Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Media-Archaeological Approaches to Theatre and Performance: An Introduction

   • Nele Wynants

   Pages 1-19

3. Stage Scenery and Technology

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

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   2. Mechanisms in the Mist: A Media Archaeological Excavation of the Mechanical Theater

      • Erkki Huhtamo

      Pages 23-82

   3. “Rendre réel aux yeux du public”: Stage Craft, Film Tricks, and the Féerie

      • Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk

      Pages 83-98

   4. Vanishing Technology: Transparency of Media in Stage Magic

      • Katharina Rein

      Pages 99-114

   5. Deep Space or the Re-invention of Scenography: Jozef Wouters on Infini 1-15

      • Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Jozef Wouters

      Pages 115-126

4. Embodied Technics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Perfumed Performances: The Reception of Olfactory Theatrical Devices from the Fin-de-siècle to the Present Day

      • Érika Wicky

      Pages 129-143

   3. Performing Astronomy: The Orrery as Model, Theatre, and Experience

      • Kurt Vanhoutte

      Pages 145-172

   4. Capturing Bodies as Objects: Stereography and the Diorama at Work in Kris Verdonck’s ISOS

      • Kristof van Baarle

      Pages 173-191

   5. Robots and Anthropomorphism in Science-Fiction Theatre: From Rebellion to Domesticity and Back Again

      • Kara Reilly

      Pages 193-210

5. Expanded Theatre

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 211-211

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   2. Cinema’s Savoyards: Performativity and the Legacy of the Magic Lantern

      • Edwin Carels

      Pages 213-232

   3. The Art of Anamorphosis: Subverting Representational Conventions and Challenging the Observer

      • Rudi Knoops

      Pages 233-251

   4. Mediated Visions of Life: An Archaeology of Microscopic Theatre

      • Nele Wynants

      Pages 253-272

   5. The (Not So) Deep Time of Social Media Theater: An Afterword

      • Sarah Bay-Cheng

      Pages 273-283

6. Back Matter

   Pages 285-290

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This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced ‘new’ media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need tobe preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.

• Multimedia
• Digital technologies
• Historiography
• Practice
• Innovation
• Contemporary art
• Scenery
• The body
• Film
• Video art
• Dramaturgy

“An exciting collection of essays, this book excavates theatre and theatre’s technologies in tandem with media and media’s theatricalities. Insights from media archaeology are applied to performances past and present even as theatre is recognized as an ongoing, irruptive, and resurgent prehistory for so-called “new” media. This book will be important for scholars across the arts, opening the concept of “deep time” to the study of performance and the history of theatre to media study.” (Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University, USA)

“This is a very well-edited and well-developed collection of articles centered on an exciting, new approach to theatre and performance scholarship. It unearths previously “invisible” examples of intermediality and provides “dramaturgies of difference” that offer a counterpoint to common tropes and anecdotes that have become all too common in media and film studies.” (Kevin Brown, Associate Professor of Digital Media and Performance Studies, University of Missouri, USA)

• Free University of Brussels (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

  Nele Wynants

• University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

  Nele Wynants

Nele Wynants is a postdoctoral researcher in the fields of art and theatre at the Free University of Brussels-ULB and the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her work on the interplay of performance, media history and science have appeared in many journals and books. She is editor-in-chief of FORUM+ for Research and Arts.

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