Keynote Erkki Huhtamo: The Diorama Revisited (part 1) (Sonic Acts XII, 2008)


Sonic Acts is a biannual festival at the intersection of arts, science, music & technology. The word ‘diorama’ is widely used in contemporary culture, but its origins remain obscure. Erkki Huhtamo’s lecture provides an archaeology of the fascinating history of the diorama, its cultural background, its applications and its relationship to other media like the ‘dissolving views’ ( magic lantern ) shows. It also explains how the word gradually came to be detached from its original meaning , gaining a discursive life of its own. Finally, he will critically review how contemporary theorists have referred to the diorama to explain media-cultural formations. Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, writer, and exhibition curator. He works as Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of California Los Angeles ( UCLA ), Department of Design | Media Arts. He has published extensively on media archaeology and media arts, lectured worldwide, created television programs and curated media art exhibitions. His research deals with topics like peep media, the pre-history of the screen, and the archaeology of mobile media. He is currently finishing a book on the 19th-century moving panorama, and preparing a collection of writings on media archaeology with Jussi Parikka. With this keynote, Huhtamo opened the conference of the 2008-edition of Sonic Acts.

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