Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to help citizens decide how to vote. They typically offer their users a representation of what is at stake in an election by matching user preferences on issues with those of parties or candidates. While the use of VAAs has boomed in recent years in both established and new democracies, this new phenomenon in the electoral landscape has received little attention from political theorists. The current academic debate is focused on epistemic aspects (...) of the question how a VAA can adequately represent electoral politics. We argue that conceptual and normative presuppositions at play in the background of the tool are at least as important. Even a well-developed VAA does not simply reflect what is at stake in the election by neutrally passing along information. Rather, it structures political information in a way that is informed by the developers’ presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions remain hidden if we interpret the tool as a mirror that offers the user a reflection of him/herself situated within the political landscape. VAAs should therefore be understood as electoral dioramas, staged according to a contestable picture of politics. (shrink)

Dioramas are multimedia installations used in museums and popular culture since the 19th century. I study two sets of anthropological dioramas: the ones made for the Museum of Natural History in New York by Franz Boas; and the ones fabricated at the New York State Museum in Albany by Arthur C. Parker. As I will show, dioramas are not only visual dis- plays but also installations with a proper materiality and temporality: they are the stage of multiple performances and work (...) as contact zones between objects, models, makers, and beholders. (shrink)

Habitat dioramas depicting ecological relations between organisms and their natural environments have become the preferred mode of museum display in most natural history museums in North America and Europe. Dioramas emerged in the late nineteenth century as an alternative mode of museum installation from taxonomically arranged cases. We suggest that this change was closely connected to the emergence of a biogeographical framework rooted in evolutionary theory and positing the existence of distinct biogeographical zones. We tie the history of dioramas to (...) earlier visual resources such as the thematic images that Wallace introduced to illustrate his 1876 Geographical Distribution of Animals. These images were unique in their time because each of them simultaneously depicted animals from several different taxa, rather than only one, as well as the ecological relations between animals and their habitats. Both, visually and with respect to their function within biogeography, these images presaged the habitat dioramas that came shortly afterwards. Not coincidentally, Wallace explicitly advocated the use of dioramas for museum display in ongoing debates on museum reform. Wallace 's suggestions were put into practice by committed evolutionists such as Gottlieb von Koch who pioneered the diorama installation in the Grand Ducal Museum in Darmstadt in 1906. As in Wallace 's illustrations, Koch's dioramas were designed to respresent biogeographical zones. This paper explores the function of these visual displays of biogeographical relations. It argues that, in both the scientific and public realms, biogeogaphical zones were defined and constructed by visual means; recourse to visual representation was more than a method of communication. (shrink)

This paper concerns the judgement and critique of athletic movement in moving images. Inspired by the ski crash trial case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, and by comparing different media representations of downhill skiing, the essay outlines a framework that discerns as well as connects elements of movement and images, developing the concept of the ‘diorama’ in relation to Deleuze’s notion of the diagram and Kant’s idea of critique. Thus, moving images featuring elite alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, fictional character James (...) Bond, and an official skiing game for the international ski federation (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS) figure as comparative material to the animation that played a central role in the celebrity trial. Diorama and diagram are posited on a continuum to assess when and how judgement takes place in each of the exhibits. The essay concludes by discussing how the judging of athletic movement in moving images contributed to Paltrow winning the case, and theoretically by connecting this finding to dioramas and diagrams as tools apt for a framework aiming at the critique of athletic movement in moving images. (shrink)

An early proponent of the social sciences, Frédéric Le Play, was the occupant of senior positions within the French state in the mid- to late 19th century. He was writing at a time when science was ascending. There was for him no doubt that scientific observation, correctly applied, would allow him unmediated access to the truth. It is significant that Le Play was the organizer of a number of universal expositions because these expositions were used as vehicles to demonstrate the (...) ascendant position of western civilization. The fabrication of linear time is a history of progress requiring a vision of history analogous to the view offered the spectator at a diorama. Le Play employed the design principles and spirit of the diorama in his formulations for the social sciences, and L’Exposition Universelle of 1867 used the technology wherever it could. Both the gaze of the spectators and the objects viewed are part and products of the same particular and unique historical formation. Ideas of perception cannot be separated out from the conditions that make them possible. Vision and its effects are inseparable from the observing subject who is both a product of a particular historical moment and the site of certain practices. (shrink)

