The course aims to lead students in an initial confrontation with the horizon of the archaeology of media devices (particularly those of a visual nature), thus promoting greater knowledge and new awareness of the forms of vision that have anticipated and progressively predisposed many media experiences that have become widespread in the contemporary world.
Course Prerequisites
There are no specific prerequisites (but it may be helpful to have taken courses in film theory and history).
Teaching Methods
The course is structured with frontal lessons conducted in the classroom and includes some screening programmes that will be presented at the Auditorium di San Tommaso. Between the second and third parts of the course, there will be a didactic outing at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, where it will be possible to deal directly with a rich collection of pre-cinematographic machines and devices.
Assessment Methods
The examination will be oral on the course topics.
Texts
Attending students: - Anna Caterina Dalmasso & Barbara Grespi (eds.), Mediarcheologia. I testi fondamentali, Cortina, Milano 2023: only Introduzione (pp. XI-XXXVIII) and two complete sections of your choice (from the four of which the volume is composed). - Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Quando il cinema non c'era. Storie di mirabili visioni, illusioni ottiche e fotografie animate, UTET, Milano 2007. - Digital materials provided by the lecturer during the course.
Not attending students: - Anna Caterina Dalmasso & Barbara Grespi (eds.), Mediarcheologia. I testi fondamentali, Cortina, Milano 2023. - Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Quando il cinema non c'era. Storie di mirabili visioni, illusioni ottiche e fotografie animate, UTET, Milano 2007.
Erasmus students must agree with the lecturer on the programme.
Contents
The course delves into the interdisciplinary research field of media archaeology, a discipline that has evolved over the past decades at the intersection of the history of devices, media studies, theories of perception, and the archaeology of knowledge. By reconstructing our past relationship with ‘old’ media, the course aims to historicize themes and crucial topoi (E. Huhtamo) that are instrumental in shaping our current relationship with ‘new’ ones. The course is divided into three parts: the first will establish the theoretical cornerstones of the discipline; the second, dedicated to cinema, will explore the forms of pre-cinematographic experience promoted by devices such as the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the optical boxes (new world, diorama, kaiser-panorama, etc.), the nineteenth-century ‘philosophical toys’ (phenakistiscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, optical theatre, etc.), up to chronophotographic devices; the third part will initiate media archaeology paths around three media devices that have had a profound impact on the contemporary world: virtual reality viewers, touchscreen displays and wireless devices.
