The Viewmaster: performance & workshop

“You know it's a trick, you can see how the trick is made. But you still want to see it”. There could not be a better description for what happens with the Viewmaster, which was performed at Huis a/d Werf last Tuesday the 2nd of February. This is a performance that makes use of the Pepper Ghost effect, an optical illusion discovered in the 19th Century. Through this, people and objects give the impression of appearing and disappearing, fading in an out of sight and walking around in a transparent ghost-like consistency. Heike Langsdorf, Ula Sickle and Laurent Liefooghe worked with this technique and developed several ways of using the Viewmater over a long research period. They ended up having “a catalog of effects” that they could use. For the performance, they decided to concentrate on only a few of the possibilities discovered for the sake of unity. However, the latent possibilities of this wonderful object still linger around and the creators felt the need to do something about them. In order to further explore the potential of the Viewmaster, they have decided to allow it to grow into a new project called The series. For this, several artists from different disciplines will be invited to explore the unused potential of the Viewmaster. The first of such artists is Inari Salmivaara, who will work at the Huis a/d Werf as a guest explorer of the Viewmaster. Her completed performance will premiere on the 26th of February. Below you can see some pictures of the workshop in which the functioning of the Viewmaster was explained, and the first imaginative exercises of Inari Salmivaara, where she has started to investigate the combination of the Viewmaster with video projection.