Influenced by the pioneering work of Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), Huhtamo considers "topoi" as formulas that traverse media culture, giving form to changing experiences and interpretations.
To date his main research achievement is the large monograph Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (MIT Press, 2013).
They featured many first rank media artists, including Jeffrey Shaw, David Rokeby, Lynn Hershman, Ken Feingold, Luc Courchesne, and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, among others.
In 1995, he co-curated Digital Mediations for Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and was a member of the International Organizing Committee of The Interactive Media Festival, Los Angeles.
Huhtamo's largest curatorial effort to date has been the major exhibition Outoäly /Alien Intelligence (2000), which he created for the recently opened Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art[8] in Helsinki.
[9] Several new interactive media art installations were produced with the museum's support for this exhibition, including The Giver of Names by David Rokeby, Head (now in Kiasma's permanent collection) by Ken Feingold, and Autopoiesis by Kenneth Rinaldo.
Huhtamo appeared as an expert on the magic lantern in an episode of Storage Wars, in which a part of his personal collection of media archaeological objects can be seen.
[11] The imagery consisted of a large number of "ride films" from the early silent cinema to contemporary theme parks, edited down into a four-minute super-ride.
At the Ars Electronica festival 2006, Huhtamo performed on stage in a production titled Musings on Hands, which he created together with the American media artists Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (Tmema).
[14] In another stage production, Mareorama Resurrected (2011), Huhtamo impersonates, performing with a pianist and projected images, a nineteenth-century moving panorama showman lost in the twenty-first century.
Ever since the project was launched in the early 1990s, he has collaborated with the NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo Opera City, 1997–), a major institution exhibiting technological art, by giving talks and contributing texts to its publications.
A bibliography can be found from Huhtamo's first Japanese language book Media Kokogaku - Kako Genzai Mirai no Taiwa no Tameni (2015).