During the winter of 2003, more than two million people visited Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a recently inaugurated but already renowned exhibition space for large-scale sculpture and site-specific installations.¹ The crowds that came to see Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project not only walked through its amber haze but were often found lying on the cold concrete floor, basking under the glow of a heatless artificial sun.² A vast semicircular screen, mirrors made of reflective foil and aluminium, haze machines, and approximately two hundred mono-frequency lights were mounted on the ceiling, tinting the hall with a yellow-orange mist. These elements combined to produce a powerful immersive and defamiliarizing effect — doubling the space in watery reflection, cancelling out most colours, and distorting the perception of its spatial limits (Figs. 1, 2).

Fig. 1: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project (2003), Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

Fig. 2: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project (2003), Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

The experience, engagement, and behaviour of viewers were central to The weather project, the focus of widespread media attention and subsequent academic discussions. While its scale and viewership were exceptional, it quickly became an iconic example of the potential of immersive, defamiliarizing environments within major art institutions.³ Artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Bruce Nauman, and later, Pipilotti Rist, Christian Boltanski, Ann Hamilton, and Mona Hatoum, had been experimenting with immersive formats since the late 1960s through the 1970s and 1980s, but it was not until the early 2000s that large-scale immersive installations gained institutional prominence.⁴ Over the past two decades, this phenomenon has expanded dramatically — embraced by artist studios, collectives, and production companies such as Random International and teamLab, and ranging in refinement from complex new-media environments to animated and often sensationalist retrospectives of popular painters.⁵ Positioned within the broader frame of ‘the experience economy’, these works have been institutionally celebrated not only for enhancing aesthetic and embodied encounters, but also for their ability to attract and retain audiences amid an increasingly competitive cultural landscape.⁶ Critics and curators remain divided: some praise immersive art’s accessibility and emotional resonance, while others view it as symptomatic of art’s commodification and convergence with entertainment culture.⁷ Yet there has been little sustained exploration of the historical precedents for these oneiric environments or the long-standing regimes of value they are seen to align with.

This article contributes to emerging scholarship that traces the relationship between nineteenth-century technologies of vision, display, and immersion and contemporary art. Specifically, it locates alternative genealogies of installation art in early natural history habitat dioramas and a value system that privileges wonder, escapism, and desire. I argue that this system, inherited from baroque visual culture and its entanglement with early colonial expansion and the imperial impulse to catalogue, possess, and display the world, has been revived in the entertainment and experience economies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recognizing this genealogy reframes our understanding of immersive art — not merely as a contemporary aesthetic trend, but as part of a long-standing visual tradition that spans scientific display and commercial entertainment.

I argue that the immersive and defamiliarizing effects of The weather project were not unique to avant-garde or contemporary art as defined by the art world.⁸ Rather, the sense of wonder and otherworldliness evoked by Eliasson’s spectacular device closely echoes what visitors to the Field Columbian Museum would have experienced a century earlier when encountering Four Seasons of the Deer (1902), the first large-scale habitat dioramas in the United States.⁹ These displays were groundbreaking for their realism — combining lifelike taxidermy, detailed habitat modelling, and trompe l’oeil background paintings — and for their scenographic design, which invited viewers to engage with life-sized, seasonally staged landscapes (Figs. 3, 4). Though framed as educational tools rather than aesthetic or experiential environments, the dioramas attracted both elite and popular audiences and became a staple of natural history museums throughout the twentieth century.

Fig. 3: Carl and Delia Akeley, Four Seasons of the Deer (Winter) (1902), habitat diorama (background painting by Charles Corwin), Field Museum of Natural History, Photographer: John Weinstein, Courtesy, Field Museum. Z93886_2c.

Fig. 4: Carl and Delia Akeley, Four Seasons of the Deer (Fall or Autumn) (1902), habitat diorama (background painting by Charles Corwin), Field Museum of Natural History, Photographer: John Weinstein, Courtesy, Field Museum. Z95269_020Ad.

Despite their disciplinary and temporal distance, Four Seasons of the Deer and The weather project both represent early articulations of immersive display practices that would evolve into dominant exhibition formats. Each marks a key moment in the development of a shared regime of value — rooted in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century baroque colonial culture and its celebration of curiosity, wonder, and spectacle — that persists across scientific and artistic institutions today. This regime underpins the shifting cultural economies of attention, presence, affect, and experience.

