All done with mirrors
DAVID HAMBLING reveals that Kim Kardashian West’s ‘hologram’ was actually a far older illusion
Kim Kardashian West recently raved on social media about a 40th birthday present from her husband Kanye West. “Kanye got me the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from heaven. A hologram of my dad. It is so lifelike and we watched it over and over, filled with lots so [sic] tears and emotion,” she wrote. Twitter was soon awash with mocking responses, featuring holograms and ghost appearances from Star Wars, The Lion King and Ghostbusters. However, things were not quite as they seemed. The impressive birthday present was not actually a hologram as Kim believed. Instead, it was the latest version of a Victorian illusion that stunned audiences over a century and a half ago, known as Pepper’s Ghost.
‘Professor’ John Henry Pepper first revealed the effect at the Polytechnic Institution in London in 1862. Pepper was not a real professor, but wrote science education books, experimented with electricity, and contributed to the theory of continental drift. He spent some time in Australia, where he tried unsuccessfully to alleviate a drought by creating rain with guns, rockets, and a kite with a charge of gunpowder. He is best remembered as a science presenter, who showed how mediums faked their effects – and as the inventor of Pepper’s Ghost.
Pepper was renowned for his contribution to the Polytechnic’s Christmas entertainment when he came across Dirck’s Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagorias were popular entertainments using magic lanterns – early still image projectors – to project ghosts, skeletons or devils on to surfaces, including smoke and semitransparent screens. Originally presented as genuine séances, phantasmagoria became the period equivalent of the horror movie, shocking audiences with amazing but obviously fabricated spooks.
Dirck’s Phantasmagoria took things up a notch; rather than static two-dimensional images, it projected a phantom of a living, moving three-dimensional actor. Dirck showed it to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1858 in model form, but there was no commercial interest because accommodating the effect would require rebuilding theatres. Pepper modified the effect so it could be shown at any theatre with a pit under the stage.
The heart of the illusion is a sheet of angled glass between the audience and the scene they are viewing. A well-illuminated actor below the audience’s line of sight in the pit is reflected in the glass, and appears to be standing on or hovering over the stage, apparently interacting with actors. The illusion works if the lighting is kept low and indirect so the glass itself is invisible.
Pepper unveiled the effect in a presentation called ‘A Strange Lecture’ to an invited audience on Christmas
Eve 1862. In a segment called ‘The Spectre Drama’, Pepper walked through the apparently solid image of another person. He originally intended to finish the demonstration by explaining how it was done, but the overwhelming reaction of the audience to the appearance of the ghost changed his mind. Reviewers agreed that the effect was the “most startling novelty of the season.” It transferred to the Polytechnic’s larger lecture theatre and played all through 1863, seen by celebrities including the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). The Polytechnic became the Royal Polytechnic and made unheard-of profits from the performances. Theatres adopted the effect whenever an impressive ghost was needed. While Pepper always credited Dirck, the name Dirck’s Phantasmagoria was soon replaced with Pepper’s Ghost.
The effect spread to other arms of showbusiness. A version of it was behind the ‘Ape Girl’ illusion, a staple of touring fairs. The audience looked into a cage apparently containing a woman, allegedly captured in a jungle or with some equally hokey back-story. What the audience actually saw was the woman’s reflection; as the lights went down, she gradually faded out to be a replaced by an actor in a gorilla
suit – the real occupant of the cage. The show ended with the ‘gorilla’ breaking out of the cage and chasing the audience.
Pepper’s ghost has always been a novelty act, better at portraying semi-translucent phantoms than more solid beings. Some of the most successful uses have been in theme parks, like Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Phantom Manor attractions. The ghost of Robert Kardashian was created by Kaleida, which calls itself “a leading hologram company creating holographic experiences for clients around the world.” Their products are used in musical performances, stage shows and public attractions. They often bring the dead back to life – Pepper’s ghosts now include Amy Winehouse, Tupac Shakur and Freddie Mercury. They can also insert a spectral or ‘holographic’ version of a famous actor into a stage show that could not otherwise afford them. Where an actor is not available, as in Kardashian’s case, motion capture and technology like that used for Deepfakes can bring them back to deliver any script required, such as telling Kim Kardashian West what a wonderful daughter she is on her birthday. One of Kaleida’s secrets is a fine gauze known as Holonet, “the brightest, most transparent hologram gauze available today.” This creates screens that, in suitable lighting, are invisible to the audience and are easier to work with than large glass sheets. In the case of the Kardashians, as in Victorian times, surprise and showmanship played their part. The family were told only that there was a special present, and taken into a darkened room where the effect had been set up; they did not know what they were going to see. A video of the speech given by the Robert Kardashian ‘hologram’ is on Kaleida’s website.
Novelty wears off. While Pepper brought his ghost back several times, audiences got bored of it after a few months. The illusion still works today because it is relatively rare. Gazing at a television screen, a much more advanced technology, no longer inspires wonder. However, it is still remarkable that an illusion that has now been around for more than 150 years still has the capacity to wow an audience – even if it has to be presented as a high-tech hologram.