Stephen Barber, The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge and the Future Projections of the Moving Image.

Abstract

ing and the spectatorial protocols associated with them’ (p. 144). Seeing By Electricity invites its readers to understand television and indeed any medium as shifting sets of social practices, influenced by the encounters and connections they share with other media. It concludes with the observance that digital media has ‘challenged the most fundamental notions of the ontology of cinema’, and a century earlier, so too did the coming of television (p. 186). Likewise, digital media has also profoundly changed understandings of television and so once again the two moving image media threaten to collapse into one another. Moreover, digital media and Internet technologies make early image transmission fantasies not only possible but commonplace. However, Galili so assiduously avoids and even cautions against anachronistic thinking that mentions of ‘pixels’ and ‘charged-coupled-device sensors’ are jarring, and likely only there to help explain nineteenth-century scanning devices based on the human eye (pp. 60, 65). Otherwise, Galili’s careful attention to the nineteenth and early twentieth century makes Seeing By Electricity a kind of escape to the past. As such it is an especially good pandemic read, allowing us to travel backwards whiles nevertheless speaking to our present landscape of video calls, online cocktail parties, remote learning, telecommuting, and binge-watching—all accelerated and amplified by social distancing and stay at home orders.