My analysis draws on Arjun Appadurai’s and Igor Kopytoff’s concept of ‘regimes of value’, the historically contingent systems through which objects acquire social meaning and agency. In The Social Life of Things, they argue that commodities gain value through the cultural frameworks that govern their circulation and interpretation.¹⁰ Applying this to exhibition practices, I suggest that both habitat dioramas and contemporary installations mobilize affect, spectacle, and the desire for transport not incidentally, but as core mechanisms through which meaning and institutional value are produced. It is important to highlight that this value is not shaped by official institutional discourse alone, but also by alternative or parallel regimes of value that structure how these works are encountered and experienced. As contemporary visual and art theory reminds us, such encounters are performative and unstable — not reducible to the intentions of the artist, curator, or taxidermist, nor to the viewer’s individual response, but formed through their interaction and embedded within broader sociocultural narratives and collective imaginaries.¹¹

Recognizing value as contingent on affective and performative encounters invites a broader historical view of how visual technologies have mediated experience and meaning across contexts. This perspective aligns with and is enriched by a growing body of scholarship that traces the genealogy of immersive forms beyond the art museum, situating them within longer traditions of scientific display, religious spectacle, and mass entertainment. The exhibition ‘Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen’ (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001) traced the fascination with immersive media back to early scientific instruments; Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas mapped a history of ‘scripted spaces’ from baroque cathedrals to Las Vegas, showing how spectacle has long served both enchantment and control.¹² More recently, the exhibition ‘Diorama: Inventing Illusion’ (Schirn Kunsthalle, 2017) examined the diorama as both a cultural form that constructs vision and an artistic medium that critiques it. Together, these projects illuminate the deep histories of illusion and affect as institutional tools. Situating installation art within this lineage opens a critical perspective on how immersive environments operate today — and opens space for critical reflection on its institutional function and political stakes.

To foreground this connection, I begin by offering a revisionist reading of habitat dioramas. Traditionally celebrated for their pedagogical potential — enabling viewers to learn biology and natural history through close observation — dioramas have long been framed within the rhetoric of scientific education.¹³ However, this view obscures their role as instruments of spectacle and their appeal to a popular appetite for transporting experiences.

Interpreting dioramas solely as educational tools reflects a history of science perspective focused on objectivity and factual knowledge. This view, however, overlooks the affective and experiential dimensions these displays enable. Since the 1980s, important revisionist studies have problematized the supposed educational and narrative power of dioramas, especially their relationship to reality and knowledge. Donna Haraway famously suggested that the dioramas built for the American Museum of Natural History are elitist and patriarchal propaganda tools, while Umberto Eco described them as embodying American popular society’s focus on imitation and entertainment.¹⁴ However, particularly influential here is Noémie Étienne and Nadia Radwan’s account of dioramas as polyvalent social dispositifs — devices that must be interpreted through the institutional logics and cultural practices that shape them.¹⁵

Building on this work, I analyse the Field Columbian Museum’s Four Seasons of the Deer series as a visual and material device embedded in both disciplinary discourse and alternative regimes of value. To bring this into view, I highlight two key dynamics: the tension between institutional narratives of scientific progress and popular fascination with spectacle and escapism; and the role of material, visual, and spatial design in shaping embodied viewer experience. These dioramas offered not only didactic content but constructed dreamlike environments — scenographic spaces that invited immersion and a desire to be transported. It is precisely these qualities, and the alternative value system they imply, that link dioramas to contemporary installation art within the framework of the twenty-first century’s experience economy. My analysis begins by situating habitat dioramas within the regimes of value, institutional contexts, and cultural discourses that shaped their production and reception at the turn of the twentieth century, before turning to a comparative reading of Four Seasons of the Deer and The weather project. This pairing serves to trace how these forms mobilize desire, direct attention, and structure viewer experience — foregrounding their shared investment in affect, immersion, and the politics of spectacle.

From its inception, the Field Columbian Museum, like many scientific institutions of its time, sought to distinguish itself from the emerging realms of entertainment and spectacle. It consistently positioned itself as a civilizing force devoted to the education of lay audiences, a mission reflected in early descriptive accounts and annual reports that framed the museum as ‘an agency for popular education and for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge’.¹⁶ This discourse aligned with Enlightenment ideals, privileging reason, progress, and the construction of modern scientific knowledge. The museum was thus both self-fashioned and widely perceived as a civilizing force and a beacon of modernity.

