Between the 25th and 28th of October, virtual and immersive technologies were celebrated with the workshops “Taking Shades and Making Silhouettes” and “Seductive Artefacts: Paradigms of Representation and Perception 1637 – 1860”, which constituted the event “Artistic Research in Optical Media”, programmed within the scope of the PhD in Media and Communication Art and promoted by Filmeu and the Early Visual Media Lab/CICANT.

In the first workshop, Mark and France Osterman showed how to draw silhouettes by casting shadows, using a pantograph. The second, lasting three sessions, took us on an exploratory journey through the ancestors of the virtual worlds that still seduce us. Rod Bantjes and Ana David Mendes demonstrated the potential of cameras obscuras and optical boxes for media artistic investigation.