Associations of Politics and Nature: Cuban Corals in East‐Berlin, 1964–1974. The concept of association is centre stage in ecological studies on coral reefs. It describes the specific composition of diverse coral species in a given reef section that depends, among other factors, on the type of surf and the form of the seabed. ‘Association’ is also an important concept in Bruno Latour's plea for transcending the division between humans and objects in sociological analysis. Drawing on the idea of association, the (...) article explores the history of the corals that were moved from the northern Cuban coast to East‐Berlin in the late 1960s and worked into a coral reef diorama exhibited in East Berlin's Natural History Museum in 1974. By focusing on the mobilisation of the corals between Cuba and the GDR as well as within the museum, I will show that far from being sharply defined objects of nature, the corals collected in Cuba and displayed in East‐Berlin must be understood as parts of constantly changing heterogeneous associations of organisms, non‐organic material, national politics, postcolonial economies and institutional politics. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader brings (...) together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Visual Vertigo:Gaëlle Foray's Homage to the DiscardedAmber Bal (bio)Gaëlle Foray's artistic style invites renewed meditation upon the two human processes that surround the artwork: first, the metamorphosis of raw materials into aesthetic object at the hands of the artist, and second, the phenomenology of perceiving art. On the side of reception (in other words, the viewer's experience of Foray's works), the artworks demand first to be felt. (...) Only following an immediate visceral "strike" of abstract, unfocused perception, does the analytical eye proceed to examine these intricate works up close, parsing their immense and meticulous detail. On the side of artistic creation, Foray's methods elicit questions about the artist's relationship to Earth's finite materials, to the tension between environmental awareness and our own extractive practices. Foray's response to issues of waste and consumption at the heart of artistic endeavors is that she exclusively uses discarded materials; a form of recycling, gleaning, and/or foraging in the lived world. Yet, her approach is distinct from the well-established use of objet trouvés ("found objects") in modern art. Unlike "anti-artworks" such as Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fontaine (a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt") or Piero Manzoni's 1961 Merda d'artista, both of which offer "common objects" in their original state for aesthetic contemplation, Foray's works are not "readymades." As opposed to what Steven Goldsmith describes as Duchamp's "subordinat[ion] of form to concept," Foray manipulates and defamiliarizes her recycled artistic material through processes of collage and bricolage.1 She describes the transformation of collected objects as a means of "paying homage to waste," from natural matter like animal bones, minerals, and fossils to synthetic waste such as long-discarded plastic toys or Tupperware containers, abandoned family photo albums, and démodé dinner party utensils from the eighties.2What emerges from the selection of Foray's works featured in this issue is a clash between the ephemerality of the human lifespan and planetary spatio-temporal dimensions. Her artistic process forces vertiginous acknowledgement of the fragility of human existence as it presses up against that which the human tries to capture through art: the world. What's more, Earth's monumental landscapes only ever figure as and in fragments. Two specific conflicts return across Foray's works to create this sense of vertigo. First is the contrast between the limited human lifespan and the eternity of the fossil; as the latter is often figured alongside photographs of humans or man-made materials in a manner that draws attention to this unfathomably large geological temporal scale. A secondary contrast arises from Foray's recurrent human-nature juxtaposition as the boundedness of human life continually knocks up against raw and unruly natural matter. Foray's recourse to diverse textures and materials heightens these oppositions—schist lies atop bone, the smooth veneer of a photograph envelops a human form but rests against the jagged edges of a stone. As we shall explore through ruminations on specific pieces, her method prompts inquiry into the relationship between these human [End Page 110] and geological timescales, attesting Foray's remarkable ability to capture brevity and limitlessness in tandem. Of equal note is Foray's repeated, self-reflexive wink to art's mediation of the world through a "framing effect," as she regularly makes the protective screen of a work or staging of an exhibition space integral to the artwork itself. This is her own means of drawing attention to the conditions in which the work of art is encountered, both exaggerating the distantiating function of the frame in classical art which "served to make [artwork] discontinuous with its surroundings" and building upon the "readymade" tradition's abolition of the barrier between viewer and artwork.3Foray's pieces, composed from an amalgam of natural matter and industrial or household waste, operate as self-contained ecosystems that are akin to stumbling upon a diorama that has escaped from its box, or a snowglobe whose glass sphere has been shattered and from which the liquid has drained away. In La Mer (see pages 34/35), the background's glitter and the iridescent blues... (shrink)

