The Artifact: Claude Glass

of the event that one is making. Various sites and destinations become mere background for a selfie or a short form online video. And we have probably all caught ourselves focusing not on the in the moment experience of a thing, but either the media we hope to get out of it or and this is key to what we're discussing today, a media based understanding of the experience. Now, I want to stress that I'm as guilty as anyone in my

own ways when it comes to this. When I really like a piece of art at a museum, I inevitably take notes and, if permitted, photograph the work and the little information plate so I can refer back to it. But I sometimes then have to remind myself to actually pause and take in the work, to experience it and put aside everything else for a moment, and inevitably sometimes I forget to do that. I've also walked ruins and imagined myself within a gothic horror film, that sort of thing.

It's easy to think that all of this is a product of media technology and to assume that, prior to smartphones, cinema and photography, travelers and concert goers simply absorb the experience on a more honest, open level. I mean, there's probably still a case to be made for that to some degree, but claud Glass gives us a little added perspective to consider here. I was turned onto this topic by Yes, a short form online that my wife sent

me via the National Gallery London, hosted by Joanna. She describes Claude Glass as a nineteen hundred's Instagram filter, and that's pretty accurate. Instagram filters, of course, are a popular and sometimes controversial innovation of the smartphone age, allowing any user to at least roughly apply some semblance of higher photographic style and or technique. It's no replacement for actual photographic talent and skill, but it generates the semblance and

experience of the thing. In this the comparison to Claude glass is solid. We're talking about a small, folding compact that contains not a traditional reflective mirror but a black mirror. Yes, much like the ritual obsidian mirrors of the Aztec god Tees Catholic PoCA, the horror anthology series on Netflix, and, as Joanna points out, the reflective surface of a sleeping

or de powered iPhone screen. British tourists of the nineteenth century would bring claud glass with them on travels, and when faced with a particularly evocative landscape, they turned their backs on the natural vista and instead gaze at it literally through a glass, darkly in the reflection provided by

their claud glass. The idea here, as Ameliasoff explains in a twenty twenty one j Store Daily post titled the claud Glass Revolutionized the way people saw landscapes, was that reflection in the glass would transform the natural world into quote, a vision of painterly charm framed and set apart from the rest of the landscape color palette, simplified, bathed in gentle,

hazy light. Soft points out that some tourists even had multiple claud glasses of different shades that, much like Instagram filters, allowed the user to play around with the various ways that their reality might match up with a more interesting bit of media. As the title of Soft's article indicates, the idea here is that the craze occurred in the wake of a quote sea change in how the British thought about landscapes. For hundreds of years, many had long

derided various British landscapes as being chaotic and uninteresting. Why would you want to travel and look at these places? But suddenly the popularity of landscape portraits such as those by French painter Claude Lorraine, for whom the glass is named, changed expectations of the natural world. Note, however, he did

not invent it, nor even necessarily know of it. Soft stresses that the key to all of this is the picturesque quality of the ideal landscape painting, and in this we mean a perfect balance of the sublime and the beautiful, the awesome and even dangerous, with the comforting and the suite. In appreciating this in landscape paintings, people began to look at landscapes themselves as if they were landscape paintings, and when the reality inevitably struggled in comparison to deliberate skilled

artistic rendition. The claud glass allowed the user to augment their perfe, framing it, simplifying its color palette, and casting it all in a hazy artistic light that resembles the artistic style they craved. Even then, Plenty found the craze kind of ridiculous, and poet Thomas Gray wrote in seventeen seventy five about falling backwards into a ditch while trying to view a landscape through the glass. We cast similar judgments about modern technology today, don't we? But what about

the future? Ai generated images, writings, video music, and now even podcasts. AI generated conversations between two non real entities are in many ways distorted inhuman reflections via scrape and pilfered data. In many cases, that gives us the alternative to the real and the genuine, a dark mirror of personalized longing. As we back closer and closer towards the ditch, tune in for additional episodes of The Artifact, the Monster

Fact or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact as Stuffdwlow your Mind dot com.