Pictorial Multimodality and the Case of the Lantern Lectures

Multimodality has in the last couple of decades been recognized as the new norm of the digital age. The term has broadly come to stand for how image, text, moving image, and so on, interact on the digital screen. This article investigates a media-historical practice of image projections before digital media, lantern lectures, in which still images were intermixed with texts of different kinds as well as with light, sequence and scale operations. The objective is to use the media-historical case of the lantern lectures to shed light on pictorial multimodality avant la lettre in order to discuss what this implies for our knowledge position towards the multimodal norm of the present. Additionally, the study’s focus on pictorial multimodality continues the analysis in the field of image studies of what an image is and develops a discussion about the transgressive relation between pictures and the concepts used to denote them.