Abstract
It was once a novelty to project large-scale still images in public. This media practice, lantern lectures, had its peak 1880–1910 and centred around a serial display of predominately photographic images with the help of an early projector called magic lantern or sciopticon. In these events, images of all kinds were intermixed: geographical views from all over the world, astronomic charts, contemporary scenes from wars to world exhibitions, and much more, with no sharp lines between spectacle and instruction. Rather, educational aims were fused with the the new media aesthetics, where the wall-size projections of brightly lit image series took centre stage, accompanied by a lecturer’s speech and sometimes music. The purpose of my presentation is to use the case of these 19th-century lantern lectures to reflect, theoretically and historically, on the broader question of pictorial knowledge. While I understand knowledge to be historically determined, i.e., changing across time and social contexts, there are some issues of pictoriality to be further developed. I will discuss how the images of the lantern lectures were embedded in and mediated through a network of media technologies and materials, multimodal presentational practices and widely circulated representational conventions, and what this implies more generally for the epistemic horizons generated by the images. My examples are taken from a case study of lantern lectures in Sweden, which methodologically combines studies of historical sources (such as slide collections and press reports) with multimodal analysis.
Presenters
Sonya PeterssonAssistant Professor / Research Fellow, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Stockholms län, Sweden
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
MULTIMODALITY, PICTORIAL KNOWLEDGE, IMAGE PROJECTION, OPTICAL MEDIA, IMAGE CIRCULATION