This lecture argues that new optical experiences created by the lens and what we now call the virtual image were the foundation alike of ‘high’ science, associated at this historical moment with the telescope, and popular spectacle. They precipitated and renewed an enquiry into the nature and status of the image as the technologies of the phantasmagoria, the kaleidoscope and the diorama penetrated deep into the poets' worlds and words. The projected image, without a correspondence in reality, was a (...) troubling aspect of this modern technology, provoking new understandings of materiality and immateriality. Colour, reflection and refraction became central concerns as a corollary of the debate. Some poets assimilated this imagery into their work, albeit skeptically. Others violently resisted it. The lecture looks closely at image-making in poetic language, and argues that there were both ontological and political stakes in this enquiry. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the 1920s and 1930s, the growing importance of habitat dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History forced staff members to reconsider what counted as scientific practice and knowledge. Exhibit-makers pressed for more scientific authority, citing their extensive and direct observations of nature in the field. The museum's curators, concerned about their own eroding status, dismissed this bid for authority, declaring that older traditions of lay observation were no longer legitimate. By the 1940s, changes inside and outside the museum (...) had destroyed any lingering notions that what exhibit-makers garnered from observing raw materials constituted scientific knowledge. (shrink)

"Im Anschluss an Merleau-Ponty lässt sich nach der Möglichkeit einer ›Ontographie‹ fragen, die mit dem Seienden zugleich die ›Art zu sein‹ dieses Seienden verzeichnet. Solche Überlegungen zu einer »écriture de l’être« lassen sich über den Bereich der graphischen oder diagrammatischen Notation hinaustragen. Als ein Dispositiv, das Sein nicht nur aufschreibt, sondern ›aufstellt‹, wird hier exemplarisch das naturkundliche Habitat-Diorama analysiert. Im Zentrum steht die ontographische Operation der ›Versetzung‹, aus der die spezifischen Evidenz- und Unmittelbarkeitseffekte des Dioramas hervorgehen. Following Merleau-Ponty, one (...) may ask about the possibility of an ‘ontography,’ which would register both the existent and its way of ‘being’. Such reflections on an “écriture de l’être” can transgress the field of graphical or diagrammatic notation. As a dispositive that not only registers being but also ‘assembles’ it, this paper analyses the habitat diorama of natural history. The focus is on the ontographic operation of ‘displacement,’ from which specific effects of evidence and immediacy emerge.". (shrink)

Cet article traite des objets éphémères fabriqués à l’intention des petits Français dans l’entre-deux-guerres et à l’aube de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L’examen de quatre de ces objets tous liés au chocolat, permet d’explorer la manière dont les jeux, albums de vignettes ou dioramas, contribuent à éduquer les enfants métropolitains sur la nation française et son empire. L’hypothèse est que de tels objets éphémères permettent de plonger dans l’imaginaire des filles et des garçons de la métropole occupés à pratiquer, adopter (...) et interpréter leurs futurs rôles d’hommes et de femmes de la “plus grande France”. Ces sources permettent donc d’étudier sous un angle nouveau le rôle joué par l’empire dans la formation du genre en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres. (shrink)

The genesis for this volume was in the bombing of Japan during World War II, where the author, as a young boy, watched the bombers overhead, speculating about the lives of the pilots and their relationship with those huddled on the ground._ From this disturbing diorama, Professor Hiroshi Kojima, the translator of Martin Buber into Japanese, unfolds a new approach to Buber's “I-Thou” relation, drawing upon insights from Husserl, Heidegger, and others in the tradition of continental philosophy to extend (...) and deepen Buber's thought. In chapters that reflect upon a wide range of phenomena—from religion, science, and technology, to imagination, embodiment, and power—Professor Kojima articulates a conception of what it means to be a human being that stands as an alternative to atomism and alienation of the modern world. Analyses of haiku and other aspects of Japanese culture demonstrate how Kojima's theory can illuminate the spiritual traditions of both East and West. Original in its thought and revealing in its insight into Japanese thought and culture, _Monad and Thou__ represents the life's work of one of Japan's great thinkers. (shrink)

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid picture (...) of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

Le Corbusier's visionary or realistic urban plans are accompanied by various experimental ways of presentation, all designed to involve the public and political authorities through spectacular installations that play on the dimension of illusionism. In his quest to present his urbanistic ideas, Le Corbusier uses dioramas, photographs and film projections. The aim of his staging is to modify the conventional vision of reality with a systematic bombardment of spectacular images.

