person
1895–1946·also known as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy
Hungarian artist of the Bauhaus, maker of kinetic light machines and abstract films. In Dialogue 38 Cameron and Bob reach for him while sorting out the tangle of figures around the optophone: he is not the Joyce cryptographer of 7 Eccles Street, but a separate artist who "made a kind of optophone machine" and a film in the 1940s — a working analogue, in light and sound, of the eye-ear instrument Joyce folds into Finnegans Wake.
Across the dialogues
38
Enters at the edge of the optophone thread — the Bauhaus light-artist whose image-to-sound machine and 1940s film make him a real-world cousin of Joyce's eye-ear device
Moholy-Nagy enters as a real maker of an image-to-sound device, set beside Joyce's literary optophone as evidence the machine was not only a metaphor.
"He was one of the guys that made a kind of optophone machine."
Cameron pins the name after the pair confuse him with the Eccles Street cryptographer, crediting Moholy-Nagy specifically with the optophone-related film of the 1940s.
"that was Moholy-Nagy."