Intersubjectivity: media metaphors, play & provocation

6th international Vilém Flusser symposium
& event series

march 15-19 1997 budapest hungary



Erkki Huhtamo
lecturer

Erkki Huhtamo (born 1958 in Helsinki, Finland) is an unaffiliated media researcher, writer and curator. His specialities include media archeology and media art.
Published numerous studies and scholarly articles in eleven languages.
He has also lectured widely and presented papers at symposia and festivals in Europe, Japan, the United States, Canada and Australia.
His most recent book is "The Archaeology of the Moving Image" (in Finnish, 1996).
His credits also include three television series (as director and script-writer) and radio programs.
He has curated several international exhibitions of interactive art in Finland and elsewhere.
He was a member of the international selection committee of the MILIA multimedia festival (Cannes, 1995-96) and is member of the Young Talent Pavillion Jury (MILIA 1997).
He is one of the international nominators for the ICC Biennale (Tokyo 1997). He also served as a jury member for Interactive Media Festival (Los Angeles 1995) and the "Portraits in Cyberspace" web gallery (MIT Media Lab, 1995).


"Elephant in the Keyhole - Media archeological approaches to the history of the screen"
lecture for the Symposium - abstract

Screens with moving figures surround us - facing a television set or sitting in front of a computer display is a banal everyday activity. This has not always been so - indeed, the very idea of the picture screen is a cultural artefact which has its own complex and often paradoxical history.
How, and under what historical, cultural and technological conditions did we come to spend such a great part of our lives in front of all kinds of screens? This lecture looks at the ideas of the screen and the screen practice from a media archeological point of view. The aim is to excavate different antecedents and presuppositions for the 20th century "cultures of the screen". Both actual historical artefacts and purely discursive manifestations of the screen (in science fiction, scientific innovation...) will be discussed, from early peep-show devices to such early 20th century innovations as the Kinora. This discussion will be related to the pre- and early history of the television set.

Intersubjectivity: media metaphors, play & provocation
Advisory Committee:
László Beke, director, Műcsarnok;
Wolfgang Meissner, director, Goethe-Institut Budapest;
Matthias Müller-Wieferig, Goethe-Institut Budapest;
Miklós Peternák, chair of the board, C3;
Zoltán Sebôk, theoretician; J.A.Tillmann, theoretician;
Organizers:Suzanne Mészöly, program director C3
Ágnes Veronika Kovács , program coordinator C3
Adele Eisenstein, program coordinátor C3
See the Goethe-Institut Budapest website on theFlusser Symposium: http://www.goethe.de/ms/bud/depsymp.htm

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