Le Corbusier's visionary or realistic urban plans are accompanied by various experimental ways of presentation, all designed to involve the public and political authorities through spectacular installations that play on the dimension of illusionism. In his quest to present his urbanistic ideas, Le Corbusier uses dioramas, photographs and film projections. The aim of his staging is to modify the conventional vision of reality with a systematic bombardment of spectacular images.

Although Joyce was losing his sight when he wrote Ulysses, Stephen's and Bloom's visual experiences are extraordinarily rich and complex. Absorbing the influences of popular visual attractions such as dioramas, stereoscopes and mutoscopes, their perceptions of Dublin are shaped by what Walter Benjamin calls 'unconscious optics'. Analyzing closely the texture of their impressions and of Joyce's prismatic narrative styles, Philip Sicker explores the phenomenon of sight from a wide-ranging set of perspectives: eighteenth-century epistemology, theories of the flaneur, Italian Futurist art, (...) photography, and the silent films Joyce watched in Dublin and Trieste. The concept of 'spectacle' as a mechanically-constructed visual experience informs Sicker's examination of mediated perception and emerges as a hallmark of modernist culture itself. This study is an important contribution to the growing interest in how deeply the philosophy and science of visual perception influenced modernism. (shrink)

As a process distinct from its poured cousin, sprayed concrete involves using compressed air to propel cement with various chemical admixtures at a surface. Used in tunnelling for rock surface stabilization, and above ground for securing slopes and fabricating fake rockeries, its chimeric character ranges from the polished landscapes of skateparks and swimming pools to mimicking cast concrete in structural repair work. The origins of this industrial process lie with taxidermist Carl E. Akeley (1864–1926), who invented it during his pioneering (...) work in the proto-photographic field of natural habitat dioramas at the Chicago Field Museum in 1907. Further cementing André Bazin’s notion of photography as embalmment, Akeley also invented a unique 35mm cine camera during his time at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. The essay explores this historical intersection between photography, taxidermy and architecture, and its wider implications for thinking through photography’s material contingency. (shrink)

