(29 August – 1 September 2017, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
DEADLINE: 31 JANUARY 2017
The magic lantern was an important visual entertainment and means of instruction in nineteenth-century Europe and its former colonies; it was used in popular and academic teaching until the 1950s. However, despite its pervasiveness across multiple scientific, educational and popular contexts, magic lantern slides remain under-researched.
The project and the conference engage with magic lantern slides on several levels:
- studying the historical importance of magic lantern slides, projection apparatus, readings, and other paraphernalia as tools in the history of learning in a wide range of fields
- exchanging archival practices and discussing tools for cataloguing, archiving and giving access to magic lantern slides held in heritage institutions and other collections
- stimulating the re-use of this form of cultural heritage in scholarly, artistic, documentary, cultural and other creative practices.
The conference will present and discuss the outcomes of the Million Pictures project and share them with all those interested in the magic lantern and lantern slides from a scholarly, historical, archival, curatorial, artistic, museological, educational or practical point of view. It will also provide a platform for both presenting ongoing scholarly research on the magic lantern, with an emphasis on lantern slides as a teaching tool as well as for presenting activities in the fields of archiving and creative re-use.
A keynote will be given by media historian Prof. Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA – Design Media Arts / Film, Television, and Digital Media) and a closing statement by Prof. Vanessa Toulmin (University of Sheffield / Research Director of the National Fairground Archive). The programme will also contain magic lantern performances, roundtables and demonstrations.
The conference invites scholars, practitioners in the heritage sector, in the creative industries, in the arts and in cultural/museum education to participate and submit a contribution.