Transitory Formations and the Education of the Senses

ABSTRACT

While panoramas and dioramas are widely seen as representational forms and were once celebrated for their realism, they had an ambivalent status as art forms and evoked passionately discordant reactions from critics and observers. The ambivalent responses to these forms have been understood in terms of elitist reactions to their mass appeal and to their deception. The implications of the sensorial disruption that temporary inhabitants of these structures experienced in their initial encounters with them has not been given much attention. The panorama and diorama strove beyond representational depiction and towards the production of a full-bodied experience. Hence, they should be considered not as novelty paintings, nor even as primarily visual media, as is typically the case, but rather as significant forms of intermedia that both relied upon and re-educated the sensorial capacities of their inhabiting human subjects. This article accordingly treats panoramic and dioramic forms as more architectural than artistic and argues for their recognition as intersensorial and transitory constructions that produced a normative reordering of intersensorial subjective space.

KEYWORDS:

• panorama
• diorama
• senses
• emplacement
• intermedia