Scholars have often praised habitat dioramas’ pursuit of naturalism and truth.¹⁷ In this literature, the work undertaken to build the Field Columbian Museum’s dioramas has been highly praised for its combination of art and science (recording, drawing, and later photographing the animals in their habitat), its attention to detail in recreating flora, atmosphere, and habitats (snow, lichens, or water drops, and their deep perspectives of background landscapes), and Carl Akeley’s pioneering taxidermy techniques in his search for naturalism and realism. Within the museum’s Enlightenment framework, these displays were celebrated as accurate, objective reconstructions of nature, reinforcing a vision of knowledge production rooted in rationality, method, and progress — and implicitly displacing the more theatrical and affect-driven traditions associated with baroque colonial systems of visuality and spectacle.

The problem with this narrative is that it disregards other elements and mechanisms of value and dissemination of these dioramas and their connection to colonial and consumerist agendas. Beyond his technical and scientific achievements, there is another side to the popularization of and fascination with the figure of Akeley that could itself be the subject of a full study. Representations of Carl Akeley, and the omission of his wife Delia, illustrate the tension between enlightened scientific narratives and baroque curiosity and thirst for novelty and discovery that will later be exploited by the entertainment market. Akeley was seen as both a skilful and thorough taxidermist and a heroic adventurer. His expeditions and curatorial work appeared in newspapers and magazines at the time, and there were many fictional accounts of his near-death experience that ended with him strangling a leopard with his bare hands.¹⁸ Similarly, when we look at the museum’s first advertising strategies, we also see recurring references to adventure and discovery. The museum’s collections are large and diverse, but the habitat dioramas are often selected to be used for publicity purposes. Two publicity posters from 1925 serve as an example. The images of a great anteater and of four polar bears devouring a seal while standing majestically around the museum building are accompanied by the invitation to ‘Take the Illinois Central’.¹⁹ The choice of the rarest mammals, represented alive and in the wild, with the iconic image of the classical and monumental architecture of the newly built museum as their setting, parallels the two-sided narrative of Akeley as both a rough hunter and adventurer and a clear-minded and detailed scientist-craftsman. The museum’s publicity and press do not merely promise viewers an edifying, educational experience; they promise excitement and appeal to their desire for wonder and escapism.

As noted above, curiosity, and the desire to be transported to other places are part of a system of value that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and persists in the present. And, although they are often excised from more clinical understandings of progress and the search for objective knowledge in modern science, they play an important part in the pursuit of knowledge; and explicitly so in nineteenth- and twentieth-century habitat dioramas.

Only recently have pejorative Enlightenment narratives of baroque science been contested. Revisionist studies have exposed the role that colonial campaigns played in transforming the natural world into a commodity of novelty: what Stephen Greenblatt has called ‘marvelous possessions’ and thus creating a new regime of value.²⁰ This regime aroused interest in the astounding, the wondrous, and the unknown, and revalued the distasteful and sensual side of curiosity, traditionally seen as a vice bordering on lasciviousness.

However, the regime that assigns value to an object through its novelty and capacity to evoke marvel and wonder did not disappear with the so-called Age of Reason and the birth of modern science, and nor did it only exist in the realm of cheap entertainment. Rather, this regime of wonder was prominent in the nineteenth-century popularization of scientific knowledge, as embodied in world fairs and expositions and the optical instruments invented to explore the workings of vision that became parlour toys, fashionable devices for bourgeois intellectuals, and entertainment for the masses.²¹ It is important to underline that the institutional mission and initial collections of the Field Columbian Museum were born out of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. Curiosity and appetite for the novel, rare, and wondrous brought huge numbers to the 1893 Exposition and continued to fill the museum.

The popular emergence of fantasies about distant and unknown worlds is also key to understanding the appeal of habitat dioramas. Many studies of nineteenth-century spectatorship have spoken of the desire to be transported and of the willingness and predisposition of viewers to be immersed in a novel, spectacular environment.²² Though the Field Columbian Museum sought to distance itself from popular entertainment, its habitat dioramas echoed the visual language and imaginative appeal of mass-cultural fantasies. Donna Haraway described the American Museum of Natural History as a ‘monumental reproduction of the Garden of Eden’ (p. 20). And, while myths of fantastical uncharted territories have existed since antiquity, industrialization and the social regulation of the modern city brought about a nostalgia for the otherworldly and a revival of fantasies of unspoiled lands.²³ Portrayals of the cultural value of fantasy come in many forms: the recuperation of myths such as El Dorado and Atlantis; the birth of science fiction and depictions of the future; and the nostalgic or enchanted landscapes depicted by Romantic, Primitivist, and Symbolist painters.²⁴ Knowledge of the world, its exploration and thorough classification, came hand in hand with the articulation of fictions, utopias, and dreams of unknown spaces where imagination could escape the control imposed by knowledge and reason.

