Tuesday 21 June 2022, 6.30pm
Join us for a presentation of Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022) with author Massimo Riva.
The event will focus on Giambattista Belzoni, an amateur archeologist born in Padua in 1778, who migrated to England in search of fortune in 1802 and who, in 1817 “discovered” the burial place of Pharaoh Seti I in The Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Belzoni then set up the exhibition “The Tomb,” at Egyptian Hall, in London, in 1821, and it was a perfect facsimile of two rooms from the burial place.
On the centenary of this exhibition, we will host the presentation of Riva’s book, Shadow Plays, which explores popular forms of entertainment used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, and XR). Typically studied as part of the prehistory of cinema or the archaeology of media, analog technologies such as the mondo nuovo or cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope evoked shadow copies of our world long before the advent of digital technologies and exercised a powerful pull on minds and imaginations.
Through six case histories and eight interactive simulations (one of them being the Belzoni exhibit), Massimo Riva explores themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination, shedding light on illustrious or, in some instances, forgotten figures and inventions from Italy’s past. Arguing for the continuity of experience and imagination, Riva adopts the term virtual realism, an experience marked by the virtualization of the real and the realization of the virtual. At a time when the gap between simulations and “real” experiences is getting ever smaller, a cultural-historical exploration of the prehistory of virtual reality can help us better understand the present in light of the past while exploring the past using the tools forged in the present.
Massimo Riva is Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. He has published several books on literary maladies and national identity, post-humanism and the hyper-novel, and literature in the digital age. He is the editor of the Yale anthology Italian Tales and the co-editor of the Cambridge edition of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration On Human Dignity. Among his recent collaborative initiatives, a series of interactive installations of the Garibaldi moving panorama were featured in library and museums in Brazil, Italy and the U.K.
The Italian Cultural Institute will not admit anyone showing covid-19 symptoms such as a continuous cough, a cold and a temperature. You are strongly invited to wear face covering during events, maintain social distancing and use wall-unit sanitizers, as a matter of courtesy to the clinically vulnerable. We keep windows open whenever possible to ensure ventilation and thoroughly clean our rooms before and after each event. Thank you for your co-operation.
We reserve the right not to admit any late comers.