Com o Sensualismo criam-se condições para uma nova estética, sensível e sensacionalista, que vai transformar as diversas artes (Literatura, Pintura, Escultura) e trazer consigo novas formas de espectáculo: o panorama, a fantasmagoria e o diorama (este, já no início do século XIX). O Eidophusikon, dispositivo de criação e ampliação (sensurround) de novas imagens – um híbrido de teatro e pintura, criado por Philippe de Loutherbourg entre 1781 e 1782 –, insere-se nesse processo e, com a fantasmagoria de Robertson (no (...) final do século XVIII, em França), constitui uma das modalidades do que hoje designamos por pré-cinema. No entanto, apropriando-se das novas condições de representação e de percepção do teatro introduzidas por David Garrick em Drury Lane – que promovem a “absorção” do espectador naquilo que vê em palco –, o Eidophusikon de Loutherbourg (ele próprio, pintor) pode ser considerado um elo em processo da nova concepção de pintura de Diderot – da qual a “promenade Vernet” do Salon de 1767 constitui como que a actualização por escrito. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and BrutalRobert N. MatuozziA Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora ; xxxii & 371 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.What if instead of re-reading Nietzsche's corpus, one imagines what it would be like to view his works on the "Nietzsche Network." Imagine a spectator situated (...) in the middle of a vast amphitheatre preparing to watch these simulacra. Gazing up and around a series of giant, flat-screen video monitors arrayed in layers around the interior wall of an amphitheatre, the spectator views and listens to Nietzsche's multi-media texts as, simultaneously, they seductively flash their provocative narratives in flickering streams of high-resolution sounds, words, and images.The Nietzsche Network is a roaring carnival. It consists of colorful, speculative historical dramatizations and equally enticing philosophical tableaux. Dark ambient musical motifs, laced with interludes of explosive, uncontrollable laughter, are a subliminal presence. Lurid detective stories and somber cultural narratives and slashing polemics implicate cultures and ideologies in festivals of cruelty and soul-murder. Poignant genealogical and aphoristic asides on joy [End Page 443] and work and suffering, weird psychological skits starring well-known ensemble casts are accompanied by hoarse oratory, soaring denunciations, and sober etymological digressions. Intermittently, the spectator is startled by abrupt, sometimes strident proclamations, like confessional bulletins shot from nowhere.Nietzsche's siren-like prose exhibits an extraordinary rhetorical range. This is particularly true of the polychromatic works originally published in the gloaming of his career in the period after 1886. Nietzsche's compelling, fluvial style is accounted for in this volume by the kinetic movements of lizards and the halcyon tones of birds, to his study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (and to the lost musicality of Greek tragedy in particular), and to his emphatic embrace of a kind of plosive, Dionysian philosophical technics.The content of the Nietzsche Network spans thousands of years of human experience and thought. A prequel features a substantial bestiary of traditional animals and emergent biomorphic forms set in a variety of carefully animated zoological dioramas. Among the modernists, has there been another thinker as strangely original and subversive? Allowing for fundamental differences, only Valéry comes to mind. Like the silent, ruminating cow in his "untimely" essay on history, Nietzsche prevents the past from injecting noise into present and future philosophizing. He will be the exemplary philosopher of the other-than-human as he campaigns to re-inscribe human animality into the zoological text of nature. Through explicit pronouncements and in scattered philosophical sorties involving human animality and his (desperate) utopist vision of human perfectibility, Nietzsche attempted to attain—at least conceptually—what Richard Rorty aptly calls the "historical sublime, a future which has broken all relations with the past."This excellent collection of essays on Nietzsche's bestiary demonstrates the surprising persistence of the animal imaginary in his thought. The various pieces also illuminate the multiple thematic and linguistic transformations Nietzsche develops as he enlists animals in his feral, anti-essentialist dialectic on the obscure continuum between "humans," "animals," and "nature." It turns out that a degraded version of Nietzsche's strangest thought experiment on animalism, the übermensch, is perhaps only a few years away from being produced through emerging boutique bioengineering, a prospect that has some commentators on both the left and the right blinking with apprehension. These essays amply demonstrate that Nietzsche's bestial philosophy of human and animal alterity subverts, among other paradigms, the strange Cartesian notion that animals are mechanical automata while humans are transcendental rationalists. As one commentator in this book broadly puts it, Nietzsche shows that the various schemes concocted to put an illusory distance between humans and animals have ended up being an immensely corrupting "pretense" (p. 224).Precursor bestiaries are indicated in this volume, though the medieval tradition originating in the Physiologus is here mostly displaced by a different [End Page 444] menagerie of cultural affiliations. The fabulist Aesop is present, along with Aristotle and Montaigne, though La Fontaine is not, and Pico Mirandola's famous remarks in his Oration on... (shrink)

Lehar (rightly) insists on the volumetric character of our experience of space. He claims that three-dimensional space stems from the functional three-dimensional topology of the brain. But his “Gestalt Bubble” model of volumetric space bears an intrinsically static structure – a kind of theater, or “diorama,” bound to the visual modality. We call attention to the ambivalence of Gestalt legacy and question the status and precise import of Lehar's model and the phenomenology that motivates it.

"Die Ablehnung der Mimesis, verstanden als ein Anspruch von Darstellungen auf Naturnachahmung, ist ein charakteristischer Grundzug moderner Ästhetik und Erkenntnistheorie seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Parallel dazu existieren zeitgleich im Raum wissensbildender Institutionen wie den Naturkundemuseen Dispositive, etwa die Habitat-Dioramen, die das traditionell mimetische Ideal auf kreative Weise aufrechterhalten. Diese vermeintlich anachronistischen Dispositive werden hinsichtlich ihrer mimesisproduktiven Dimensionen medienphilosophisch reflektiert und zu Adornos Mimesisverständnis ins Verhältnis gesetzt. The rejection of mimesis, understood as a depiction’s claim on imitation of nature, (...) has been a characteristic feature of modern aesthetics and epistemology since the end of the 19th century. At the same time, there are also dispositives, such as habitat dioramas, which creatively maintain the traditionally mimetic ideal in the space of knowledge-building institutions such as museums of natural science. These supposedly anachronistic dispositions are reflected in media-philosophical terms with regard to their dimensions of mimesis production and are related to Adorno’s understanding of mimesis. ". (shrink)