This issue of 19 addresses the multifaceted ways in which visual technologies of the long nineteenth century continue to resonate in a present shaped by digital immersion, algorithmic mediation, and contested historical memory. It brings together a collection of articles that examine how overlooked nineteenth-century visual technologies disrupt dominant narratives of technological progress, while also tracing their afterlives in contemporary art, media, and cultural heritage practices. Together, these articles illustrate how the past continues to shape our visual culture, offering insights into the historical entanglements of technology, perception, and memory.

The nineteenth century is notable for the unprecedented proliferation of visual technological apparatuses developed within a variety of contexts that ranged from scientific research to spectacle and stagecraft. As Jonathan Crary argued in his seminal Techniques of the Observer, these devices radically repositioned the spectator. Their dependence on phenomena such as after-images, stereoscopic vision, and subjective colour perception reflected a radical break with the classical paradigm of a stable objective reality, severing perception from the referent and situating it ‘within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body’.¹ While Friedrich Kittler has drawn attention to the material infrastructures of media as the structuring mechanisms of modern perception, in Crary’s analysis, modern visual media have been instrumental in the disciplining of individuals, enforcing what Mikhail Bakhtin called a ‘private chamber’ mode of isolated, absorbed engagement that precludes participation and collective action.² Where Michel Foucault stressed the disciplining effects of the gaze on its objects, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) has been particularly influential in the work of Crary and others in which attention is turned to the subjugation of the observer.³ While Debord addressed the mass media of his own time, later theorists have extended his insights to the nineteenth century, drawing connections between spectacular entertainments and the emergence of modern visual regimes in which multisensory reality is reduced to seductive yet deadening phantasmagoric illusions. As Maurice Samuels argues in The Spectacular Past, the immersive qualities of phantasmagorias, wax displays, panoramas, and popular stage performances, as well as of a certain type of history painting, offered a false but comforting sense of mastery over the turbulent events of the French Revolution and Empire.⁴ While focusing on the propensity of these forms to act as conduits of ‘ideological manipulation’, Samuels nevertheless acknowledges that critiques calling attention to the supposed dangers of immersive spectacles may be open to charges of elitism.⁵ This point is, as Samuels notes, made by Martin Jay in his study of anti-ocular discourse, Downcast Eyes, but is particularly relevant to a nineteenth-century context in which the expansion of the popular audience drove commercial demand for spectacular entertainment.⁶

The identification of nineteenth-century visuality with the objectifying gaze and passive, trance-like spectatorship is still current, or even predominant; however, recent scholarship has sought to complicate this reading in various ways. In The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination, Alberto Gabriele argues against the immersivity of optical apparatuses such as the magic lantern, stereoscope, and phenakistoscope, insisting that by drawing attention to the embodied and constructed nature of perception, they allowed the viewer an agency denied by the cinematic medium.⁷ Alice Barnaby’s Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination 1800–1900 stresses qualities of ‘agency, play and experimentation’ as inherent to nineteenth-century visuality, while the theatre historian Lynn Voskuil has argued against the identification of popular audiences as gullibly receptive to the seductions of commercial spectacle. While in Debord’s account, spectacle isolates individuals from each other, Voskuil insists upon the communal experience of sensation-drama audiences, bound together by shared somatic responses in such a way as to ‘produce a public rather than defeat it by inciting consumption’.⁸ Victor Burgin has long drawn attention to the productive excesses of a panoramic subject position, and the possibility of an agency that can resist hegemonic mechanisms of representation.⁹ While recent scholarship is too extensive to cover fully here, notable publications such as On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen, edited by Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer, that attend both to historical forms and their contemporary afterlives demonstrate the significant expansion of the field. Together, these perspectives point to a heterogeneous visual culture capable of eliciting critical engagement and imaginative reworking.¹⁰

