Event

Mareorama Resurrected

The Velaslavasay Panorama is pleased to welcome renowned media scholar and collector Erkki Huhtamo, here to present an illustrated lecture and demonstration focusing on the most magnificent moving panorama spectacle ever staged - Hugo d'Alesi's Maréorama, an illusionistic sea voyage on the Mediterranean, which was originally presented at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900.

It was also to be one of the last of its kind, a magnificent culmination and ending to a form of entertainment that was once one of the most popular storytelling traditions, performed throughout the 1800's. Professor Huhtamo's lecture places the Maréorama within the history of the moving panorama tradition, which in itself is an artistic offshoot of the enormous, stationary panorama installations so popular throughout the 19th century.

That is not all: the Professor presents a reconstruction of several sequences of the Maréorama, based on illustrations preserved in his own collection, to be accompanied by the original piano music composed for Maréorama by the then well-known saloon composer Henri Kowalski which will be heard here for the first time in more than 110 years!

Erkki Huhtamo works as Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA. He holds a Ph. D. in Cultural History. He has published extensively on media archaeology, an emerging approach he has pioneered. It excavates forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to penetrate beyond canonized accounts of media culture. Professor Huhtamo has applied this approach to peep media, stereoscopy, the notion of the screen, the moving panorama, electronic games and mobile media. He has also written about the ways in which media artists have integrated media-archaeological elements into their works. Professor Huhtamo's most recent books are Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (co-edited with Jussi Parikka, University of California Press, 2011) and a forthcoming monograph titled Illusions in Motion: a Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles.