An Intermedial Cabinet of Obscurities: Media-Archaeological Excavations in Performance

This article frames the essay-cluster Theatre, Media, and the Archaeology of Spectacle as an “intermedial cabinet of obscurities” and argues that media archaeology, paired with intermedial performance studies, enables theatre history to be rewritten as relational micro-histories rather than as a single developmental line. Drawing on Huhtamo’s genealogy of cultural topoi, Zielinski’s variantology, and Elsaesser’s fragments as epistemological probes, this text shows how the journal has long hosted archaeological gestures: studies of fireworks, moving panoramas, mechanical theatres, paper theatres, puppetry, and Raszewski’s reading of early peep-show boxes via Furttenbach. Methodologically, the article combines close readings of these interventions with an account of perceptual dispositives informed by Crary’s claim that vision is historically organized through shifting assemblages.