Contemporary artistic and curatorial engagements with nineteenth-century forms reflect this complexity. Broadly speaking, museums and heritage institutions have tended to draw on the democratizing and educational potential of immersive strategies, as seen, for example, in the virtual reality recreation of the 1588 assassination of the duc de Guise at the Château de Blois, developed in 2017. Artists, too, have increasingly taken inspiration from historical optical devices and media formats, recontextualizing, reinterpreting, and often critiquing the visual logics and ideological assumptions embedded within them.¹¹ The groundbreaking ‘Dioramas’ exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt situated the 1822 invention of Louis Daguerre and Charles-Marie Bouton as the emblematic immersive technology, establishing its prehistory in seventeenth-century devotional wax tableaux, while also connecting it with contemporary art practice.¹² Consisting of a large semi-transparent painting, the first so-named dioramas were viewed from a darkened auditorium within a specially designed building, the passage of time and atmospheric effects simulated through the manipulation of light and coloured lenses. This exhibition not only established the kinship between Daguerre and Bouton’s invention and related forms such as late nineteenth-century habitat dioramas, but also traced its continuing legacy in works by contemporary artists such as Richard Barnes, whose photographs present museum dioramas in states of construction, maintenance, and repair, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, for whom the uncanny realism of the nineteenth-century form — its capacity to suggest a dreamlike world ‘between life and death’ — provides the frame for a problematization of illusion. For these artists, the immediacy of the diorama invites contemplation of the deceptive nature of visual perception itself. As Sugimoto writes in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, ‘I have always been wary of my gaze.’¹³

Nineteenth-century technologies of spectacle continue to resonate in contemporary art as tools for examining the relationship between illusion and ideology, particularly in the construction of collective memory and national identity. For the British artist Mat Collishaw, whose work draws on a diverse range of historical apparatuses and optical devices, the identification of nineteenth-century spectacle with delusion and reactionary values is at the forefront. His Albion of 2017 used an updated form of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion, a device developed by the scientist John Henry Pepper in the 1860s, commonly used on stage to simulate ghostly figures, to create a phantasmagoric three-dimensional image of the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, a heritage site long associated with the legend of Robin Hood. He describes this work as

about believing more in the myth of something than the actual reality of it […]. It struck me as quite similar to what was going on at the time when I came up with it, with the whole idea of Brexit. People wanted to believe in this whole idea of ‘Old England’ — that perhaps never existed, that’s perhaps just a myth — the idea of this ‘great and noble race’ that we have, where there weren’t too many immigrants.¹⁴

Collishaw touches on one of the central themes of this issue, that of the lieu de mémoire, as formulated by Pierre Nora, sites of memory constructed in response to the rupture of historical continuity and the perceived loss of organic tradition.¹⁵ The nineteenth-century subject is often conceptualized as an isolated individual disconnected from communal life, but, as Nora has explored, historical rupture created a state of temporal discontinuity in which the past is felt to be irretrievably out of reach, necessitating the creation of new traditions, heritage sites, and other forms of memorial. The apparition-like presence of Albion draws the beholder in, but remains tantalizingly inaccessible, resisting both entry and touch. The sense of unfulfilled promise is common to many nineteenth-century immersive apparatuses; here, however, as with the work of Barnes and Sugimoto, the self-reflexivity of the work invites us to interrogate our experience, since, unlike the original Pepper’s Ghost illusion, its mechanism is laid bare.

The twelve articles that are gathered in this issue of 19 examine a wide-ranging set of contemporary returns to nineteenth-century visuality across scholarship, art, heritage, and media practice. Several contributors critically assess how immersive and historical reconstructions serve ideological ends. In ‘Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century Frankfurt: Time Travel in TimeRide and the Neue Altstadt’, Amrita Biswas and Johanna Laub explore how both the TimeRide attraction and the recently rebuilt Neue Altstadt (New Old Town) in Frankfurt are carefully curated to present an exclusionary form of national identity. As the authors argue, the immersive experience of virtual reality suggests a shared lineage with the panorama paintings of the nineteenth century. If the older medium sought to bridge the distance to far-off lands, here it is the past that must be tamed to accommodate the tourist gaze.

If Biswas and Laub are concerned with the objectifying properties of nineteenth-century visuality, Megan Nash’s ‘“No photons to capture”: Electric Lighting and Visual Culture at Binoomea (Jenolan Caves)’ similarly explores the colonialist implications of successive lighting technologies at Binoomea in eastern Australia, the oldest known cave system in the world, which became a tourist attraction in the nineteenth century. Nash examines the imperialist connotations of electric light in this site sacred to the Gundungurra people, considering it as a metaphor for colonialist penetration. Present-day visitors to the caves witness a sequence of lighting effects that enables them to experience the changing manner in which this site has been presented to tourists from the nineteenth century until now. As Nash argues, the succession of technologies, each with their own particular associations and affects, has the potential to unsettle the viewer, inviting us to question our assumptions.

