Maréorama Resurrected

Presented at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 to jubilant acclaim, Hugo d'Alesi's Maréorama was a  popular spectacle unlike any other produced before or since. A moving panorama experience that patrons took in while lounging on the deck of a ship, the illusion was completed by a highly technical mechanism which gently rocked the ship to and fro. Constantinople, Naples, Venice, and the ancient Tunisian city of Sousse were the lively ports visited on this illustionistic sea excursion around the Mediterranean.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Erkki Huhtamo to The Velaslavasay Panorama, here to present an illustrated lecture and demonstration that will place the Maréorama within the history of the moving panorama storytelling tradition.

The evening will also include a projected reconstruction of several sequences of the Maréorama based on illustrations preserved in his own collection, and will be accompanied by the illustrious Kate Kohler, playing the original piano music composed for the Maréorama by the then well-known saloon composer Henri Kowalski - which will be heard here for the first time in more than 110 years!  

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Erkki Huhtamo works as Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA, and has published extensively on media archaeology, an emerging approach he has pioneered. Professor Huhtamo's most recent books are Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (co-edited with Jussi Parikka, University of California Press, 2011) and a forthcoming monograph titled Illusions in Motion: a Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles.

This illustrated lecture was been made possible in part by the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.