Uniting old and new, this salvaged magic lantern from the 1870's has been fitted with a zoetrope-like device imprinted with the letters of the alphabet. The lantern logs into it’s own email account, retrieves new content, and spins out the viewer’s emails or text-messages one letter at a time, projecting them across the room.

Part apparition, part spectral machine, the lantern turns out text-based patterns of light. Ideally, the interaction is more gestural than informational, as we watch the device chug along in it’s very physical rendering of it’s very ephemeral content: our alphabet.

Technology includes use of java programming on the web-based side, and the arduino platform to drive the stepper motor-based device itself.

An interesting byproduct of the nature of the lantern (like any camera obscura) is that anything inside the body of the old apparatus is projected outward - including the inverted image of the bulb itself. Due to this phenomenon, in the projected image it appears as though the bulb itself is spinning, rather than its rotary of letters.

...messages from the ether...a visual ouiji-board for today’s text-obsessed...

a video of the magic lantern, hard at work, can be seen here:
http://danielliss.com/videos/lantern.mov

a love of the spirit of mystery which surrounds objects such as the magic lantern brought me to this project.

anyone interested in text, interaction, projection, mystery, visual phenomena.

visitors can text or email the object directly. receiving a message, it begins to churn it out one letter at a time, clanging away.

it's made of a now-ancient magic lantern and somewhat less intriguing modern electronica: arduino, stepper-motor and assorted circuitry.

servos are easy. steppers require discipline. text is beautiful.