The Magic Slate

Magic Slate

Today is the first day of my retirement and of course at the end of any period of your life you tend to reflect back on what you have achieved. As I reflected I automatically checked to see if I had any work e mails, and was reminded of how quickly you are wiped away by the institution you have worked with. My work e mail had already been taken down, I no longer had an electronic presence and if course all of those files that record the many and various activities I have worked on over the last 48 years are no longer accessible and have probably been wiped. It was I realised rather like I had been working on a Magic Slate for all those years. However, as always I shall try to turn my experience into a post about something to do with drawing. 

The Magic Slate is a children's drawing toy that was invented in the USA by R. A. Watkins in 1923. Besides being a toy, it is also often used as an erasable message board and communication device for people unable to speak.

A stylus is used to write or draw on a transparent plastic sheet which when pressed down creates an impression on the layer beneath. This layer transfers itself to the back of the plastic sheet where the stylus has pushed it into the waxy backing. The “magic sheet” is lightly attached to the card surround, so that it can be lifted away from the wax backing by a sliding bar when you have completed your drawing or writing and need to erase it. The most interesting aspect of this arrangement is that the resinous wax layer that exists behind the plastic sheet retains etched into itself traces of all the previous impressions. 

Sigmund Freud once wrote an essay about this very process, 'A note upon the Mystic Writing Pad'.  He wrote the essay to explain his theory of memory and used what he called the 'Wunderblock' (the German name for a magic slate) to illustrate his ideas. The outer coating or transparent sheet on which we read the writing or drawing represented for him the protective layer of the mind. He writes that the layer protects the mind from too much excitation and that if this thin layer is torn or contaminated (in Freud's day thin transparent paper was used instead of transparent plastic), the Wunderblock would cease to work, in the same way that trauma can irreparably damage the psyche. The stylus for Freud representing a stimulus from the outside world. The papery layer is the conscious mind and the wax resin is representative of the unconscious.

Freud thought that the mind retained impressions of memories in the unconscious. This is why a forgotten trauma can still effect how we emotionally operate, even long after an event. The main difference between the magic slate and the mind being that the mind's traces can come back and disrupt psychic life, especially in dreams and after trauma. Freud wrote, "The permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights." Therefore it could be argued that Mystic Pads have a particular kind of memory. Freud went on to state, "I do not think it is too far-fetched, to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system of Pcpt-Cs. (Perception-Consciousness) and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception."

A writer on the Electronic Labyrinth website takes the idea further and points out that Derrida in 'Freud and the Scene of Writing,' states that perception is itself a kind of writing machine like the Mystic Writing Pad. The marks on the pad are not visible due to the stylus leaving a deposit on the sheet of plastic, the marks only becoming visible because of the contact the wax has on the reverse side of the sheet of plastic, which Derrida argues, is also the case in perception. None of us apprehend the world directly, but only retrospectively; our sense of that which is beyond ourselves is the product of previous memories, previous writings. "Writing," says Derrida, "supplements perception before perception even appears to itself" (Writing and Difference 224). Accessed from: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0257.html

The Mystic Writing Pad, then, is for Derrida a model of the primacy of writing, of the way in which we can only ever experience the world after the fact, through traces of previous experiences and through the signifiers which are for Derrida in effect the condition of being.

What is intriguing about this is that a process of image making can also become a metaphor for how the mind works. In my recent post on drawings as storage devices I was trying to articulate  a similar concept, if drawings are thought about in a certain way they can also be seen as a type of battery as well as a material metaphor. The process of making drawings produces something far more than just the mechanics of how they are made. By extending Freud's metaphor, another insight from the Mystic Pad essay could be that what makes the human mind distinct isn't just its "layers" for perception and storage, it is also about the nature of traces and how they can be understood. Because a trace is by its very nature only a fragment that is left by contact with a much more complex entity; these traces have to be interpreted and in their interpretation we rarely achieve accuracy. This could be a even deeper metaphor for how perception operates.

Using a magic slate to make a small animation

Because the transparent plastic sheet that overs a magic slate is very reflective, any drawing you do is hard to see and your body is reflected in its watery like surface. In trying to make this basic animation, I began to realise that it had another potential metaphorical direction, one that was about trying to write on water, a concept akin to walking on water, but with the vague presence of the author appearing to float around and mingle with the images. Something to return to perhaps another time. 

References:

Derrida, J. (2001) Writing and difference. London: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1991) A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad, General Psychological Theory.

The Electronic Labyrinth 

See also:

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

Drawing devices

More drawing devices

Using viewfinders