Similarly, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the rise of neoliberal ideology promoting a market logic in all spheres of life by which individuals, as entrepreneurial agents, are responsible for maximizing their own value and well-being, has been closely tied to the marketing of novel, memorable experiences as consumable events.²⁵ This development was accelerated by the expansion and commercialization of globalizing technologies such as the internet, social media, and AI-driven platforms — which ostensibly grant access to any place and event in the world. These technologies have not only transformed the production and circulation of images, but have also reshaped the aesthetics and reception of art, encouraging immersive formats that promise heightened emotional impact and sensory novelty.²⁶ Spectatorship itself has been reconfigured: with the world seemingly mapped and rendered instantly accessible, audiences have become increasingly attuned to, and expectant of, extraordinary, disorienting, or transporting experiences. Within this context, installation art’s emphasis on scale, atmosphere, and affective presence responds to a cultural appetite for immersion that echoes, albeit through different media, the same regime of wonder and escapism that shaped nineteenth-century dioramas.²⁷

The same period has also witnessed the growth and internationalization of art markets and a new interest in engaging wider audiences beyond the elitist niche the art world had occupied over the course of the twentieth century. There has been a large increase in the number of visitors to art spaces, while shows, artists, and auctions make headlines. In this context, installation art, an artistic, institutional, and cultural phenomenon that emerged on the margins of twentieth-century art practices, has taken centre stage and become a mainstream art form. Its promise of new experiences is essential to the attraction of mass audiences.

There is a tension between the putatively transgressive character of installation art and its popularization and alignment with the incipient experience economy. As Julian Stallabrass and Rosemary Betterton have argued of the so-called Young British Artists, the new alignment between art and cultural consumption, both in style and dissemination, contradicts the discourse of transgression and subversiveness that surrounded these artists.²⁸ This paradox, which Betterton brilliantly describes as the ‘uneasy marriage between avant-garde shock and commodity consumption’, is clear in installation art: it is celebrated by the art market, the institutional art world, the media, and mass audiences alike; while it is simultaneously articulated by artists and theorists as a means of resistance to mainstream imperatives and normative visibility.²⁹ Installation art’s emphasis on experience and engagement thus seems to be paradoxically valued both as a mechanism for resistance and normative transgression and for its status as a spectacular form of art-making that attracts masses of viewers to the art world’s institutional spaces. The weather project exemplified this tension through its complex reflection around global warming and media in a prominent national museum and including, as part of the artwork, an extensive promotional and advertising campaign around London. The weather project, like many immersive installations exhibited at the turn of the twenty-first century, navigated two systems of value — one intellectual and progressive and the other centred on entertainment and consumption — that echo the dual systems of value implicated in scientific dioramas a century before.

Having traced the competing value systems that shape habitat dioramas and installation art, I now turn to their material and spatial construction. Both Four Seasons of the Deer and The weather project stage immersive, dreamlike worlds that blend realism with illusion. I want to highlight two key features: the articulation of idealized, oneiric worlds that promise viewers a temporary escape from mundane reality, and their ability to stimulate viewers’ desire to inhabit them.

Four Seasons of the Deer, produced by Carl and Delia Akeley, was the first series of large-scale habitat dioramas exhibited in a scientific institution in the United States. Although at the time Carl was already serving as chief taxidermist at the Field Columbian Museum, the project began as a private initiative, developed laboriously by the Akeleys without institutional support. The Field Columbian Museum, like many scientific institutions at the time, was reluctant to encourage techniques that were perceived as experimental exhibition forms that promoted illusionism.³⁰ Only in 1902, after their completion, would the museum buy and install these dioramas that went on to become a reference point for natural history museums throughout the country. Over the course of the century, scenographic and stylistic features became increasingly sophisticated and dramatic, but habitat dioramas’ key elements were already present in Four Seasons of the Deer, and they created quite a commotion among visitors.³¹

The Four Seasons of the Deer diorama series includes four cases featuring taxidermic white-tailed deer in recreated habitats across the seasons — colourful autumn, snow-covered winter, dry spring, and lush summer — demonstrating changes in coats and antlers. Displayed as life-sized (1:1 scale) environments arranged around a central pillar, each diorama could be viewed through angled glass walls that maximized visibility, with background paintings by Charles Corwin depicting the Iron Mountain region of Northern Michigan, where Carl Akeley had hunted the specimens. Their unprecedented naturalism was achieved through the innovative use of papier mâché and wire mannequins, allowing more realistic postures than earlier examples. Rich flora, detailed modelling of elements like leaves and water, and trompe l’oeil backgrounds created a striking illusion of depth.³² These techniques combined to produce immersive environments that appealed to the Victorian sense of depth and desire to be transported.³³ While modest in scale compared to The weather project, the wonder and fascination these glass-bound scenes evoked made them among the museum’s most popular exhibits (Figs. 5, 6).

