Erkki Huhtamo
Biographic Data
| ID | 1063796 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erkki Huhtamo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erkki |
| FAMILY NAME | Huhtamo |
| SIGNATURE | HUHTAMO E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Overhead modernity
Screenology, or Media Archaeology of the Screen, has occupied me for over twenty years. I am more and more convinced that its investigations must be taken far back in time and also beyond the Western world. Media screens can be understood as dedicated artifacts that are distinct from the forms and contents that keep appearing on them. In brief, they are interfaces that connect the close and the remote, the present and the absent, the material and…
The Self-Driving Car
This article discusses the self-driving car as a media machine, thinking about its character and broader implications from media archaeological and posthumanist perspectives. Self-driving or autonomous vehicles challenge traditional ideas about agency. Car culture has usually been considered human-centered. While there have been concerns about the “human factor” and the consequences of poor and distracted driving, the human behind the steering wh…
Media studies as an ‘archaeology’
This article is a contribution to the historiography of media archaeology, and therefore to its self-understanding as a scholarly approach. It starts from a simple observation: the use of the words ‘archaeology’ or ‘media archaeology’ within media studies has exploded in recent years, but so far no one has clarified when, how and where these naming practices developed. This is the task the article is meant to explore. It argues that media archaeo…
The pasts and prospects of media archaeology
Elephans Photographicus
A Menippean Satirist in the Rear View Mirror
The Brown-Urban-Joy Spirograph
This brief article is a postscript to ‘The dream of personal interactive media: A media archaeology of the Spirograph, a failed moving picture revolution’, which appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 4 (November 2013)
Illusions in Motion
(Un)walking at the Fair
This article is a contribution to urban media archaeology. It sheds light on ‘mobile visualities’ by concentrating on the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900. After discussing theories and practices of walking, it focuses on a specific technological prosthesis for the pedestrian: the Trottoir roulant, or the moving walkway that circled the exposition grounds. Even though it was not the first of its kind, the extent, location, and function of the o…
The dream of personal interactive media
The Spirograph – not to be confused with the familiar drawing toy – was an innovative but utterly forgotten device for presenting moving pictures. It utilized spinning discs on which microphotographs were arranged in a spiral, and which could function either as a projector or as an individual peep-viewer. ‘Invented’ by Theodore Brown around 1906, it was adopted by and developed under Charles Urban, who attempted unsuccessfully to bring it to the …
Media Archaeology
Dismantling the Fairy Engine
Media Archaeology
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time…
The Sky is (not) the Limit
This article is a contribution to screenology, a hypothetical branch of media studies that would deal with the history of screens as both material realities and discursive entities. It develops an archaeology of the screen from a specific angle, excavating the little known efforts to turn the sky into a kind of super-screen, the ultimate media display. These efforts have been both concrete and discursive, often involving complex mixtures of both.…
Aeronautikon! or, the journey of the balloon panorama
In the nineteenth century, numerous moving panoramas were displayed by touring showmen and theatres alike. An interesting sub‐genre of the theatrical moving panorama was the balloon panorama that was introduced in the 1820s in the context of the Christmas pantomime. By using a vertically moving roll panorama the audience was given the sensation of looking at scenery on the ground from above – an experience very few people could afford in real lif…
Penetrating the peristrephic
Of all the ‘things panoramic’, the peristrephic panorama remains one of the least well known. It is usually mentioned in passing in the histories of the panorama, but both its form as a spectacle and its historical vicissitudes have remained obscure. This article discusses in a condensed manner the origins, evolution, forms and reception of the peristrephic panorama. It reconstructs the institutional development of this form from its earliest beg…
MediaArtHistories
Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, l…
From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd
The author explains his proposed archaeology of the media. This practice draws on the work of scholars such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault in its embrace of all forms of cultural artifacts as material for theory and its view of history in terms of discursive production. Where it differs from existing approaches is in its particular focus on historically recurring discursive patterns. The author offers examples of such patterns and propose…
From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd
