Media shape our dreams. Technologies give way to worlds that are absent, distant, lost, desired, feared, or still to come. They bring ghosts into the room, make images move, resurrect past worlds, conjure foreign lands, and promise forms of communication that do not exist (yet). Long before a technology becomes ordinary, or even technically possible, it may already exist as an image, a fantasy, or a desire.
Technics of the Imaginary explores this entanglement of media and imagination. Optical toys, panoramas, magic lanterns, stereoscopes, telecommunication and contemporary immersive media all emerged within cultures of expectation and wonder. Modernity did not simply replace enchantment with rationality, its technologies became interfaces with precisely those things that seemed beyond immediate reach: distant cultures and vanished pasts, invisible forces and interior worlds, the dead, the future. A machine could be an instrument of scientific demonstration and a vehicle of transformation at the same time.
Taking a cue from Eric Kluitenberg’s archaeology of imaginary media, we also look beyond technologies that worked and survived – to abandoned inventions, impossible machines, technological myths and unrealised futures. Old media, meanwhile, often return in new technological forms. Media history appears less as a linear succession of inventions than as a field of detours and forgotten possibilities. Imaginaries themselves travel: across periods and cultures, between science and spectacle, dream and device.
Such journeys were never innocent. Technologies that seemed to bring the world within reach also helped to order it. Panoramas, colonial exhibitions, ethnographic photography, travel images, and popular spectacles made distant peoples and territories visible through European categories of knowledge and desire. The programme therefore asks whose worlds are imagined, and brings colonial histories into dialogue with non-Western and glocal perspectives.
Across five days, participants will explore these questions through lectures, discussions, performances, collections and hands-on experimentation. Morning sessions provide historical and theoretical perspectives; afternoons move towards objects, practices and experiments. Operating a magic lantern, looking through a Kaiserpanorama, reconstructing an optical effect or working with an obsolete device is not simply an exercise in historical reconstruction. The devices are treated as material traces of ways of seeing, knowing, desiring and imagining otherwise.
Target group
The Summer School is aimed at research MA and PhD students, artistic researchers, and more advanced scholars working in Arts, Performance, Media, Visual Culture, Cultural History, and related fields, both at the University of Antwerp and at universities and schools of arts internationally.
Prerequisites: Background (obtained BA) in the field of Arts, Performance, Media or Cultural History or the History of Science, Knowledge and Technology.
This course is conducted in English.
Campus
This summer school takes place at Stadscampus (Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp) of the University of Antwerp. This campus is located in the city centre.
Micro-credential and study credits (ECTS)
Successful completion of the summer school can be awarded with 6 credits according to the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Credits will be awarded by the University of Antwerp based on attending all sessions, preparing a poster pitch on a "Dead medium" and presenting this during the summer school, and submitting a 4000-word written assignment.
To include the credits in the curriculum at the home institution, participants need an agreement with the responsible person at their university. University of Antwerp students eligible to include the ECTS credits as part of their study programme must register via Mobility Online and SisA.
All certificates of completion are issued as a micro-credential. Participants who attend the scheduled course contact hours, but don't complete the tasks will receive a certificate of attendance.
Learning outcomes
- Knowledge of a variety of concepts, methods, and approaches in the fields of cultural and performance studies and the histories of science, knowledge and media.
- Knowledge of most important key texts on science performance and the circulation of knowledge
- A greater understanding of how performance played a crucial role in the circulation of science, knowledge and visual culture and shaped modern Western culture.
- Acknowledgement of overlooked relations and prehistories of so-called ‘new’ media by considering the interplay between present-day media performances and the archaeological traces they carry.