If, for these authors, the associations of nineteenth-century technologies with official ideologies and objectification are foremost, others draw on the unsettling effects of spectrality and shadow worlds. In ‘Cinema Redivivus: Bill Morrison and Early Cinema’s Spectral Return’, Tina Wasserman draws out the ghostly quality of the cinematic remains that provide the materials for artist Bill Morrison. In Morrison’s work, the ‘already spectral’ medium of photochemical film becomes a channel for the return of the repressed in fragments of decomposing celluloid that, reconstituted in Dawson City: Frozen Time, present powerful counter-narratives to triumphalist frontier histories. In ‘Picturing Hart Island: Negative Heritage Reclaimed’, Heidi Kolk moves between the media ‘rediscovery’ during the pandemic of Hart Island, the largest ‘potter’s field’ in the United States, and nineteenth-century photographs of the site produced by the social reformer Jacob Riis. As Biswas and Laub argue, the nineteenth-century panorama reflected the values and aspirations of a burgeoning middle class, yet, as Kolk demonstrates, the fascination with ‘negative heritage’ also has roots in earlier discourses. Indeed, as scholars such as David Pike have shown, the idea of the ‘underworld’ as a space not necessarily below ground but functioning as the ‘unconscious’ of the city, ‘the place to which everyone, everything, and every place posing a problem or no longer useful to it is relegated’ is itself a nineteenth-century concept.¹⁶

Prominent theorists of media archaeology, such as Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, have long drawn attention to the limitations of established historiographies of nineteenth-century technologies of vision, highlighting the drawbacks of writing histories of visual culture of specific media such as photography or cinema as teleological narratives, as if the modalities that such media have taken on today are inevitable results of long evolutionary processes.¹⁷ Alternative paths followed by media in their earlier histories, including experimental dead ends that did not lead to mass production and commercialization, are equally important, but have been omitted from historical accounts.

Several authors in our collection adopt a media archaeological perspective to address these gaps. Alaz Okudan, in ‘Camera Archaeologia: A Media Archaeological Investigation into the Contemporary Use of Nineteenth-Century Photographic Processes’, examines a series of contemporary photographers based in Turkey who engage with early photographic techniques such as cyanotype, wet-plate collodion, salted paper, and albumen printing. These experimental analogue methods, which rely on the unpredictability of chemical reactions dependent on sunlight, are often used in combination with digital tools. Together, they open space for handwork, chance, and ambiguity, transcending ‘binary categorizations such as old/new and analogue/digital’, according to Okudan. In ‘On Screen and in Living Colours: Vision and Early Colour Photography’, Rachel Hutcheson turns to the historical experience of early colour photography to interrogate how colour itself was once perceived as unstable and contingent. Natural colour technologies such as diascopes and autochromes staged colour not as a fixed, objective property but as a subjective perceptual event shaped by viewing conditions. Like Okudan, Hutcheson challenges linear narratives of technological progress, revealing how earlier experimental media made visible the ambiguities and contingencies that contemporary commercially successful digital systems work to obscure.

If nineteenth-century technologies have been interpreted as manufacturing passivity and alienation when deployed as hegemonic regulators of vision, our collection asks what kinds of agency and subject positions are made possible to the viewers by their deployment in the present. In some cases, our authors arrive at contrasting interpretations as they evaluate analogous technologies of vision. Considering the legacy of natural history habitat dioramas in contemporary art practices, Clara Zarza, in ‘Wonder and Desire in the Museum: Immersive Devices from Akeley’s Early Habitat Panoramas to Eliasson’s Contemporary Art Installations’, argues that the role of the viewer’s affective participation functions as a shared mechanism across historical and contemporary contexts. In contrast, Kelly Presutti in ‘“Brutal magic”: Staging Human-Environmental Relations in the Anthropocene’ suggests that natural history dioramas of the long nineteenth century deliberately foreclose the possibility of the viewer’s ‘imaginative co-creation’ in order to uphold claims of scientific objectivity. Presutti contrasts this with the works of contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kent Monkman, and Richard Barnes, who subvert the conventions of the medium.