Fig. 5: Carl and Delia Akeley, Four Seasons of the Deer (Summer) (1902), habitat diorama (background painting by Charles Corwin), Field Museum of Natural History, Photographer: John Bayalis, Courtesy, Field Museum. Z14T.

Fig. 6: Carl and Delia Akeley, Four Seasons of the Deer (Summer) (1902), habitat diorama (background painting by Charles Corwin), Field Museum of Natural History, Photographer: John Weinstein, Courtesy, Field Museum. Z93889c.

In the richest of the displays, that representing summer, an adult male with antlers stands in the foreground with the focal point of the light on him to draw the viewer’s attention (see Fig. 6). His eyes focus on the viewer as they approach the case from the left. His front legs are immersed in a body of water carefully made from resin, rich in details (complex gradations of colour, floating water lilies, and sticks) and surrounded by lush vegetation (approximately 17,000 leaves made out of wax, a number impossible to achieve prior to the Akeleys’ systematization technique using metal moulds, a technique that they experimented with here and Carl later patented).³⁴ The modelled tree trunks and leaves seem to merge with the dense forest and lake painted on the back wall and, among them, are three other specimens. One, in the foreground, is positioned as if captured in the instant of turning to look at the visitor. The others, a doe and a fawn partially obscured by the leaves, are positioned to be looked at from the right flank. All except the fawn are looking at the viewer and all are posed in a realistic manner, giving viewers the sense that the deer are reacting to their presence, that they have just stumbled upon living creatures in the wild.

The composition of the diorama draws on the European pictorial tradition of perspective, building the scene around specific viewing perspectives. Furthermore, its visual language is inspired by early modern depictions of ‘The Garden of Eden’.³⁵ The animals are depicted at peace, looking at the viewer without fear or absorbed in a dreamlike moment, such as the encounter between a deer and a butterfly in the spring scene. Thus, the diorama offers a special, privileged experience, a momentary closeness and immersion difficult to witness in nature.³⁶ The drama in Four Seasons of the Deer is quite restrained. It becomes more and more prominent in subsequent dioramas made by Akeley and his followers: a gorilla epically beating his chest, a leopard poised to jump, and animals gathering in harmony at a water source on the African savannah (where, incidentally, humanity originated) can be found among the halls of the Field Museum and other American museums. Dioramas represent unspoiled and unexploited lands where the spectator can be transported as a traveller or adventurer, like the epic narratives popularized about the figure of Carl Akeley.

The weather project involves an analogous interplay between technologies of realism, dreamlike illusion, and otherworldliness. The dramatism, theatricality, and immersive effects are inevitably more sophisticated, as they must successfully engage spectacle-sated audiences a century later, although the elements are fewer. The illusion of a colossal, unearthly indoor sunset — reflected in the ceiling’s sea of mirrors made of reflective foil and aluminium — and the atmospheric effects produced by the haze machines distort the viewer’s perception of the space. This altered perception is accentuated by the way the mono-frequency lights interact with the artificial mist to create an illusion of heat. The lights also limit the range of colours that viewers can see, a resource that Eliasson had previously explored in his 1997 Room for one colour. Designed to help the viewer forget the specificity of the Turbine Hall (the space was emptied of any furniture or signage that could break the illusion), The weather project allowed visitors to bask in this unearthly, misty sunlight and be transported away.

Beyond its immersive spectacle, The weather project also engages with a lineage of modernist experimentation in optics and colour theory. Eliasson’s use of mono-frequency lighting not only distorts perception but foregrounds the act of seeing itself. Yet the installation also carries a latent didactic dimension. While not overtly framed as an ecological critique, its simulation of a sublime, artificial sun — absent of heat, temporality, or climate — invokes a quiet unease about the natural world’s technologized mediation. This tension between enchantment and simulation invites reflection on the viewer’s own complicity in the systems of spectacle and consumption that drive environmental degradation. At the same time, in its capacity to subtly reshape gallery behaviour, the installation also becomes playful and entertaining: visitors laid on the floor, gazed upwards, mirrored themselves and each other in the reflective ceiling. The exceptional environment becomes as much a sight for reflection as a curiosity: a place to leave the city behind but also anticipated by advertisements around the city — ‘Have you talked about talking about the weather today?’ reads the advertisement for the exhibition in a London taxi following the well-established marketing strategy of appealing to curiosity in teaser campaigns.³⁷ In this sense, The weather project not only transformed the architectural space of the Turbine Hall and activated new social and bodily engagements but also directly drew upon curiosity and wonder (Figs. 7, 8).

