GoogleDoodle

The stereoscope, and its cards, are fascinating objects. Hopefully, this illustration communicates that. 

My GoogleDoodle is an illustration of John Tagg looking through a stereoscope, viewing two images of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. I created it digitally, drawing it on Autodesk Sketchbook, and creating the animation on ezgif.com. I worked from photo reference, using my own pictures of the stereoscope and portraits of Tagg and Holmes I found online.

Writing for this blog has left me with definite opinions and beliefs about the stereoscope, but they’ve culminated over the course of me working with, and learning about, the telebinoculars and the collection of cards at the Seidman House. So I thought this part of the assignment was a good opportunity to meditate on my findings and synthesize them into some kind of statement. I wanted my GoogleDoodle to express the hypnotic quality of the illusion and then represent both the proponents of the binoculars and cards, as well as the critics. 

Essayist John Tagg, courtesy of Cornell University. 

John Tagg, in his essay “The Archiving Machine,” calls the cards “lucrative parlor novelties.” While I’ve already discussed Tagg’s criticism of photography and portraiture in my contextual analysis, in “The Archiving Machine” Tagg is actually rather uninterested in the cards and the device. (instead, he focuses on the intricacies of archiving such images.) He does, however, cite Oliver Wendell Holmes’s extremely high praise of the stereoscope. 

Holmes, as Tagg characterizes him, was a “physician, essayist, poet, and inventor.” He invented a handheld version of the stereoscope and was awestruck by the intensity of the optical illusion it created. 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, courtesy of Penny's poetry pages.

There’s a quiet kind of conflict between the two perspectives on the binoculars and the cards, and that reflects my thoughts on the objects. A stereoscope is a fun gadget, the illusion is interesting, and the contents of the cards’ narration are compelling. But the vaguely sinister nature of experiencing something so— in my opinion— thoughtlessly limited and censored, and the knowledge that it was used in schools and in homes, leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

Tagg, J. (2012). The Archiving Machine; or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet. Grey Room, 47, 24–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23258588