Playful Visions by Meredith A. Bak

Author:Meredith A. Bak [Bak, Meredith A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Children; Childhood; Culture; Optical; Play; Playthings; Nineteenth-century; 19th Century; Cinema; Pre-Cinema; Moving Image; Illusions; Optical Illusions; Technology; Visual Technology; Visual Effects; Learning; Entertainment; Archival Research; Media Archaeology; Material Culture; Digital Natives; Screen Time; Children’s Media; Persistence of Vision; Pedagogy; Middle Class; America; United States; USA; Europe; Media culture; Rational Recreation; Child Consumers; Children and Consumption
Publisher: MIT Press

Conclusion

Within film theory, the notion of persistence of vision has long been a factor in characterizing the kinds of interactions viewers have with screen-based moving-image media, positioning the cinematic spectator as an active agent or a passive subject. Optical toys, as the means through which persistence of vision was introduced to young people, would help establish how children understood themselves as media audiences and part of how they came to understand vision itself. Within the nineteenth-century home, toys like the phenakistoscope and zoetrope facilitated the exercise and display of optical discernment: a way of performing white, middle-class sensibilities. Related children’s texts advanced hierarchies of the senses through social and moral allegories, such as the characterization of eyes as servants to the intellect. Such frameworks also helped yoke new modes of scientific authority to existing social values.

By presenting an illusion of motion, these toys highlighted the distinction between how a viewer perceives something and the actual object seen. They thus challenged the visual epistemology that had, until the nineteenth century, grounded the viewing subject. For children, however, the discourses of failure and deficiency were always already built into how they understood vision. Because vision was positioned as a learned developmental competency, scientific rhetoric that acknowledged its limits and its vulnerabilities did not necessarily produce anxiety, but instead formed the parameters within which subjectivity was constructed. The rational, disciplined subject could thus both delight in the moving image and maintain a sense of mastery by understanding how it worked. In this way, these toys recast vision not as an intuitive process, but as one that required conformity to a kind of training and refinement, which would be commensurate with a capitalist work ethic characterized by efficiency, focus, and intention.

Close examination of these toys’ material attributes and iconography imagines the kinds of social configurations that likely coalesced around them. Picturing these play spaces in turn helps better characterize the interactions that children had with these optical toys, not as entirely immersed in optical spectacle, but capable of dropping into and out of the illusion at will. Much like the museum visitors introduced at the beginning of this chapter, nineteenth-century optical play involved considerable trial and error, where children could choose to look or to look away. Nevertheless, such play was an opportunity to experience and internalize persistence of vision, and these toys were deployed to train children’s tastes and sensory habits. Optical play was an occasion for seeing and being seen—a pastime enjoyed during privileged leisure hours that enforced a distinct outlook on vision and social life overall. Persistence-of-vision toys paradoxically empowered viewers to understand the principles underlying their vision by playfully pointing out its limitations. These devices set into motion a visual regime that has continued into the contemporary children’s mediascape. At stake in this investigation, then, is an opportunity to explore the genesis of a long preoccupation with how young people are socialized into particular cultures of spectatorship, participation, and interactivity. Optical toys were not just the ludic devices that produced

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