Associate Professor Martyn Jolly, Lead Chief Investigator, Photography & Media Arts

Location: Zoom Meeting here

Time: Aug 27, 2020 05:30 PM (Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney)

Meeting ID: 981 0028 9985

Password: 303926

Free event: all welcome

For this seminar artist, art historian and now collector Martyn Jolly will discuss his research in context of his current exhibition, Martyn Jolly’s Phantasmagoria, curated by Virgina Rigney, Canberra Museum and Gallery, 10 June — 5 September 2020.

For Jolly the magic lantern shows that came to prominence in the mid nineteenth century were much more than just the antecedent of today’s PowerPoint presentation. They were just as common, but for their nineteenth and early twentieth-century audiences they could be uncanny experiences of phantasmagoric apparitions, powerful moments of collective witnessing, virtual journeys to exotic places, intellectual revelations of new knowledge, or even prompts for communal praying and singing. His collecting began when he realised that to really understand and appreciate the ‘magic’ of these objects that they needed to be used and with fragile collections in museums out of bounds. As Jolly has written of his collection, "magic lantern slides are not self-evident objects like paintings, they are a media like a computer file, they need to played on a device — projected through a lantern with voice and music — in order for their ‘magic’ to be fully understood."

Biography: Dr Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University School of Art & Design. He completed his PhD on fake photographs and photographic affect at the University of Sydney in 2003. In 2006 his book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography was published by the British Library, as well as in the US and Australia. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Canberra Museum and Gallery. In 2006 he was one of three artists commissioned to design and build the Act Bushfire Memorial. In 2011 he undertook a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia and a Collection Scholar Artist in residence Fellowship at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. In 2014 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant along with Dr Daniel Palmer to research the impact of new technology on the curating of Australian art photography. In 2015 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World. He is also researching Australiana photobooks and the history of Australian media art.

This is the first seminar presented by the Materiality, Agency and Data Research Hub.

The ANU School of Art & Design Research Hubs bring together academics to address big ideas and urgent issues of our nation and beyond. Building on core strengths and shared concerns, the Hubs provide focal points for our researchers to connect and collaborate.