Museums & Collections Blog

By freelance journalist Rammy Elsaadany

The premise of the exhibition was that a group of fresh and energetic Central Saint Martin students would create a piece that was to be an interpretation of each artists understanding of the museum objects and the theme of historic representation, as I hurriedly power walked to the museum ( I am perpetually late to events) my mind began to wonder about the infinite ways that this repository of ancient Egyptian objects ranging from art to every day things could generate creative pieces in the next generation of artists.

Image (c) Veronika Neukirch

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Grant Museum magic lantern slide LDUCZ-299 showing craters on the lunar surface

The UCL Grant Museum and the Science and Engineering Collections currently have several thousand magic lantern slides that relate to subjects as diverse as telegraphy, astronomy or Australian coral reefs; but which for the most part have been consigned to gathering dust in splintering wooden boxes. I, however, have spent the last few weeks sorting, auditing and cleaning hundreds of these slides, and I am now rather well acquainted with these little glass squares.

Example of a 19th century magic lantern slide projector from the UCL physics collection. This example was used as a sort of overhead projector but others were designed to project across a lecture theatre or hall

Magic lanterns were first developed in the 17^th century as one of the earliest image projectors. While the device itself has evolved, the concept has remained the same: A combination of lenses and a light source are used to enlarge the images found on glass slides (each about the size of a Post-it) and project them onto a wall or screen. Magic lantern slides, hence, can be described as a kind of ancestor to the Kodachrome slides used in slide projectors, or even present-day PowerPoint slides. (more…)