Fig. 7: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project (2003), Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

Fig. 8: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project (2003), Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

Despite their immersive effects and apparent openness, both Four Seasons of the Deer and The weather project were meticulously composed — what Norman Klein terms ‘scripted spaces’, where viewer movement is subtly guided under the illusion of freedom. Like perspective in painting, the viewer’s position is central, but no longer static. These works do not merely present scenes to be looked at; they incorporate the viewer into the display. In Eliasson’s installation, the mirrored ceiling captures and reflects the spectator, while in Akeley’s dioramas, the deer’s gaze includes the viewer within the staged wilderness.

Moreover, both devices stage a tension between reality and illusion, between proximity and inaccessibility. The diorama’s hyperrealism draws the viewer into that exceptional moment difficult to witness in nature, yet the glass barrier and perspectival depth hold them at a distance. Similarly, The weather project offers sensory immersion while withholding full access — its sun-like screen cannot be touched, its warmth never felt. This ambiguity mirrors the mechanisms of desire described by John Berger in his study of the mechanisms of publicity and Graham Huggan in his analysis of the systems by which colonialism and so-called postcolonialism produce and market the exotic. In both cases desire and fantasy depend on a sustained tension between the real and the otherworldly, the familiar and the strange, the accessible and the unreachable.³⁸ Desire, in both dioramas and installations, arises in the gap between what is seen and what remains out of reach.

As Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson have argued, contemporary art viewers are not merely passive recipients but rather, are ‘caught up within the complex and fraught operations of representation — entangled in intersubjective spaces of desire, projection, and identification’ (p. 1). These complex and fraught intersubjective experiences do not merely problematize a one-sided focus on installation art’s capacity for transformative engagement through embodied experience. They can also be traced back to a tradition and value system often regarded as wholly distinct from legitimate art practices and whose role is often downplayed by artistic discourses because of its dangerously unsophisticated connections to mainstream consumption and entertainment.

In drawing a line of continuity between early habitat dioramas and contemporary installation art, this article has foregrounded their shared reliance on immersive, scenographic devices that are meticulously scripted to play in the tension between the real and the otherworldly, the accessible and the inaccessible, to provoke desire. Far from neutral aesthetic experiences, these environments function as cultural technologies that choreograph affect, spatial perception, and viewer behaviour in order to produce wonder and a longing for transport in a contained and controlled environment. I have argued that these mechanisms are embedded in a historical regime of value that emerged within baroque visual culture — one deeply intertwined with colonial logics of possession, display, and the commodification of knowledge. This genealogy persists, resurfacing at key moments such as the rise of popular museum culture at the turn of the twentieth century and the emergence of the twenty-first century’s experience economy.

Such continuities problematize art history’s investment in narratives of rupture and avant-garde innovation, as well as the tendency to frame museums as autonomous sites of rationality or critical reflection. Instead, they reveal the extent to which immersive displays are complicit with institutional histories of control, exoticization, and consumer seduction.³⁹

