About Erkki Huhtamo

I work as a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in the departments of Design | Media Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media. I grew up in Finland, where I received my doctorate in Cultural History from the University of Turku. I moved to California in 1999 and at present have no plans to return where I came from. Beside researching, teaching, and crisscrossing the world, I enjoy cycling, running, swimming, and growing, roasting, grinding and drinking my own coffee in LA - something I could not even dream about doing in Finland!

I have published extensively on media culture and arts during the past quarter of a century (my early books were in my native tongue Finnish). Media archaeology is an emerging approach within media studies I have pioneered with a number of other scholars since the early 1990s. It excavates forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to penetrate beyond canonized accounts about media culture. I have applied this approach to phenomena like 'peep media' (a notion I have coined), stereoscopy, the screen, electronic games, and mobile media. I also write about contemporary art, and have curated quite a few exhibitions in different countries.

Researching and writing my most recent book, Illusions in Motion (The MIT Press, 2013), was quite an adventure. It took me more than a decade, and made me travel all around the world looking for clues. In fact, practicing media archaeology can be true historical detective work. I hope that the readers of Illusions in Motion will find the results both challenging and inspiring. I always try to be as clear and logical as I possible can, and I pay a lot of attention to style.

I am already actively working on new books which I hope to finish much sooner this time. One of them will discuss "media archaeology as topos study" and another "The Media Apparatus." Yet another work (a kind of follow-up of Illusions in Motion) will penetrate into the fascinating but almost totally unknown history of mechanical theaters.

My latest books were published in early 2015 in Japanese and Italian. The first one is titled "Media Kokogaku - Kako Genzai Mirai no Taiwa no Tameni" (Media Archaeology: Dialogues Between the Past, Present, and Future, trans. Yoshitaka Ota, Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2015) and the latter "Elementi di schermologia. Verso un'archeologia dello schermo" (Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen, trans. Roberto Terrosi, Kaiak Edizioni, 2015). Please check them under my name in Amazon.co.jp and Amazon.it. I have currently no plans to publish these books in English.

Last but not least, I enjoy collecting antique optical devices such as magic lanterns, peep show boxes, phenakistiscopes, praxinoscopes, kinoras and other fascinating things. I use them in my research and teaching, and also to illustrate my books, as you can easily see from the pages of Illusions in Motion. I always search for original historical documents such as broadsides, playbills and posters to add to my collection. As the photos on this page show, I also give magic lantern shows with original nineteenth-century equipment and hand-painted slides, accompanied by musicians and foley sound effect artists!

Please check for news and some glimpses of my media-archaeological collection from my personal webpage: www.erkkihuhtamo.com .

I am always interested in hearing from my readers, so please stay in touch!

Erkki H.