The Nervous Magic Lantern is a projection device I came up with in the year 2000. With assistance from wife Flo (Florence) we have been performing with it ever since.

It pushed aside The Nervous System first presented publicly in 1975. The Nervous System required two prints of a film shown slightly out of sync, advancing very slowly but in rapid alternation. Projections were at first more like activated slide-shows than movies, with things appearing both in motion and - to an extent - in depth. Eventually screen-images became 3-dimensionally voluptuous with no spectacles required, prompting use of an early porn film with rounded body-forms for the making of XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX.

The Nervous Magic Lantern came to me in a dream, does not employ film and makes no sense. It is simple mechanics could have been invented centuries before film. To this day I don’t understand why it works, with its depth-illusions even more pronounced when seen by a single eye. Unlike the Nervous Magic Lantern, it’s screen-output records well and CHAOS is a selection from what were originally public performances.

Both systems rose from an ongoing interest in illusionary depth. In my Twenties, I studied painting under Hans Hofmann, who made his students intensely depth-conscious while commanding them to always affirm the flat painting surface. Cinema, however, made optical illusion irresistible.

Acknowledged illusion makes for wakefulness, for modesty regarding our assumptions; our struggle for reality proceeds against the pull of every sort of illusion. Optical illusion plays with this urgency, allows us to consider our predicament and even be amused by it.

Ken Jacobs