The author explains his proposed archaeology of the media. This practice draws on the work of scholars such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault in its embrace of all forms of cultural artifacts as material for theory and its view of history in terms of discursive production. Where it differs from existing approaches is in its particular focus on historically recurring discursive patterns. The author offers examples of such patterns and propose…
The pasts and prospects of media archaeology
From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd
The author explains his proposed archaeology of the media. This practice draws on the work of scholars such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault in its embrace of all forms of cultural artifacts as material for theory and its view of history in terms of discursive production. Where it differs from existing approaches is in its particular focus on historically recurring discursive patterns. The author offers examples of such patterns and propose…
MediaArtHistories
Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, l…
Penetrating the peristrephic
Of all the ‘things panoramic’, the peristrephic panorama remains one of the least well known. It is usually mentioned in passing in the histories of the panorama, but both its form as a spectacle and its historical vicissitudes have remained obscure. This article discusses in a condensed manner the origins, evolution, forms and reception of the peristrephic panorama. It reconstructs the institutional development of this form from its earliest beg…
The Sky is (not) the Limit
This article is a contribution to screenology, a hypothetical branch of media studies that would deal with the history of screens as both material realities and discursive entities. It develops an archaeology of the screen from a specific angle, excavating the little known efforts to turn the sky into a kind of super-screen, the ultimate media display. These efforts have been both concrete and discursive, often involving complex mixtures of both.…
Aeronautikon! or, the journey of the balloon panorama
In the nineteenth century, numerous moving panoramas were displayed by touring showmen and theatres alike. An interesting sub‐genre of the theatrical moving panorama was the balloon panorama that was introduced in the 1820s in the context of the Christmas pantomime. By using a vertically moving roll panorama the audience was given the sensation of looking at scenery on the ground from above – an experience very few people could afford in real lif…
Media Archaeology
Dismantling the Fairy Engine
Media Archaeology
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time…
Illusions in Motion
(Un)walking at the Fair
This article is a contribution to urban media archaeology. It sheds light on ‘mobile visualities’ by concentrating on the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900. After discussing theories and practices of walking, it focuses on a specific technological prosthesis for the pedestrian: the Trottoir roulant, or the moving walkway that circled the exposition grounds. Even though it was not the first of its kind, the extent, location, and function of the o…
The dream of personal interactive media
The Spirograph – not to be confused with the familiar drawing toy – was an innovative but utterly forgotten device for presenting moving pictures. It utilized spinning discs on which microphotographs were arranged in a spiral, and which could function either as a projector or as an individual peep-viewer. ‘Invented’ by Theodore Brown around 1906, it was adopted by and developed under Charles Urban, who attempted unsuccessfully to bring it to the …
A Menippean Satirist in the Rear View Mirror
The Brown-Urban-Joy Spirograph
This brief article is a postscript to ‘The dream of personal interactive media: A media archaeology of the Spirograph, a failed moving picture revolution’, which appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 4 (November 2013)
Elephans Photographicus
The Self-Driving Car
This article discusses the self-driving car as a media machine, thinking about its character and broader implications from media archaeological and posthumanist perspectives. Self-driving or autonomous vehicles challenge traditional ideas about agency. Car culture has usually been considered human-centered. While there have been concerns about the “human factor” and the consequences of poor and distracted driving, the human behind the steering wh…
Media studies as an ‘archaeology’
This article is a contribution to the historiography of media archaeology, and therefore to its self-understanding as a scholarly approach. It starts from a simple observation: the use of the words ‘archaeology’ or ‘media archaeology’ within media studies has exploded in recent years, but so far no one has clarified when, how and where these naming practices developed. This is the task the article is meant to explore. It argues that media archaeo…
The pasts and prospects of media archaeology
Overhead modernity
Screenology, or Media Archaeology of the Screen, has occupied me for over twenty years. I am more and more convinced that its investigations must be taken far back in time and also beyond the Western world. Media screens can be understood as dedicated artifacts that are distinct from the forms and contents that keep appearing on them. In brief, they are interfaces that connect the close and the remote, the present and the absent, the material and…
Art (13 works) · History (12 works) · Visual arts (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Digital Games and Media (4 works)