Recent research on useful media has stressed the transnational networks and infrastructures of production and exhibition. In the case of educational films and slides, this transnational dimension has often been subsumed into research on international organisations and initiatives, while relatively little attention has been paid to smaller-scale bi- or trilateral collaborations between sets of national organizations that were often instrumental to pursuing such international bodies‘ goals. In my presentation, I propose to provide an alternative perspective on the transnational history of educational image projection in postwar Europe by investigating the Austrian-Turkish collaboration on educational media production, distribution and projection in the early 1950s. This collaboration was instigated by UNESCO as a mission for Austrian experts in educational media to guide Turkey’s development of an infrastructure for classroom image projection in the context of the organisation’s cold war doctrine of educational mass media as a key to liberal democracy. While following the core script of an UNESCO mission of developmental support, the collaboration – as documented in media reports, institutional records and resulting media objects – betrays an entangled relation of self and other, as well as of political, organisational and business interests between the involved agencies.

Most crucially for the purposes of the conference, the division of labor between film and slide projection is a central element of the Turkish-Austrian collaboration: In the developmental logic of quickly bringing visual education to the countryside, slides took pride of place. In a bid to offer tailor-made equipment for classroom slide projection without electricity, two Austrian companies were brought in to produce models of petroleum lamp projectors. These models were called NUR-Petroleum and Türkilux (both 1952), the latter brand name strikingly combining projection technology and the ideological project of ‘enlightening’ another nation. Elaborating on my recent research into the media ecology of Austrian classroom projectors in the 1950s, I aim to use the Austrian-Turkish collaboration to demonstrate the close relation between the poetics of educational slides and films, the design of projection technology and the educational dispositifs addressed, and inflected, by these media.