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Media maverick: Professor legitimizes media forms of the past

Click here to see Huhtamo demonstrate working relics from his collection of antique optical viewing devices, which each play a role in the history of media culture and the moving image.

By Alexa Smahl

March 6, 2013 12:00 a.m.

A lightbulb flicks on inside a red cast-iron box as Professor Erkki Huhtamo cranks the wheel attached to it.

Huhtamo’s Mutoscope involves a wheel of cards that create a moving image.
Huhtamo’s Mutoscope involves a wheel of cards that create a moving image.

As he continues cranking, tiny flip cards with printed black and white images whir around a spinning wheel underneath the light. By peering into the device’s lens, a viewer can see a moving image created by the movement: a woman visiting the monkey house of a zoo.

These types of machines were a popular feature of penny arcades and amusement piers in the early 20th century. The coin-operated device, called a Mutoscope, from 1898, offered one of the earliest ways of experiencing cinematographic moving images, explains Huhtamo, a professor of media history and theory.

The peep show box sits among rows of other media relics that make up an extensive collection of antique optical viewing devices in Huhtamo’s office on the third floor of the Broad Art Center.

Rows of antique optical viewing devices fill Huhtamo’s office in Broad Art Center.
Rows of antique optical viewing devices fill Huhtamo’s office in Broad Art Center.

“People tend to disembody the content of media from the apparatus that delivers it. Huhtamo focuses on the material aspect of media,” said Peter Lunenfeld, a Design | Media Arts professor and a colleague of Huhtamo.

These objects from the past are crucial to Huhtamo’s research in media archaeology, an emerging field within cultural studies that he has pioneered. By excavating forgotten or even “dead” forms of media, Huhtamo said he wants to make connections between old and recent forms of media.

This approach to studying media reveals that technologies that are often thought of as new ideas have precursors from the past, Huhtamo said. For example, the touch screen was anticipated by older forms of media like the peep show boxes in Huhtamo’s collection that require the viewer to interact with the device.

“People collect as a hobby because they become fascinated with something,” Huhtamo said. “I don’t collect in such a way. All of my collecting is linked to my interest in research and teaching. I don’t see any clear distinction between my hobbies and my work. It’s all the same.”

Huhtamo’s work is helping to define the field for future graduate students interested in studying media archaeology, Lunenfeld said. He cited Huhtamo’s coinage of the term “peep media” which refers to devices that have hidden elements that require viewers to pay a fee before viewing.

Huhtamo recalled how his interest in media culture began at an early age when he was growing up in Finland. He founded the film club at his high school and remembers screening Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” with a 16mm projector to a packed audience.

“I guess I was one of those high school kids who was spending my evenings mostly in cinemas rather than in bars,” he said.

His interest in media culture expanded to more experimental forms such as video art and interactive technology while he was majoring in cultural history at University of Turku in Finland.

When virtual reality became popular in the 1990s, Huhtamo said he started wondering whether these new technologies were actually completely groundbreaking ideas. By looking into the history of media technology, he discovered that there were media forms such as panoramas that had already anticipated what virtual reality represented.

“I don’t think anything in culture comes only from the present or from fantasies of the future but from earlier forms of media,” he said. This idea resists the typical notion of media technology as progressing in a linear narrative with new technologies building off one another, he added.

Huhtamo has spent the past decade working on a book titled “Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles,” which is a history of moving panoramas. Popular in the 19th century, panoramas were large paintings of battle scenes or exotic locations that would surround the audience on a viewing platform, Huhtamo said.

“The topic of the book is so little known and there is very little reliable scholarship out there,” he added.

Lauren Yang, a fourth-year psychobiology student, has taken an introduction to media culture fiat lux course with Huhtamo and is currently enrolled in his honors collegium course on cross-cultural approaches to media history.

She said Huhtamo brought in archival footage of old television shows to share with his fiat lux class, such as a Brazilian show from the 1990s that allowed viewers to call in to vote for the outcome of its characters.

“It was very similar to ‘American Idol,’ which I thought was a new and novel concept,” she said. “Professor Huhtamo shows how you can dig into the past and bring media forms back to make them apply to modern time.”

One of Huhtamo’s magic lanterns.
One of Huhtamo’s magic lanterns.

Huhtamo said he also gives magic lantern shows, which were typical during the Victorian era, to provide an alternative way of teaching about media forms instead of a lecture format. The shows involve projecting colored slides through the lantern with music or dramatic readings of the images.

“I want to see how I can identify with the showmen of the past and re-enact that kind of experience,” he said.

This concern with preserving the past, as well as media forms that have been suppressed or forgotten within the narrative of media history, is the same concern that defines his collecting habit.

“If I don’t buy it, it will disappear forever. I’ll never see it again,” he said.

Huhtamo refers to his method of collecting pieces from the past like the magic lanterns as a “secret science” within a loose network of researchers, collectors, and enthusiasts.

“It (the collection) is quite a gem that nobody knows about,” Lunenfeld said.

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Alexa Smahl
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