What you see is what you get - or is it?

WHETHER or not it is true that early film-goers actually fled the cinema in panic at the sight of the Lumière brothers’ 1896 film of a train pulling into a station, we have come a long way from those early days of mingled belief and disbelief in the magic of film.

Members of that audience are said to have feared they would be mown down by the advancing locomotive, but paradoxically, or perhaps inevitably, the more sophisticated special effects, 3D and CGI develop, the more sceptical cinema audiences become. Few today would admit to believing all they see on screen.

Ian Burns’ machines sit somewhere between that sophistication and earlier DIY days of film; such as when Doctor Who monsters may have been made out of spray-painted buckets and squeezy liquid bottles, but were no less terrifying for that.

In Colony Cam(2005) a large flatscreen monitor shows a desert or moonscape with a small, lone flag, fluttering in the breeze. To the left, a light bulb, motorised fan, flag and a line of wire on the wall are filmed by a miniature camera that transmits directly to the monitor. What we see is what we get, but, as Burns reveals, things can be so arranged that our eyes are led to deceive us.

The installations have a touch of the Heath Robinson about them. Does anyone look at Heath Robinson cartoons any more? Born in 1872, he came of age at the time of the Lumières, and his drawings depicted hugely inventive, and often ultimately pointless contraptions. These poked gentle fun at the aspirations of the emerging middle-classes, but also touched a nerve in a time when technology was moving design into hidden realms. No longer could you look at a machine and simply see how it worked as, increasingly, people were required to make a leap of faith, whether at the cinema, or even when simply boiling an egg.

Burns's work inverts that leap of faith. Instead of being asked to believe what we see on screen, we struggle to connect a plastic bag, light bulb, office chair and coat hanger with the majestic and sublime image in Glacier(2008); or the hurleys, buckets, umbrella and yard brush of Spirit(2008), with rugged landscape shown on the monitor.

Progressing through the Butler Galleries, the nine, deliberately rough-and-ready assemblages restate this idea, though they don't necessarily add a great deal more to it. In Burns' Down by the Sea, held in 2005 in New York, the depicted scenes related directly to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which was an emerging scandal at that time. Then, the topicality was a little heavy handed, although the message: that all news is a manipulation of images and events; was current and vital.

The world may, or may not have moved on, but in this enjoyable exhibition the main message is a return to the ability of film to create and transmit wonder and magic, even as it misdirects and deceives.

Ian Burns Supreme FictionButler Gallery, Kilkenny. Until October 9. See butlergallery.com