Media Digging: Erkki Huhtamo

Erkki Huhtamo is a new media archeologist, curator, and Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA. He was a guest lecturer at MIT on Monday November 15, 2004.
Media experiences have often been associated with fixed locations. Erkki Huhtamo brings up that in recent decades, media experiences have begun to “break out” from fixed locations, taking place in all kinds of intermediate spaces. He discusses how mobile phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, MP3 players and pocket game consoles are changing the ways we conceive communication, mobility, social space and the formation of identity.
Contrasting new media devices with hand fans, cameras, watches, and even clothing, Huhtamo points to a continuity of, if not the technologies, then the ways that people have thought about and used and reacted to personal devices. At once informative, entertaining, and charmingly obsessive, Huhtamo mesmerized us with his magic lantern show.