Wonder, immersion, and active viewer engagement were central to many nineteenth-century technologies. One widely popular medium was the stereograph, which used the human eye’s stereoscopic function by presenting two slightly offset photos to create a three-dimensional illusion when viewed through a stereoscope. Two of the articles in our collection examine the wide variety of ends for which this technology of virtual immersion was harnessed, and the role of the viewer’s agency in generating this illusion. In ‘Behind the Scenes with Franklin George Weller: The Creation of Stereoscopic Tableaux’, Melody Davis focuses on a set of wet collodion negatives by American stereographer Franklin George Weller, demonstrating that Weller’s compositional and technical choices were designed to create a temporally unfolding experience guided by the viewer. This immersive, embodied experience was choreographed within the diegetic space of a three-dimensional virtual reality while remaining open-ended, inviting subjective interpretation shaped by the viewer’s imagination. While Weller’s stereographs were geared towards popular leisure consumption, the Scottish Astronomer Royal Charles Piazzi Smyth deployed this technology in combination with plaster casts and other analogue media in order to impart scientific authority, as examined by Kris Belden-Adams in ‘Plaster Peaks, Photography, and the Spread of Scientific Knowledge: The Tale of Tenerife’. Smyth’s images enabled the viewers to experience an impossible vantage point that exceeded the natural limits of embodied human vision. Despite their differing purposes and target audiences, both Weller’s and Smyth’s uses of the stereograph relied on the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief and engage with the illusion.

What happens when such historical objects survive into the present day, bearing visible traces of both the passage of time and the mechanical processes that produced them? Do we still engage in the suspension of disbelief that was so central to the operation of nineteenth-century visual technologies? Robert Thomas Kilroy, in ‘Tailoring Authenticity: A Media Post-Mortem of the Daguerreotype through the NFT’, addresses the time-travelling nature of these artefacts in his close reading of the French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’s daguerreotype Ayoucha. Kilroy makes the case that while the photographic process, despite the diminutive size of the image, conveys a palpable sense of presence to the Egyptian woman captured by the camera, the abrasive marks on the surface introduce a competing awareness of the daguerreotype as a material object, subject to the effects of time and viewing conditions, a sense of materiality that challenges the viewer’s impulse to suspend disbelief.

Illusion is a central theme in all of the articles that make up this issue but, taken together, they attest to the multiple competing versions of the real that coexisted in the nineteenth century. Rachel Ozerkevich’s ‘Cameras, Handwork, and Bodily Traces: Overpainted Photomechanical Images of Athletes and their Terrains’ discusses the practice of overpainting photographs of athletic events in the late nineteenth-century sports press — and its legacy in the work of the contemporary photographer, Laura Millard. The photographic medium was, explains Ozerkevich, not always legible to a readership accustomed to older forms of image-making, necessitating the interventions of a retoucher in order to clarify narrative content. This practice, once deemed a necessary measure, was subsequently condemned, at least in art photography, as damaging to the integrity of the medium. However, as Huhtamo has suggested, obsolete practices and technologies can be ‘pointers to important developments’ revealing ‘neglected features of the cultural fabrics of the time’.¹⁸ In the case of the sports illustrations discussed by Ozerkevich, the ubiquity of overpainting complicates our conception of nineteenth-century positivism, revealing the incompatibility of early photography with the requirements of narrative. As Ozerkevich observes, overpainted photographs altered to appear less jarring to nineteenth-century viewers strike twenty-first century eyes as strange or uncanny. Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the ‘symptom’ is useful here. Invoked by Kilroy in his discussion of the daguerreotype, it refers to the sign whose meaning is constructed only in hindsight, providing an apt model for the way in which old media acquire new significance in the present.

Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that nineteenth-century technologies of vision afforded both control and play, discipline and imagination, objectification and affective engagement. Moreover, this collection emphasizes the necessity of a media archaeological approach to nineteenth-century visuality, one which resists teleological histories and acknowledges the multiplicity of technological trajectories, including those experimental or marginalized forms that disrupt straightforward narratives of progress. By attending to these media, scholars and artists alike reveal the ambiguities inherent in visual experience, both past and present. In contemporary discourse, the rapid advancement of AI and digital technologies is framed predominantly within a progressivist narrative, presenting technology as a linear, inevitable force driving social improvement and increased efficiency.¹⁹ We need historical examinations, more than ever, to bring to light alternative trajectories marked not by straightforward progress but by ambiguity, multiplicity, and open-endedness. Nineteenth-century visualities invite us to embrace uncertainty, question the ideological assumptions embedded in technological visions, and critically interrogate how contemporary technologies shape power, identity, and collective memory. These technologies continue to be relevant, not only as evidence of particular historical subjectivities, but also as dynamic agents in contemporary debates about identity, history, and perception, offering both tools of control and means of critique.

