Page 68 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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that might have otherwise existed only momentarily, or possibly not at all for
a human viewer.
Though, as I mentioned earlier, the static nature of the dioramas made them
incapable of representing aspects of contemporary biology, it is possible to see
them as peculiarly appropriate for addressing a modern spectator, precisely
because of this frozen quality. Realist (post-Akeley) taxidermy freezes
animal motion, much as a photograph does. Walter Benjamin associated this
frozen-motion effect in photography with the development of an ‘optical
unconscious’, allowing the eye to see what had previously been hidden from it,
opening up reality for close examination (1979: 243). This is precisely the inten-
tion of the creators of the dioramas, and they addressed a mass audience
that had become accustomed to finding fragments of reality far removed from
their original spatial and temporal context.
Another aspect of the diorama which is characteristically modern is the way
it deploys ‘reality effects’. This phrase was coined by Roland Barthes (1989) to
describe the use of descriptive detail in nineteenth-century realist novels. Reality
effects are all those extraneous descriptions which don’t serve to progress the
narrative, but which work to underwrite the realism of the text. The Berlin
‘media archaeologist’ Friedrich Kittler (1999) suggests that such reality effects
first become apparent in new analogue media technologies in the nineteenth
century (such as photography, film and phonography) which record everything,
regardless of its significance. In photography and phonography, reality could be
recorded without being translated into symbolic code first, which allowed for
the presence of meaningless noise, utterances, and imagery which the conver-
sion of data into symbols would usually filter out (Kittler 1999: 16, 23). Older
understandings of what constituted a real or ‘true’ representation are replaced
with a ‘forensic’ notion of realism, in which reality is found in traces, in back-
ground noise and in irrelevant detail. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-
century representations in a wide range of media mimic or reproduce such
extraneous detail to underwrite their own realism. And so the Akeley-style
natural history habitat diorama painstakingly reconstructs the traces and
details that are indifferently recorded by machines such as the camera (photo-
graphy was heavily used in the design and construction of the dioramas). The
diorama marshals these technologically produced effects of the real into a
coherent composition. In doing so, it manages to be simultaneously modern
and popular, addressing a visitor reconfigured as a consumer, and carrying
an (apparently) morally uplifting conservationist message, mixing scientific
veracity with popular illusionism.