Hologram Performance by Chief Keef Is Shut Down by Police.

According to the article, a rap-singer, with outstanding arrest warrants related to charges of child support, cannot appear at a public concert, and has had himself “holographically” inserted into a live performance.

How? Apparently via a video projected on stage using a modern version of an old theatrical trick, known as “Pepper’s ghost,” brought to popular attention by “Professor” John Henry Pepper and commonly used in Victorian magic shows, but invented in the late 1500s by a Neapolitan scientist, Giambattista della Porta.

An image below the stage is aligned (with a sheet of glass or reflective material placed between the two at an angle), so that when the hidden area is suddenly lit, it appears to be in front of the audience. Like a ghost. As della Porta put it, “what is without will seem to be within… [and the spectator] will think he sees nothing but truth.” I’d never heard of della Porta’s stage trick before. Have you? It opens a whole new door in my head. La porta è aperta.

But della Porta’s screen door may just as well swing the other way: what is within the hidden room will seem to be without… The principle of the camera obscura – Latin for dark chamber – also invented by della Porta!

A precursor of the movie camera, and its projector, yet another metaphor for the Unconscious Mind. One room, the one we live in, or think we do, is lit by the bright sun of our consciousness, but there’s another hidden room, containing objects that are normally invisible, but which may suddenly appear out of “nowhere” on the screen of our mind. No-where suddenly become now-here, an absence unexpectedly intruding its presence. A surprise.

Its sudden appearance may seem like a kind of magic – defined as “the art of producing marvels using hidden natural forces.” But that is the crucial point – though these “forces” seem to be hidden, they are natural, an inescapable consequence of consciousness itself. Before its invention, perhaps only a few million years ago, everything was hiding, in plain sight, seen but observed by no one. When the light went on, whatever wasn’t seen disappeared into the shadows. The brighter the light, the darker and deeper the penumbra it casts.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the 20th-century French philosopher-anthropologist, invented the phrase “participation mystique” to describe the way “primitive” tribes lived in a magical, unconscious harmony with their environment, due to their supposed lack of self-awareness. They lived like animals (though apparently elephants, gorillas, dolphins, and at least one parrot might take exception to that).

But we are all living in participation mystique, thinking what we see is the only reality. The truth is it’s all a magic trick, like Pepper’s ghost. No matter how aware we may be of ourselves as separate entities, there will always be a roomful of stuff behind the seen that we know nothing at all about.