Flashing Arcs and Crater-Clouds: Revisiting Volcanology in Southern Italy

American inventor, engineer, and early seismologist, Frank Perret returned to Naples in 1905 with a geological listening aid designed to amplify and record the subterranean soundscape of Mount Vesuvius. Having worked with Thomas Edison in New York, Perret was uncommonly familiar with media technologies of the early 20th century. His seismic audio probe was the first instrument to capture geological vibrations as sound waves, but it was far from the first attempt to register the volcanic activity of Mt. Vesuvius. The Antiquarium of Pompeii opened in 1875, collecting and exhibiting artifacts from ancient Pompeii and its destruction by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Paintings by Pierre-Jacques Volaire from 1771, Joseph Wright of Derby from 1775, and by scores of others, depict eruptions from the 18th century. Perret’s geological auditing instruments added to an existing complex of architectural, museological, and representational systems organized around Italy’s volcanism.

Today, Vesuvius and the other volcanoes of Southern Italy are peppered by an expanded field of research centers, geological stations, and museums of antiquities and volcanology. Following in the footsteps of Perret, this workshop will travel to Southern Italy to register the links between geology, media systems, museums, and the nexus of cultural institutions that intersect with Italy’s volcanoes and its geomorphology. In conversation with recent work on media ecologies, this workshop will propose and test an idea of cultural geology. The workshop will inquire how geology and volcanology have been viewed, heard, measured, described, and understood through cultural institutions and related practices, and how and to what ends traces of these activities have been collected and put on display not only for scientists and engineers but for a wider public. It will ask how these institutions foreground ideas of cultural stability or volatility, of knowledge and its antithesis, against the background of historical and potentially imminent violent and explosive geological activity.

How do histories of environmental risks and natural catastrophes such as volcanic activity manifest not only in the destruction of buildings and of lives but also in a landscape of cultural institutions, as well as artifacts, media, technologies, and social activities?