Erkki Huhtamo

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 life. The most famous balloon panorama was the Aeronautikon! (1836) that was based on recent record‐breaking aerial flight by Charles Green and his company. This article analyses the aesthetics of the Aeronautikon by resorting to a variety of contemporary sources. It also compares the balloon panorama with contemporary accounts of balloon flights in an effort to understand its challenges to perception, and the strategies of the evolving media culture.

Penetrating the peristrephic: An unwritten chapter in the history of the panorama

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 beginnings, excavating the careers of showmen like Messrs Marshall and J.B. Laidlaw. It then explains the forms the shows took by engaging in a close reading of contemporary descriptions – in particular, the one by the German prince Hermann Pueckler‐Muskau. The article proceeds to discuss some of the discursive manifestations the peristrephic panorama gave rise to, illuminating its position within the wider cultural fabric. The study shows that the peristrephic panorama had a character of its own as a transitionary form between the static circular panoramas and the later moving panorama shows.

Focus on Media Art Histories

This report reviews ‘REFRESH! The First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology’ held at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, from 28 September to 1 October 2005. The event dealt with the interconnections between media art, science and technology, although its mission was not absolutely clear. As the review points out, there was some vagueness in defining the goals, partly related to its interdisciplinary nature. The review then places the event within a cultural and institutional context and discusses plans to turn it into a continuing tradition.

The Brown-Urban-Joy Spirograph: A postscript

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).

The dream of personal interactive media: A media archaeology of the Spirograph, a failed moving picture revolution

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 market, primarily for educational use, following his return to the United States in 1916. This article charts the failure of this form of non-theatrical moving pictures, examining their place within traditions of didactic ideals about visual education, including the notion of a ‘living book of knowledge’. It also relates the Spirograph to a variety of media genealogies, identifying its important place in a history of ‘proto-interactive’ media machines and as a harbinger of future forms of database exploration.

Robo Renga: Or a Tele-Discussion about Art and Robotics

demonstrates the extent to which robotics has inspired artists since the 1960s. Of course, one might claim that this happened even earlier, if one were to include the tradition of ’bachelor machines’, motorised devices like Moholy-Nagy’s LichtRaum-Modulator (’Light Prop’), or the use of the image of the robot in earlier artworks, such as the collages by Eduardo Paolozzi that Jasia Reichardt mentions in her Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction.3 And in his classic Beyond Modern Sculpture Jack Burnham tried to show how robotic art could be seen as a continuation of the anthropomorphic trends in Western sculpture.d

The official opening of the InterCommunication Centre, West Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, April 1997 and its inaugural exhibitions

have encountered those three letters frequently at media festivals, in booklets, on posters, in publications, and on the web. ICC has variously described itself as a ’museum of the future’ or an ’interface between art and techno-science’. But what these slogans really meant remained a mystery, until the secret was finally unveiled in April 1997 when ICC, or the InterCommunication Centre (http://www.ntticc.or.ip), opened its doors to the public in West Shinjuku, Tokyo.

What we did in a virtual jury- a renga

Selecting artists’ works for inclusion in galleries and exhibitions is a difficult process at the best of times: getting the jurors and the work together in one place at one time can be a problem. Liaising over the Internet offers a possible solution. Erkki Huhtamo, formerly from the University of Lapland, Finland, and now an independent researcher and curator, and Machiko Kusahara from the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics, Japan, discussed on-line the advantages and disadvantages of the virtual jury.