ABSTRACT
The sessions that combined the projection of images, the recitation of texts and the interpretation of musical melodies reached between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an important socio-cultural relevance at the international level. For their aims, these sessions used a new device that adopted names such as fantascope, megascope, solar microscope or projection lantern, and that gave the name to a very popular social media known under the term ‘magic lantern’. Despite its undoubted influence, the presence of the magic lantern in the academic field has always been residual. Fortunately, for the last two decades, there has been a change of trend enhancing its cultural relevance, largely thanks to the renewal and the thrust introduced by ‘media archeology’. Given the growing scientific interest in an object of study as extensive as the magic lantern, the authors make two fundamental contributions: (a) a brief historical introduction of the magic lantern in Europe based on ten textual references; (b) a theoretical approach from the genetic-cultural in the terms proposed by L.S. Vygotski so as to be able to integrate the magic lantern into a hypothetical ‘mediation archeology’.
