Josef Svoboda
«Laterna Magika»

From the moment of its inception, it has not been clear whether Laterna Magika (LM) is film, theater or a brand-new media performance show. First introduced in the Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels, this entity combined ballet, theater, several film projections, and sound background. [...] LM transformed the concept of virtual and physiological time. The medium of virtual time included a real actor with whom the spectator could identify and thus gain a direct paradigm on which to model his own behavior, should his physical body ever find itself in a virtual interactive space. [...] It was a highly synchronized program, coordinated to the last detail, with everyone having his exact spot in a precisely marked space.

(source: Havránek, Vit in: Future Cinema. The cinematic Imaginary after Film, exhib. cat., Shaw, Jeffrey and Weibel, Peter (eds), The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), London, 2003, p. 102.)