Confirmed speakers

Painted glass slides are fragile miniatures painted by hand on flat glass supports for projection with magic lanterns. Following the development of the magic lantern as the first optical instrument of projection in the mid-seventeenth century, the production and use of painted glass slides achieved their apogee during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This lecture will address the materials and techniques used in hand-painted slides in Europe and North America until the nineteenth century, based on written historical sources and material characterization studies. From the choice of glass support to the painting materials and techniques, we will trace their evolution across time and place, aiming to deepen our understanding of the slides' historical, cultural, and artistic impact.

These artefacts frequently present significant conservation problems, mainly due to the deterioration of the painting and its detachment from the glass support. In this session, we will also discuss the importance of reproducing magic lantern slides while addressing its challenges.

With a performative and practical component, students will have the opportunity to witness and participate in the production of magic lantern slides in real time while learning about contemporary alternatives to traditional methods and materials.

This lecture introduces immersive optical media through a media-archaeological perspective. It deals with how archival investigation, combined with hands-on work with historical devices, can illuminate forms of optical mediation that remain insufficiently examined within existing histories of visual culture. By embedding these technologies in their broader cultural contexts, the session introduces the concept of a culture of display as a framework for understanding display technologies, ranging from magic lantern spectacles to cosmoramas and stereoscopes. It argues that, over the long nineteenth century, images increasingly emerged as objects designed for presentation through display technologies, thereby reshaping the conditions of visual experience.

Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau’s PhD research (1829) into retinal persistence led him to develop hand-painted colour disc experiments that are often overlooked in histories of science and the moving image due to the now-discredited theory of retinal persistence. As an artist-researcher, I engaged directly with Plateau’s hand-painted discs at Ghent University Museum and later developed a series of creative reconstructions based on his colour disc experiments. This practice-led investigation culminated in the artwork Plateau’s Dream, offering new insight into the significance of these discs for expanded animation and media archaeology. The research explores how Plateau’s experiments embody a form of ‘proto-animation thinking’ and how both his conceptualization and materialization of transitional states resonate with the animation concept of metamorphosis. The development of Plateau’s Dream revealed parallels between Plateau’s analogue discs and digital moving image techniques, while also serving as a tool for speculating on how his experiments inadvertently generated a harmonics of virtual colour.

This workshop invites participants to engage hands-on with these speculative reconstructions. Through rotating the discs, participants will observe the emergence of virtual colours, explore the impact of rotational speed, and experiment with varying ratios and hues across Plateau’s key colours – yellow, red, blue, and white. The session also offers opportunity to contrast the perceptual mixing of painted colour via rotation, with traditional pigment blending, and compare the colour discs with Plateau’s later phenakistoscope designs. This firsthand (and fun!) engagement offers a unique opportunity to reanimate historical experiments and reflect on their relevance to contemporary visual culture.

Objects of wonder-making are heterogeneous, practice-oriented, and situated in diverse cultural contexts. They carry socio-historical relevance that requires not only an informative understanding but also an experience-based one. These objects do not reside quietly in their material condition; rather, they possess an affordance - an agency - that becomes perceptible when they are placed in a context where they can be experienced through this affordance. Simply observing a historical puppet as it lies inert in an acid-free archival box in a collection fails to realize its capacity for being seemingly alive. As the puppet lies in its coffin, its materiality still lingers with the spectacle it once represented, yet it remains dormant precisely because of that same materiality - its fragility.

Computational technologies can offer some relief from this conundrum. Computers are not merely universal calculators but also powerful media machines - a fact that computer games have demonstrated repeatedly over the years. Game engines, their extensions, and related technologies provide a toolkit for leveraging the affordances of computers to create experiences that enable a mode of inquiry aimed at understanding the affordances of objects of wonder and wonder-making through models and modeling.

This presentation will focus on this moment, where these affordances intersect, drawing on cultures of wonder such as Turkish Shadow Theatre, the Laterna Magica, Costumes of Bauhaus, and others.

Date: 6 July 2026
Time: 4.30 - 5.30 pm
Location: TBC, Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerp (University of Antwerp city campus)

Media archaeology originated in the Western world, more specifically in Europe. Is it possible to break out from its Eurocentric origins and Western focal points to practice it from glocal (global + local) perspectives? How can its principles be applied to non-Western contexts, and to cross-cultural exchanges of ideas and motifs? These are questions cultural anthropologists are familiar with, but media scholars have barely touched upon. This lecture tackles them by concentrating on the migrations of topoi, culturally coded commonplaces, across cultural and ethnic boundaries. What happens when a topos crosses a linguistic, racial, and ideological border? Who controls it? How do topoi react to language barriers, divergent behavioral norms and code systems, and incompatible visual traditions, values, attitudes, and ideologies? These unresolved issues are among the most crucial media archaeologists are currently facing. 

The popular anatomy museum was a staple of nineteenth-century funfair attractions. Inside, visitors encountered the secrets of human anatomy, as well as the grotesque sights of sick and extraordinary bodies. Their rich displays offered spectacle, as well as knowledge.

