Afterword: A Variantology of Hands-On Practice

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/articles/9593tw35m

Abstract

The essays in this special issue offer us compelling and inventive pedagogical strategies for effectively transporting artefacts and technological media from the past to the present and even for transporting our experiences of contemporary media from the present to (the recreation of) a possible experience in the past. In short, these strategies are relevant for any scholar working with technological media in a historical register from within any field and any time period. From Meredith Bak’s details of her playful media archaeological experimentations with optical toys in the classroom to Peter J. Bloom’s delving into the vectors of meaning that emerge from juxtapositions of media artefacts in collections, Christina Corfield’s account of paper-based reconstructions of optical devices, Robby Gilbert’s narrative about how he reveals the mechanisms behind the illusion of movement by excavating basic principles of movement and time in the zoetrope, and Gert Jan Harkema and André Rosendaal’s argument for the importance of classroom activities that rely on touch via Virtual Reality as a way to teach film, all provide us with ways to give students or, broadly speaking, users an alternate access point to history other than through more well-worn methods of narrativization via text or images.

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