Abstract
This introductory chapter maps the ground where media archaeology and theatre studies meet. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced “new” media. Literally “a place to observe”, the theatron has been a favoured platform for trying new technologies and scientific objects, including mirrors, electric light, the magic lantern, the théâtrophone, and, more recently, cameras, digital projection devices, and mobile media. Combining approaches and perspectives from both fields, Wynants develops a conceptual frame to unearth previously neglected examples of intermediality. She focuses on the vital relationship between researchers and artists, the particular concern with presence and performativity, and the pivotal role in this context of the archive as a source of discovery and creativity. She urges us to reread contemporary intermedial performance through the looking glass of media-archaeology in order to excavate alternative or forgotten theatre histories.
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Notes
- 1.
Quite a number of authors have tried to outline the field. In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, Huhtamo and Parikka, the editors of the anthology, sketch an overview of different existing approaches and provide the necessary impetus for the field to establish itself more clearly as a discipline. See also Wanda Strauven (2013), Michael Goddard (2014), and Thomas Elsaesser (2006, 2016).
- 2.
Huhtamo elaborated a theoretical and historiographical foundation for his topos approach in “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study” in Huhtamo and Parikka 2011, 27–47. The basis of topos study is due to Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1979. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), trans. Willard R. Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- 3.
Erkki Huhtamo is probably the exception that proves the rule. In his rich and lengthy study of the moving panorama (2013) he gives a detailed account of the performative aspects of the medium, and the many ways contemporary spectators wrote about what he rightly calls a “storytelling medium”. Huhtamo seamlessly intertwines this complex combination of text (performed by a narrator), image, performance and public reception.
- 4.
The limitation to Foucault’s analysis, according to Friedrich Kittler, is that while based entirely on the written archive stored in libraries and other repositories, they do not acknowledge that writing is just one technical medium among others (Goddard 2014, 1766).
- 5.
It has been claimed that the German tradition emphasizes the role of technology as a primum mobile, which has led to accusations of technological determinism.
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Wynants, N. (2019). Media-Archaeological Approaches to Theatre and Performance: An Introduction. In: Wynants, N. (eds) Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99576-2_1
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