No abstract

After an extensive tour throughout Europe, including venues such as Amsterdam, London and Brussels, the French entrepreneur and magician Henri Robin arrived in Paris in 1862, where he opened a new theatre on the legendary Boulevard du Temple. His arrival remarkably coincided with the destruction of this renowned hub of popular visual culture as it was cleared to make way for Hausmann's far-reaching program of urban modernisation. Nonetheless, Robin started providing scientific entertainment for audiences to be both beguiled and informed, and managed to do so very successfully throughout the following five years. His evening shows consisted of a mix of astronomical sciences, magic and the evocation of ghosts. This article addresses Robin's career in relation to the changing ideas of theatricality and his remarkable persistence in commingling astronomy and magic within a theatrical context. It will show that Robin's initial concept of theatricality is concretized in his explicit demonstration to the spectator that they were at the theatre, and that this was indeed the place where the wonders of the heavens could pry open the matter of their own understanding. Correspondingly, Robin's career fizzled out during the Second Empire, when scientific activities were dispersing rapidly across different public sites, altering and reshaping the appeal of the physiques amusantes. The rise of professional conférences alongside the waning appeal of what the critic Théophile Gaultier termed 'ocular spectacle,' eventually forced theatre and astronomy into fixed and discreet domains. As such, the story of Henri Robin and his science-based spectacles articulates major shifts in the various relationships between art and science, and theatre and astronomy.

This paper analyzes from a pragmatic postphenomenological point of view the performative practice of CREW, a multi-disciplinary team of artists and researchers. It is our argument that this company, in its use of new immersive technologies in the context of a live stage, gives rise to a dialectics between an embodied and a disembodied perspective towards the perceived world. We will focus on W (Double U), a collaborative interactive performance, where immersive technology is used for live exchange of vision. By means of a head mounted omni-directional camera and display the fields of vision of two participants are swapped, which enables the participants to perceive the world through another person's point of view. This intermedial experience brings a classic dichotomic perception of space to falter: material reality as a 'live' condition can no longer be opposed to a virtual mediated reality. In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the 'real' and the 'virtual' to a meaningful experience. In this respect, we refer to recent neurological experiments such as the 'rubber hand illusion' in order to clarify the spectator's tendency to fuse both ontologies and to embody a coherent image-world.

No abstract