The moving image did not first emerge on a linear strip of film, but on a spinning cardboard disc. Invented by Joseph Plateau in 1832 and, almost simultaneously, by Simon Stampfer in 1833, the phenakistiscope marked a crucial step in both understanding and demonstrating the basic principles of motion perception. It has since become a staple ingredient in any account of the advent of cinema. Yet, despite its ubiquitous presence in books and museum displays, it remains an object that most media scholars have never experienced with their own hands and eyes.

The phenakistiscope’s shift from a functioning object to a historical concept has favoured a reading centred on sequentiality and the shutter mechanism. Its inherent circularity tends to be overlooked within a teleological narrative, or treated merely as a technical limitation. However, historical phenakistiscope animations reveal that the circular format produces its own logic of motion, at the level of both perception and creation.

Early abstract animations from the 1830s – preceding abstract painting by more than seven decades – serve as a starting point for a hands-on exploration of visual rhythm through a circular logic. Participants will construct their own phenakistiscope and create a custom animation for it, discovering through practice how rotation, repetition, and cyclic form generate motion in ways that linear media cannot. Rather than merely observing an early optical device, we will experiment with its affordances – revealing the phenakistiscope not as a precursor to cinema, but as a captivating medium in its own right.

In this session, Hannah Welslau and Tim Overkempe illustrate the close (inter)connectedness and overlap between performing new media experiments and supernatural demonstrations at the turn of the nineteenth century. Around this time, clairvoyants such as Madame Blanche performed magnetic shows in fairground establishments alongside novel technological marvels like X-rays, telegraphy, and the phonograph. But how were these different approaches combined into one show?

Using new media technologies, showpeople did not only popularize new scientific innovations through their multimedia spectacles but also circulated ideas about magic and the supernatural. In real-life demonstrations, they sparked interest about these topics and excited the public’s eyes, ears, and bodies in their interactive shows.

In the nineteenth century, audiences were particularly receptive to the idea that invisible forces shaped the world around them. Just as electricity, sound waves, or magnetism revealed powerful yet unseen energies, occult forces could likewise be imagined as immaterial agents capable of producing tangible effects. If the former were proven to be true, why not the latter? This broader cultural openness allowed supernatural phenomena and scientific marvels to be presented side by side, staged by the performers to reinforce one another’s credibility.

In this workshop, participants are invited to bring travel souvenirs, which are approached as mediums for memories and meanings. Together, these objects will become the collection, which will be used to experiment with display and curatorial practices, examining how objects are loaded and unloaded through specific performance, display, or other means. In doing this, we will shed light on how museological processes transform everyday things into museum objects, negotiating their meanings by limiting or inviting multiple readings.

The GUM (Ghent University Museum) positions itself as a “forum for science, doubt, and imagination,” a framing that radically shifts how science museum objects operate within the institutional ecology of knowledge. Rather than presenting scientific artefacts as stable carriers of truth, the GUM foregrounds their epistemic instability, their narrative multiplicity, and their embeddedness in wider socio-cultural networks. This presentation explores how museum objects at the GUM are performatively activated: how they trigger doubt and invite reflexive engagement through curatorial strategies that acknowledge the 'constructedness' of knowledge.

The GUM treats objects not as passive specimens but as actors capable of shaping thought, affect, and discourse. Through scenography, juxtaposition, storytelling, and the explicit thematizing of doubt, GUM objects perform scientific reasoning as an open, iterative, and human practice. They create encounters that destabilize authority while simultaneously making room for curiosity, resistance, and co-creation.

Performative activation of the displayed object in the GUM fosters a relational mode of science communication: one in which objects mediate between researcher, visitor, and institutional narrative. These activations reveal not only what objects are, but what they do: how they mobilize imaginaries, memories, and ethical questions.

The presentation argues that this performative approach enables the science museum to evolve into a reflexive space where scientific knowledge is not merely transmitted but continuously negotiated. In this model, the museum object becomes a catalyst for critical engagement, shaping publics for science while keeping space open for doubt, ambiguity, and plurality.

Relict: A Phantasmagoria is an experimental documentary performed with antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation. Invoking the history of magic lantern phantasmagoria as an exercise in belief and perception, Relict considers the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, fake news, religion, and documentary ethics collapsed within contemporary cryptozoology. Adapting modern cryptozoological lore to hand-drawn magic lantern slides, Relict employs the visual language of phantasmagoria through slides based on antique designs, including rackwork slides and dissolving views. These slides are infused with the aesthetics of veracity in current nonfiction filmmaking, including CGI speculative animated documentary, thermal imaging, and interventions of rotoscoped documentary re-enactment. Inspired by the magic lantern’s historical role as a tool for scientific lectures, Relict wanders through histories of documentary animation used to visualize and legitimize monstrous creatures. The performance is nested in a collage of soundscapes, including interviews with Dr. Brian Regal (Kean University), a historian of science on the politics of skepticism in cryptozoology; a recent creationist sermon; and excerpts of pseudoscientific wildlife documentaries.

​More information about the performance.

​Free admission, but registration required through this link. Registrations will close once we reach maximum capacity. Thank you for your understanding!