Notes

1. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall was inaugurated in 2000 as a large-scale sculpture and site-specific installation art exhibition space for playful, experience-oriented commissions. With its dramatic entrance, its huge proportions (the area where works of art can be shown is 3300 m²) and emphasis on viewer engagement, the Turbine Hall quickly attracted an exceptionally wide range and vast number of visitors. [^{^}]
2. According to Tate, over two million people visited The weather project (16 October 2003–21 March 2004), which would be considered an exceptional number for contemporary art museums worldwide. The weather project, Tate, 2003 <https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project> [accessed 20 August 2025]. [^{^}]
3. See Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate Publishing, 2005); Anne Ring Petersen, Installation Art: Between Image and Stage (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015); Louise Hornby, ‘Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control’, Environmental Humanities, 9.1 (2017), pp. 60–83, doi:10.1215/22011919-3829136; and Olafur Eliasson and Tim Jonze, ‘How We Made Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project’, Guardian, 2 October 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/02/how-we-made-olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project> [accessed 20 August 2025]. [^{^}]
4. See Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (MIT Press, 1999); Agnes Meng, ‘Mirrors, Projections, Screens: Contemporary Immersive Art and Current Challenges to Immersive Spectatorship’, International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media, 8.1 (2024), doi:10.60543/ijsim.v8i1.9407; and Anna Wiener, ‘The Rise of “Immersive” Art’, New Yorker, 10 February 2022 <https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-rise-and-rise-of-immersive-art> [accessed 20 August 2025]. [^{^}]
5. Janet Kraynak, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2020). [^{^}]
6. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore define the ‘experience economy’ as a model in which value is generated through curated and staged memorable experiences designed to engage consumers emotionally and sensorially, rather than by goods or services. See B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, updated edn (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). In this context, immersive and installation art have been embraced institutionally, a shift Rosalind Krauss already critiqued in 1990 as the museum’s transformation into a growth-oriented corporate entity. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’, October, 54 (1990), pp. 3–17, doi:10.2307/778666. In Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2020), Janet Kraynak further links this to digitization as a socio-historical force that undermines democratic ideals while mirroring neoliberal aesthetics. [^{^}]
7. See Bishop, Installation Art, Petersen, Krauss, Kraynak, Meng, and Wiener. [^{^}]
8. See Reiss and Bishop, Installation Art. [^{^}]
9. Akeley had created smaller habitat dioramas before, including a muskrat scene in 1889, but Four Seasons of the Deer was his first large-scale project. [^{^}]
10. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–61; and Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. by Appadurai, pp. 64–91. [^{^}]
11. The spectator’s involvement in the production of meaning has been central to contemporary art theory. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972) laid the groundwork by showing that meaning is shaped by context, and Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du réel, 1998) reimagined art as a space of social exchange and co-produced meaning. In this line, Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson foreground embodiment and discourse as key to the spectator’s role in meaning-making. See Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, ‘Introduction’, in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. by Jones and Stephenson (Routledge, 1999), pp. 1–10. [^{^}]
12. Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects, rev. new edn (transcript, 2024). [^{^}]
13. The museum’s archives (Annual Reports of the Director and the Archives of the Scientific Departments in the Field Museum Library’s digital collections) suggest that the scientific staff were less interested in what the public wanted to see and their reaction than in what the public ought to know about natural history and science. This way of thinking has also permeated many of the studies of the dioramas to date, such as Michael J. Reiss and Sue Dale Tunnicliffe, ‘Dioramas as Depictions of Reality and Opportunities for Learning in Biology’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 54.4 (2011), pp. 447–59, doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2011.00109.x. They refer to other studies of the didactic power of dioramas, including Bob Peart and Richard Kool, ‘Analysis of a Natural History Exhibit: Are Dioramas the Answer?’, International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7.2 (1988), pp. 117–28, doi:10.1016/0260-4779(88)90016-7, and Doris Ash, ‘How Families Use Questions at Dioramas: Ideas for Exhibit Design’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 47.1 (2004), pp. 84–100, doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2004.tb00367.x. [^{^}]
14. See Donna Haraway, ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936’, Social Text, 11 (1984), pp. 20–64, doi:10.2307/466593; and Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, trans. by William Weaver (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). [^{^}]
15. Noémie Étienne and Nadia Radwan, ‘Introduction’, L’art du diorama (1700–2000), ed. by Étienne and Radwan, special issue of Culture & Musées, 32 (2018), pp. 11–23, 10.4000/culturemusees.2229. See also Noémie Étienne, The Art of the Anthropological Diorama: Franz Boas, Arthur C. Parker, and Constructing Authenticity, trans. by Chris Miller (De Gruyter, 2022); and the articles by Bernard Schiele, Adriaan de Jong and Mette Skougaard, Stephen Bitgood, and Raymond Montpetit in Les Dioramas, ed. by Bernard Schiele, special issue of Publics et Musées, 9 (1995), pp. 9–103 <https://www.persee.fr/issue/pumus_1164-5385_1996_num_9_1> [accessed 31 August 2025]. [^{^}]
