Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles

Abstract

ILLUSIONS IN MOTION: MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MOVING PANORAMA AND RELATED SPECTACLES By Erkki Huhtamo Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013, 456 pp.Reviewed by Zach MelzerWhen he is not producing programs for Finnish television about history of cinema, recreating moving panorama performances, or appearing as an appraiser of found objects on American television's Storage Wars, Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA, Department of Design Media Arts) is an avid collector of pre-cinema moving image culture. One of largest of its kind, his private collection is made up of numerous optical toys, advertisements, postcards, pamphlets, and other ephemera gathered from Europe and North America, and dating from as far back as eighteenth century. Huhtamo's collection is a time capsule where old visual media imaginations produced both through and about these media are reanimated. Indeed, as his new book Illusions Motion: Media Archaeology of Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles illustrates, Huhtamo is invested very curation of such imaginations. Although he concentrates on one particular medium-the moving panorama-Huhtamo insistently treats it as a discursive object, positioning it within a vibrant multi-media ecology and highlighting multiplicity of forms and usages it has taken. In doing so, book aims to provide an account of a media culture in making that is made up of a multiplicity of technologies, formats, audiences, users, and theories. Throughout, Huhtamo reveals how ideas about moving panorama were shaped by loosely tied links between a host of disparate individuals-artists, performers, inventors, critics, and observers-each serving as cast members an episodic-like narrative set between roughly 1750 and 1900. However, whereas Huhtamo extensively highlights how moving panorama belonged to a heterogenous network of media technologies, practitioners, and evaluators, his argument also flattens social dimensions that put this network of users at play, thereby deflating his more theoretically ambitious goal of understanding how this nineteenth century media culture was formed.As a book concentrating on moving panorama particular, Illusions Motion is a welcome undertaking. As Huhtamo argues, of many other visual apparatuses of this period, moving panorama is among most under-investigated. Conventionally thought of as a side-note accompaniment or an afterthought to studies devoted to nineteenth century visual culture, Huhtamo shows how moving panoramas fact have distinct histories equal importance to those of cyclorama, photography, and cinema. But more than this, Huhtamo posits, moving panoramas reveal how visual cultures of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries functioned integrally complex ways. He writes, the moving panorama's apparatus, its relationship to other media, and its role(s) culture of its time can provide valuable windows for observing media operation.Huhtamo concentrates on moving panorama not simply order to provide a history of this particular device, but also to shed light on how media cultures are moulded, take shape, and inevitably transform over time. He does this by illustrating how moving panoramas were shaped by aspirations and limitations of a multiplicity of different trades and avenues of thought such as painting, theatre, photography, travel, journalism, poetry, science, and philosophy. The book is therefore structured around encounters moving panorama had with other devices at time. Chapters are broken down into episodes with each concentrating on ways moving panoramas crossed paths with other mediapeepshow boxes, cycloramas, dioramas, theatre, phantasmagorias, and photography. Huhtamo thus offers an understanding of moving panorama as one that was assembled by relations made with other media; relations that were guided by a polyphony of skilled professions, each defining and redefining its usages. …