Media Archeology at The Early Visual Media Website

Interested in early forms of multimedia? Then check out The Early Visual Media Website which showcases the precursors to today's multimedia, virtual reality, and time-based media techniques but opens its gates to "all media where people try to reconstruct the visible world around us for artistic and/or entertainment purposes." According to the site's author, Thomas A.E. Weynants, archivist at Ghent University, viewing the variety of "wondrous devices...opens a lot of opportunities for research and discovering in the field of Media Archeology." He admittedly focuses on the more spectacular examples of early visual media. The site is rather confusingly displayed but on the left hand side there is some clear sorting: of Pre-cinema, Photography, Early Film, Television, Fairground Art, Conjuring Arts, and Death Dance. One can also find an extensive list of links to other sites on the web divided into useful categories such as Pre-cinema and optical toys, Chronophotography, 19th Century photography, Daguerreotypes, Stereotography, Fair and vaudeville, Prestidigitation and illusions, Physical culture, the History of television, and others.