then, all you have to do is look steadily at the chromatrope.
Made for the LocalJinni City night walk – a collective projection journey ANU campus 4, 11, 18 October 2025 in association with the exhibition Light Source, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, a re-edit of the government film:
The Australian National University.
Originally made by Tom Cowan and John Morris in 1967 with music composed by Moneta Eagles.
Thank you Fiona Hooton. Thank you ANU Archives.
My catalogue essay for the exhibition Light Source, Drill Hall Gallery, curated by myself and Tony Oates, 22 August to 19 October 2025.
First paragraph:
Yes, yes, we all know about ‘Australian light’, it’s hard and it’s harsh. It makes us squint into the red distance, across a haze of heat, towards the horizon. It makes us shade our eyes, our noses crossed with Pink Zinke, as we look out beyond the breakers into the blue. That’s the natural light we all live in, and supposedly ‘deal with’ in our art. But what about artificial light in Australia, the light that isn’t the signature of our national identity, but which we have nonetheless generated here? The following survey is derived from the work of many historians. It has detected, scintillating far off in the deep historical distance, brief flashes of the creative production of synthetic light for its own sake. It turns out that a continuing engagement with the direct manufacture and manipulation of that purest of art materials — light itself — has been reflected and refracted, bouncing through different genres, medias and contexts, all the way down the long tube of Australian history
For Believing What You See: Trust and Vision from the French Revolution to Generative AI, Research Event Series, School of Art, Communication and English (SACE), University of Sydney, 10 October 2025.
In the 1870s somebody in the Australian colonies assembled 36 carte-de-visite photographs of the celebrities of the day into an album. There was nothing so unusual about that, except that along with 34 living people the album included 13 of the living dead — spirits who had crossed beyond the veil of death but still wished to participate in nineteenth century progress through the medium of photography. This album, which is in the National Gallery of Australia, was compiled at a time when established beliefs were being tested on all fronts — by new sciences, new technologies, new ideologies, and new religions. Increasingly, the battle for belief was being played out along one major democratic front: the evidence of one’s own eyes. It was the potential sensitivity of collodion and albumen emulsions to both terrestrial and supernatural light, and the potential interpenetration of corporeal and plasmic matter, that allowed spirit and human to mingle in one person’s modest album. Our compiler chose to believe what they saw in the photographs, and assembled for themselves a rich, multidimensional world that extended far beyond the colonial frontier where they lived.
Imagining a Real Australia: The Documentary Style 1950–1980
My review of Stephen’s book has been published in The History of Photography journal.
Martyn Jolly 