Notes

1. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1990), p. 70. [^{^}]
2. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press, 1999); and Jonathan Crary, ‘Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen, ed. by Katie Trumpener and Tim Barringer (Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 107–19 (p. 108). [^{^}]
3. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1994), pp. 381–434. [^{^}]
4. Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 43. [^{^}]
5. Ibid., pp. 89, 60–61. See also, Jay, p. 590. [^{^}]
6. On the popular appetite for spectacle, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). [^{^}]
7. Alberto Gabriele, The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), p. 175. [^{^}]
8. Alice Barnaby, Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination, 1800–1900 (Routledge, 2016); and Lynn M. Voskuil, ‘Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere’, Victorian Studies, 44.2 (2002), pp. 245–74 (p. 250) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3830328> [accessed 9 September 2025]. [^{^}]
9. ‘The Time of the Panorama’, in Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin, ed. by Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2009), pp. 293–312. [^{^}]
10. Among the present volume’s editors’ contributions to this investigation, see Gülru Çakmak, ‘Victor Burgin’s A Place to Read and the Panoramic Subject of the Bosphorus’, in Projective: Essays about the Work of Victor Burgin, ed. by David Campany (Éditions de Mamco, 2014), pp. 39–69; Gülru Çakmak, ‘The Panoramic Studium in Nineteenth-Century History Painting: Paul Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme’, in Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, ed. by Lewis Johnson (Routledge, 2014), pp. 69–79; Gülru Çakmak, ‘Contesting Heritage: Sacrifice and Spectacle in Yadegar Asisi’s Pergamon Panorama’ (forthcoming); Patricia Smyth, ‘Theoretical Approaches to the Reception of Popular Forms of Entertainment and Visual Culture’, in Culture, Literature, and the Arts: Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2024) <https://routledgelearning.com/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts/essays/theoretical-approaches-to-the-reception-of-popular-forms-of-entertainment-and-visual-culture/> [accessed 9 September 2025]; Patricia Smyth, ‘Virtual Environments in the Nineteenth Century: The Spectacle of Old London’, European Journal of English Studies, 27.2 (2023), pp. 228–57, doi:10.1080/13825577.2023.2282187; Patricia Smyth, Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle (Liverpool University Press, 2022); and Patricia Smyth, ‘Place and Space in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Old London: The Thieves’ House on West Street’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 26.3 (2021), pp. 357–83, doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcab010. [^{^}]
11. While this list is far from exhaustive, some examples of contemporary immersive and illusionistic visual media include: Mat Collishaw’s zoetropes All Things Fall (2014) and The Centrifugal Soul (2016); Yadegar Asisi’s large-scale panoramic installations such as Pergamon Panorama at the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin (2011, rev. 2018), The Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin (2012); the virtual reality reconstruction of the assassination of the duc de Guise at the Château de Blois (2017); virtual reality components in the Musée d’Orsay exhibition ‘Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months’ (3 October 2023–4 February 2024); and ‘At the Beach with the Monk: Caspar David Friedrich Goes Virtual Reality’, shown at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (5 April–30 June 2019). [^{^}]
12. ‘Dioramas’, exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (14 June–10 September 2017), subsequently presented under the title ‘Diorama: Inventing Illusion’ at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (6 October 2017–21 January 2018). [^{^}]
13. Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Nature peu naturelle’, in Dioramas, ed. by Katharina Dohm and others (Palais de Tokyo/Flammarion, 2017), pp. 104–07 (p. 107). [^{^}]
14. Mat Collishaw and James Parry, ‘In Conversation’, in Mat Collishaw, The Centrifugal Soul (Blain|Southern, 2017), pp. 81–89 (p. 88). [^{^}]
15. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7–24, doi:10.2307/2928520. [^{^}]
16. David L. Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 2. [^{^}]
17. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, ‘Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology’, in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. by Huhtamo and Parikka (University of California Press, 2011), pp. 1–21. [^{^}]
18. Erkki Huhtamo, ‘The Dream of Personal Interactive Media: A Media Archaeology of the Spirograph, a Failed Moving Picture Revolution’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11.4 (2013), pp. 365–408 (p. 394), doi:10.1080/17460654.2013.840247. [^{^}]
19. Regarding AI, a growing body of incisive scholarship challenges this narrative, examining its exaggerated promises alongside its ecological, political, and economic costs. For example, see Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (HarperCollins, 2025). Sonja Drimmer cautions art historians against succumbing to institutional pressures to embrace computer vision and emergent generative AI tools, emphasizing that the technology’s objectives and functions are fundamentally at odds with the needs and goals of art historical research and pedagogy, in ‘Machine Yearning: On Generative AI’s Structure of Feeling’, ArtForum, 63.8 (2025) <https://www.artforum.com/features/generative-ai-structure-of-feeling-1234728310/> [accessed 9 September 2025]. [^{^}]