16. Field Columbian Museum, Annual Report of the Director to the Board of Trustees for the Year 1910 (Field Columbian Museum, 1911), p. 5 <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25629> [accessed 31 August 2025]. [^{^}]
17. For more information on the efforts to build naturalism and truth in the Field Columbian Museum habitat dioramas, see Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1993); Sally Metzler, Theatres of Nature: Dioramas at the Field Museum (Field Museum of Natural History, 2007); Lance Grande, Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Reiss and Tunnicliffe. [^{^}]
18. News about Akeley’s life and work appeared in important newspapers and magazines at the time, such as the New York Times and National Geographic Magazine, but also in successful men’s pulp magazines, such as Argosy, where he was featured as part of the series ‘Men of Daring’ by Benjamin David Stookie Allen in the 1930s; and in several stories in comics, such as ‘Carl Akeley, He Brought Us Africa’ authorized and approved by the Museum of Natural History of New York and published by D.C. Comics in the September–October 1946 issue of The Land of Lost Comics, and in the March 1955 volume of EC Comics’ Two-Fisted Tales. In 1920 Akeley wrote a memoir called In Brightest Africa (Doubleday, Page), an account of his travels in Africa and he has since been subject of many biographies and fictionalized accounts. [^{^}]
19. John Gilbert Wilkins, ‘Take the Illinois Central to the Field Museum’ advertisement, in Research: Design in Nature, ed. by Wilkins (Field Museum Press, 1925). [^{^}]
20. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Other important sources that underscore the persistence of curiosity and wonder as central to systems of knowledge from the early modern period onwards include Adalgisa Lugli, Naturalia et mirabilia: il collezionismo enciclopedico nelle Wunderkammern d’Europa (Mazzotta, 1983); José Ramón Marcaida, Arte y ciencia en el barroco español (Marcial Pons, 2014); and Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (University of Chicago Press, 2013). [^{^}]
21. For more information on the dissemination of such technologies and devices, see Klein, The Vatican to Vegas, particularly pp. 149–65, doi:10.14361/9783839461693-012; Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, with Isotta Poggi, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Getty Research Institute, 2001); and Marit Grøtta, ‘Playing with Optical Toys: Techniques of Visual Play from 19th Century Popular Culture to Marcel Duchamp’, in Sich selbst aufs Spiel setzen, ed. by Christian Moser and Regine Strätling (Fink, 2016), pp. 347–60, doi:10.30965/9783846757918_021. [^{^}]
22. Such was the focus of the conferences ‘Embodied Spectatorship and Performance in Theatre and Visual Culture, 1780–1914’ (online, 2020) and ‘Modern Visuality in Nineteenth Century Performance’ (University of Exeter and online, 2021) organized by the Theatre & Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century AHRC collaborative research project. It is also well documented in Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (University of California Press, 1998). [^{^}]
23. The myth of Utopia appears in the late Renaissance, at the same time as colonial expansions. The first author to write about Utopia was Thomas More in 1516. [^{^}]
24. For more on nostalgia for uncharted lands, see Umberto Eco, Historia de las tierras y los lugares legendarios, trans. by María Pons Irazazábal (Lumen, 2013); and for more on science fiction and fantasies of the future, see the exhibition materials of ‘La gran imaginación: historias del futuro’ (Fundación Telefónica, 2022) and Klein, pp. 149–65. [^{^}]
25. Astrid Agenjo-Calderón, ‘The Economization of Life in 21st-Century Neoliberal Capitalism: A Systematic Review from a Feminist Political Economy Perspective’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 58 (2021), pp. 185–92, doi:10.1016/j.strueco.2021.05.009. [^{^}]
26. See Meng. [^{^}]
27. Claire Bishop explores the shifting modalities of spectatorship in Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024), expanding on earlier concerns developed in Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate Publishing, 2005), where she traces the evolution of installation as a medium and its relationship to viewer engagement. [^{^}]
28. See Rosemary Betterton, ‘Undutiful Daughters: Avant-Gardism and Gendered Consumption in Recent British Art’, Visual Culture in Britain, 1.1 (2000), pp. 13–30; and Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, rev. and expanded edn (Verso, 2006). [^{^}]
29. Betterton, p. 14. [^{^}]
30. See Wonders. [^{^}]
31. Field Columbian Museum, Annual Report of the Director to the Board of Trustees for the Year 1901–1902 (Field Columbian Museum, 1901/1902), p. 106 <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25547> [accessed 31 August 2025]. [^{^}]
32. See Wonders. [^{^}]
33. See Terry F. Robinson, ‘The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship’, in The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780–1830, ed. by Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson (University of Michigan Press, 2023), pp. 25–57. In her contribution to this issue of 19, Melody Davis argues that the capacity to see more than is there and the desire to be transported is characteristic of Victorian audiences of panoramas and other immersive experiences. [^{^}]
34. See Wonders. [^{^}]
35. See Haraway. [^{^}]
36. See Wonders. [^{^}]
37. Olafur Eliasson: Minding the World, ed. by Caroline Eggel and Gitte Ørskou (Hatje Cantz, 2004), p. 133. [^{^}]
38. See Berger. [^{^}]
39. I am grateful to Tim Syme for his generous assistance in editing this article. [^{^}]