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The Telectroscope is
produced by:
In partnership with:
- Tiscali UK – Information, entertainment, broadband, email and internet access.
- Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts in England, distributing public money from Government and the National Lottery
- Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
With additional support from:
With special thanks to:
The Artist
Paul St George’s father was an acrobatic tap dancer, his mother a costume designer. They were mid-way through a world tour of Kiss Me Kate when Paul was born - he started life in Norway, was weaned in Sweden, toddled in Finland but went to school in Bristol, England.
Paul is cultural diversity personified with German Jewish, Sierra Leonian, French and Manchester Jewish ancestry. Not knowing he was Jewish, Paul won an academic scholarship to a small choir school in Bristol (school small, choir big). He sang in the Cathedral choir until he discovered that he could stay in bed longer and miss choir practice if he was Jewish. Later, he studied at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, Wiltshire. The college was situated right next to Lacock Abbey where Fox Talbot invented photography. Paul’s fascination with the relationships between images and different realities started there and has continued until now.
The Telectroscope project brings together many strands of his career. His practice as an artist has always been concerned with questioning the relationship between the viewer and what is being viewed. His work is also often associated with different realities, spectacle and viewer participation. For example, he explored how many art works rely for their impact on massive size or weight, and produced a series of tiny, though perfect, replicas, or Minumentals™, of monumental pieces of art like Tilted Arc, commissioned for New York’s Federal Plaza, or Angel of the North in the north east of England.
St George has long been fascinated by the many inventions that bloomed at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of these exciting ideas for optical and communication devices foundered for lack of a key component (e.g. the cinematograph without celluloid) or an audience. Paul has discovered that many of these dormant inventions are re–emerging in the twenty-first century. Paul’s healthy obsession is to bring many of these latent glories to life and to draw out the connections between now and then. The Telectroscope is the biggest and the best of these projects. Audaciously simple and profound at the same time, this is a project that brings imagination to life.
Paul also teaches and runs an undergraduate course in animation.
Paul St George
Amazing discoveries…
Alexander Stanhope St George, inventor of the Telectroscope, was inspired by a chance meeting with the great British engineer Brunel when he was still a child. St George’s great–grandson found this photograph after his grandmother’s death.