This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old
art form theatre has always embraced ¿new¿ media. To create theatrical effects and optical
illusions theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies
and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics
optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked
relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the
interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces the authors
assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This
archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment
of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains
as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need to be preserved the authors stress the
return of the past in the present but in a different performative guise.
