Abstract
Once it was the latest news 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, public buildings and sculptures, contemporary scenes from wars to world exhibitions, and much more, with no sharp lines between epistemic and aesthetic image functions. Rather, educational aims were fused with the spectacle of the new media aesthetics, where the wall-size projections of brightly lit image series took centre stage, accompanied by the lecturer’s speech and sometimes music. The purpose of my study 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 image’s mediation in specific pictorial media together with the multimodal character of the events conditioned the embodied as well as cognitive experience of the viewer, and what this implies for the knowledge producing capacity of the image more generally. 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
