Susan Daitch & Erkki Huhtamo

Speculative Media Histories / Writing Early Film History Otherwise

January 16, 2020, 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Price Center Theater, UC San Diego

Susan Daitch (Hunter College), talk and reading from Paper Conspiracies (City Lights, 2011), a novel about a film restorer who finds herself caught up in political intrigue around the Georges Mlis serial re-enactment of the Dreyfus Affair.

Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA Design Media Arts), talk and presentation on The Charles Urban Spirograph and the Dream of Interactive Cinema. The spirograph, not to be  confused with the drawing toy, is an early 20th century home motion picture viewing device that never made it to the market.  

Susan Daitch is the author of six novels including White Lead (Random House, 2016), Lost Civilization of Suolucidir (City Lights, 2016), The Colorist (Vintage Contemporaries, 1990), and LC (1986) and teaches writing at Hunter College.

Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, exhibition curator, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Departments of Design Media Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media. He is the author of Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (MIT Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Jussi Parikka) of the anthology Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (University of California Press, 2011), as well as numerous articles. He is also the author of numerous books in Finnish, including Virtuaalisuuden arkeologia (The Archaeology of Virtuality, The University of Lapland Press, 1995) and Elvn kuvan arkeologia (The Archaeology of the Moving Image, YLE, Finnish Broadcasting Company Publishing, 1996).