Aki Onda is a Japanese audio-visual artist whose works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, and historical. Ken Jacobs is an American, New York-based experimental filmmaker who uses found footage, which he edits and manipulates. In the Depth of Illusion is Onda’s soundtrack to Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern, a manifestation of Jacobs’ paracinematic performances.
The joint project began in 2007 and is an immersive, hypnotic, three-dimensional viewing experience, described as ‘cinema without film or video’, and using Jacobs’ imaginary Nervous System apparatus with a traditional magic lantern projector to create hand-painted, abstract yet geometric, swirling and rotating Rorschach-like patterns, and offering dream-like visions.
Jacobs wanted with Nervous Magic Lantern to “get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of