​Date: 8 July 2026
Time: 4.30 - 5.30 pm
Location: TBC, Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerp (University of Antwerp city campus)

How have performative cultures shaped sonic media and ways of listening? How can we access the roles that sensory experience has played in histories of knowledge production?  

This talk embarks on living histories of sound in the nineteenth century. We will engage these questions in a media archaeological exploration of listening. During the nineteenth century, acoustic experience changed radically. New scientific research, technologies, and artistic experimentations intertwined to create different understandings of sonic phenomena. An important development of this acoustic modernity was the elaboration of technical devices that amplified, recorded, transduced, and visualized sounds. 

My research looks at the crucial role that performances of listening had in shaping, sharing, and substantiating this sonic knowledge. One had to learn to listen differently for the phonographs, telephones, earphones, and microphones to work at all. Addressing traditions of interplay between performative cultures and media developments, this talk focuses on how theatres, scientific demonstrations, and industrial exhibitions staged modes of mediatized listening. I’ll share my re-enactment practices by reconstructing a little-known sound media called the theatrophone. Engaging performative and multi-modal approaches, I’ll reveal the bodily choreographies, the sensory skills, and the scenographic tools that were used to help people make sense of new sonic worlds. One aim is to reflect on what modes of artistic research help bring attention to overlooked material, sensory and affective traces of past media, and how such traces might be engaged for examining listening practices today.

In the first part of the workshop I will briefly introduce my work as an intercultural multimedia performance artist and academic, focusing on my Doctorate of Creative Arts (DCA) project "Troppo Obscura: A Peep Show of Historical Perversity" (University of Technology, Sydney), presented here for its relevance to the Summer School. This project combined multimedia installation and fictocritical writing to interrogate colonial and contemporary entanglements between the global North and South. Framed within Victorian aesthetics and high Empire, Troppo Obscura examined technologies of surveillance and control – camera, museum cabinet, Expositions Universelles, and the peepshow – as sites of epistemic violence. Drawing on archival film from Indonesia and ethnographic research in Cirebon, it unfolded as an Australian-Indonesian collaboration across visual art, sound, performance, and scholarship. The lecture situates this work within broader debates on media archaeology, performative culture, and the embodied dimensions of historical knowledge.

Following the lecture, the workshop invites participants to engage with this methodology of artistic research, which for me begins from embodied and affective responses to historical and contemporary phenomena. Participants will experiment with writing and movement as modes of registering their situated subject positions and relational entanglement with selected media technologies – either those provided or brought into the session. Through these embodied exercises, participants will explore how affect, aesthetics, and fictocritical writing can serve as translational bridges between sensory experience and theoretical reflection. The workshop aims to foster critical experimentation with media as historical source and living presence, aligning with the Summer School’s ethos of questioning, performing, and re-imagining the materiality of media across time.

I will use experiential media archaeology to question persistent academic myths about the camera obscura as an Enlightenment epistemological figure. I invite participants to re-experience media artefacts that explore alternatives to the idea that seeing is viewing perspective paintings on the retina. These include dynamic viewers such as Kepler’s rotating camera obscura and optical machines for hybrid projections that widened the angle of view well beyond the 60º of the fixed perspectival eye. We will examine the theatrical coulisse: its use in optical boxes and sometimes in glass with concave mirrors. These exploit motion-parallax and variations in focus. In all cases the visual is not an image but a temporal flow of visual-tactile sensations that the mind re-constructs as spatial experience.

This mysterious process of construction, that many likened to the hidden machinery of theatre illusions, was seized upon by philosophers like Descartes and Berkeley who drove home its skeptical implications for empiricist epistemology. Commitment to empiricism made other theorists hesitant or willfully blind to these new ideas. The dominant paradigm had its own seductions, which we will explore: Brunelleschi’s proof of the truth of perspective, and Hoogstraten’s demonstration (and implicit critique) of perspective’s reliance on a fixed point of sight.

Finally, we will consider an anti-camera obscura – a projection device that was Kant’s metaphor for the constructive work of the mind. Familiarity with now-forgotten artefacts brings into sharper view the critiques of the camera obscura paradigm, perhaps stated more boldly in the experiments of artisans whose main interest was in what works.

In this session, Hannah Welslau and Tim Overkempe illustrate the close (inter)connectedness and overlap between performing new media experiments and supernatural demonstrations at the turn of the nineteenth century. Around this time, clairvoyants such as Madame Blanche performed magnetic shows in fairground establishments alongside novel technological marvels like X-rays, telegraphy, and the phonograph. But how were these different approaches combined into one show?

Using new media technologies, showpeople did not only popularize new scientific innovations through their multimedia spectacles but also circulated ideas about magic and the supernatural. In real-life demonstrations, they sparked interest about these topics and excited the public’s eyes, ears, and bodies in their interactive shows.

In the nineteenth century, audiences were particularly receptive to the idea that invisible forces shaped the world around them. Just as electricity, sound waves, or magnetism revealed powerful yet unseen energies, occult forces could likewise be imagined as immaterial agents capable of producing tangible effects. If the former were proven to be true, why not the latter? This broader cultural openness allowed supernatural phenomena and scientific marvels to be presented side by side, staged by the performers to reinforce one another’s credibility.